Love Me with Fire and Brimstone

“The people who love you the most, tell you what you don’t want to hear.”
- Larry Shyatt (Florida assistant bball coach)

I found that quote on a daily basketball coaching email I get, and I liked it a lot. It’s something I’ve always believed, and it’s a lot like a Dan Rather statement I referenced on a recent post. Most of us don’t have nearly enough of this type of love in our lives.


Someone else who clearly believes in this is David McCullough, Jr., an English teacher who at a graduation speech reminded students that “You are not special. . . You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. ... We have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement.” (You can read an article about the speech and watch a video of it here. It’s 12 minutes long and definitely worth your time).


People cannot reach their full potential in life - whether in terms of relationships, profession, knowledge, faith, etc. - without someone to tell them the difficult truths. A recent Des Moines Register article that struck a nerve with me on this topic was one about young people fleeing traditional Des Moines churches in favor of nothing at all or more “progressive” churches. The woman quoted most in the article stated what she saw as the key reason: most people don’t want to hear about sin, God’s judgment, or hell, so they seek out churches that don’t preach on those matters.

I don’t care if you go to a 200 year old church, a 200 day old church, or no church at all, but I do think that’s an extremely dangerous (yet common) sentiment. It’s the same sentiment I get when my students read Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It’s rude, they say, for Edwards and churches today to establish that hell exists, that punishment and sin are real, that God has established standards of conduct and a desire for each of us to be better than what we currently are. God is love, they say. He’ll take me as I am, they add, followed by references to what a loving God will or won’t do in their mind.

Yes, God is love. And yes, He’ll take me as I am. Those are true, and that’s what I and many others want to hear. But we also need people in this world to tell us the truths that we don’t. They need to remind us that some of our behaviors are less than Christ-like, and that God does speak through ALL of Scripture. And they need to remind us of hell.

Here’s the thing: “Fire and brimstone” talk, the message of God’s judgment, is a communication of how good God is, of how far away from Him we are, and how desperately we need Him. It’s a communication that out of love he has created a way to bridge that gap and fulfill our needs. It reminds us He is the goal, not a comfortable, unexamined, unchallenged life here on Earth. And it reminds us that if God is for us, who can be against us?

I don’t like being reminded of my sin. I squirm when new sins I wasn’t even aware of are highlighted, forcing me to change. But I am thankful for those times. For through them, I am better and closer to the goal.