Luke 16:19-31: The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus

Sermons – Covenant Grace Baptist Church

We are living in the imaginary world of John Lennon, ‘Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try; No hell below us; above us only sky.’ Unfortunately imagination and fantasy are not reality, and so we are walking around deluding ourselves about the facts. There is a heaven, there is a hell, we have a soul, there is an afterlife and we will face God on judgement day. We live in a dream land where we deny reality, we deny the things that define us, we deny the destiny that inevitably lies before us. We pretend morality is not universal but personal; that biological sex does not define gender but that it is a fluid state of mind that can be guided by choice; that God can be wiped out; that conscience is a relic of a former level of evolution that can be ignored; that souls are the ignorant invention of prescientific people, and on and on we could go. But there are facts we can never escape, we must all die, and we must face the consequences of what we have done in this life. One theologian described death this way, ‘death is the most democratic institution on earth… It allows no discrimination, tolerates no exceptions. The mortality rate of mankind is the same the world over: one death per person.’ Benjamin Franklin said that the two things in life that are certain are death and taxes. That is not technically true, people can avoid tax, but no one can avoid death. We all must die, but death is not the end, we must then go on to reap what we have sown in this life. It is this reality that Jesus places before us in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Luke 16:19-31. Jesus...
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