This would be a good time for every minister reading this book to ask himself or herself the same question the Holy Spirit asked of me: “If the people I minister to died right now and stood at the judgment of the sheep and the goats, how many would be sheep and how many would be goats?” When ministers assure people of their congregations who act like goats that they are saved, they are telling them the exact opposite of what God wants them to be told. That minister is working against Christ. He is taking sides against what Jesus wants such people to be told according to what He said in Matthew 25:31-46. The entire point of what Jesus said there was to warn the goats. He doesn’t want them to think they are going to heaven.
Jesus said that all men would know we are His disciples by our love for one another (see John 13:35). Surely He must have been speaking of a love that exceeds the love that non-Christians show each other, otherwise His disciples could not be distinguished from nonbelievers. The kind of love of which Jesus spoke is a self-sacrificing love, when we love each other as He loved us, laying down our lives for each other (see John 13:34; 1 John 3:16-20). John also wrote that we know we have passed out of death to life, that is, been born again, when we love each other (1 John 3:14). Do people who grumble, speak against, and hate ministers who teach Christ’s commandments display the love that marks them as being born again? No, they are goats, on the road to hell.
