In a letter, Martin Luther, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, wrote to Hans von Rechenberg in 1522 about the possibility that people could turn to God after death, asking: Who would doubt God's ability to do that?

God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.

There are those, like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who put it quite clearly: "We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that's it. One or the other, forever." God in the end doesn't get what God wants, it's declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won't.

Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.

To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life lived now in connection to God.

Jesus calls men, not to a new religion, but to life.

Sin is not just breaking God's laws; it is breaking His heart.

The Hindu religion is the only of the World's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.

I just look at death as not a threat. It's inevitable, and I have an assurance of eternal life.

People die. But when they love Jesus, they don't stay dead. They are raised to life again so they can be with Jesus. And for all eternity, for years and years and years of forever, they never have to think about death. It will never be something that will happen again. They will always and forever be alive, in heaven.

A right knowledge of sin lies at the root of all saving Christianity.

We've lost the wow of God because we've lost the woe of God. His perfect holiness helps us truly appreciate His amazing grace.