Matt Chandler, Sermon: “Sabbath” sermon, November 22, 2009… four days before Thanksgiving when he collapsed at home with a seizure that ultimately lead to the discovery of advanced brain cancer:
“[Non-believers] think that we obey the moral laws that we obey because we believe that if we do not obey those laws God is going to damn us to Hell, give us cancer, or send some fire out of the sky to blow up our city. They do! They think that our devotion to the Scriptures and to our God is fear-based. Now the reason they believe this is because for some us that’s true. Because we grew up where the pastor at our church utilized fear to get earthly numbers at the expense of heavenly ones. So I’ll say this to you: Heaven is not a place for those who are afraid of hell, it’s a place for those who love God.” (mins 6:56 to 7:54)
“And so we obey the law because the law is good, not because we’re afraid of lightning bolts, pestilence, cancer. God did not make His rules and the grab man and throw him into his rules and say, good luck! ‘Jesus, Holy Spirit, watch!’ […] now I’m not saying that God at times will not crush you. But for the believer in Christ, the believer cries out like they did in Scripture, ‘May the bones that you crush rejoice.‘ Sometimes God will crush your fingers to get your hands off of what will harm you. And that’s been true in every book of the Bible, in every year in the history of man. J. I. Packer’s got my favorite quote: ‘And still He seeks the fellowship of His people and will send them both joy and sorrow to detach their hands from the things of this world and attach them to Himself’.”