Hell? Yes. (A Beginning)
So this week I am preaching on hell. I've never done this. I'm Presbyterian. We don't talk about hell a whole lot. It's not polite. Or decent and in order. But I've heard my fair share of sermons on hell because I grew up in fundamentalist Baptist churches where it seemed to creep into most of them. Hell, as it was described to me was a place of eternal torment. There was fire in hell as well as brimstone, agony, anguish, eternal regret and the Devil and his minions, who added to the horror by dreaming up even worse ways of torturing lost souls. And as if that wasn't bad enough---after spending years in hell, lost souls had the Lake of Fire to look forward to after Jesus' Second Coming. There they would do laps in a burning "lake" for all eternity alongside the eternally doomed Lucifer and his band of fallen angels. I was a rather frightened child. In fact, at a "Watch Night" service for New Year's Eve I watched ...