hell and penn

so i have been talking about blogs lately and i had lunch in the caf with my friend rachel the other day...and she says that she reads over 300 blogs or something crazy like that.  what??  wow. i don't even know what to say to that except....wow! :)  she is awesome.  you should go visit her blog.  

a couple things i've been thinking about lately:

hell.  i've been reading a lot about hell in dr. morgan's class (Christian Doctrine) and really trying to understand the concept of eternity separated from God and His just rule.  i get into this circular fairiswheel that i can't get off.  i start thinking about eternity and then i think of how it is going to be when we aren't living here on the earth anymore.  i won't have to worry about the silly things i worry about everyday.  eternity. wow. how do you even think about that? foreverness...what do you do forever?  what does forever look like?  it hurts my brain.  but then i think about eternity without God, suffering more than anything i can ever imagine. then i watched this video of Penn:

"how much does it take to hate somebody to not proselytize? how much does it take to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?"

then i start thinking about the gospel and what a preposterous thing my salvation is. because of sin, i am against God. i am not a friend of God and i deserve death. i am unworthy of any mercy or grace because of the acts that i do against the Lord. i am made in His image and yet I am an enemy of Him.

the glorious God has made us in HIs image, giving us His glory. But Romans tells us that we have exchanged the glory of God, falling short and have made ourselves the center of the world, wanting to pursue our glory instead of His. And through pursuing our glory, we lose the glory of God that we once had.

YET!!! He sends His Son to bear all of the stuff i have done that goes against God's character and Jesus dies the death that i was supposed to. He pays my price. He does it, not because He is passionate about me or is obsessed with the idea of me, but He does it to exalt Himself. He does it so that I can come into a relationship with God, and act in response of His deliverance of me. Jesus does not fall shourt and because we are tied to Christ's death, we are becoming what we were supposed to be. We are being made into the image of Christ.

wow. dr. morgan (in his book, Hell Under Fire) says, "...the central 'problem' of the Bible that the gospel solves is centered on how God can be holy and just and still forgive rebellious and guilty sinners who trust Him".

wow.

back to penn...i think he said it best.

why don't i love well enough?