Raise Your Hand for Hell — E.A. Johnston

The Dangers of Superficial Church Membership

I want to share a story with you today, friends, because it shows us how much trouble we're really in. I tried to join a Southern Baptist Church, and it was peculiar in how they would enter you into public membership.

If you wanted to join that church, you had to submit to a three-hour new member class taught by a staff minister. Well, I signed up and showed up, and was seated in a banquet room with about a hundred other people.

The staff minister greeted us and handed out a booklet on the plan of salvation that had fill-in-the-blank spaces. First, he went around the room and asked us about our church background. There was quite a hodgepodge of church backgrounds there.

As people said, they came from churches that were Methodist and Lutheran and Baptist and Catholic. Some were even unchurched completely. Then the staff minister gave a long history of his church and what they expected of us in regard to baptism and serving and tithing.

Then he had us open the plan of salvation booklet, and he slowly read it to us page by page and had us fill in the blanks that were in each paragraph. When we got through doing that, he gave his personal testimony, how he got saved when he was eight years old, that he was in a Baptist church, and he responded to the pastor's invitation to become a Christian, how he walked the aisle and accepted Jesus as his personal Savior.

And as he told the story, his voice broke, and he shed some crocodile tears, as a lot of evangelists tend to do. And he said he made his mother proud that day. And I glanced around the room, and the people around me, believe it or not, had tears in their eyes.

Emotional Imitation and Manufactured Decisions

That's why TV shows use canned laughter, because human emotion often follows imitation. Then he made the following statement. He said, our church will not allow membership unless you have accepted Jesus as your personal Savior.

And if there are some of you here today who would like to accept Jesus right now, I'm going to give you that opportunity. And he asked us to close our eyes and bow our heads and raise our hand if we wanted to accept Jesus.

Everybody closed their eyes except me. I looked around the room in startlement as I saw hands go up all around the room. Then he closed in a prayer and welcomed us to his church. Well, I never went back to that church again, because on the drive home I felt nauseous and mad at the same time.

The False Assurance of Ritual Religion

It sickened me and angered me that our modern churches have so cheapened the gospel to reduce it to a few steps of a physical act, while at the same time playing with people's emotions. A dead room full of people were now convinced they were Christians because they did what the minister told them to do.

They filled out a booklet. They got a little teary-eyed. They raised their hand to accept Jesus as their personal Savior. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach, and it still bothers me to think about how those deceived individuals will one day die and drop into hell one by one like everybody else who mistook church membership for salvation.

None of that man-centered denominational nonsense is even in my Bible. Jesus didn't tell Nicodemus to close his eyes and raise his hand if he wanted to accept him as his personal Savior. Rather, he told him, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

The Necessity of the New Birth

A person gets saved when they are born from above and washed in the blood. We must have a new nature, new principles, new affections, new aims. By our first birth we are corrupt, shaped in sin and iniquity.

We must undergo a second birth and regeneration where God performs a supernatural act of grace upon our heart. Those deceived individuals in that room that day were given a false assurance of heaven by church membership, but they never had been awakened to their lost condition.

They never had come under Holy Ghost conviction, were yet strangers to God's demand for repentance and His necessity of regeneration upon the heart. They were not told that salvation avows the fact that sin and all the occasions of it must be forsaken, that we must cast away and throw down every beloved idol from our heart.

Total Surrender to Christ

That following Christ meant to renounce ourselves as we're bought with a price, and that price is His blood that God required of them to use themselves and everything else for Him and His glory. Their strength, their substance, and their influence should be God-centered.

And from that point forward, their time was not their own, their money was not their own, their body was not their own. Christ must be a complete master. That Jesus said, if any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

The Tragedy of Raising a Hand for Hell

No, instead they were given instructions to close their eyes and raise their hand if they wanted to accept Jesus. What they didn't realize was they raised their hand for hell.