This would relate not so much to your deeds, as your policy, your direction in life, the decisions you take, the direction you go in. If your foot offends you, cut it off. I will not be my own. I will not make my own decisions; I will not plan my life and future. I will seek the Lord’s guidance. I will give up anything that takes me into sin. Do you have a talent or an ability but to exercise it means you have got to go into sin. A sinful profession? I feel very sorry for people in the arts these days, the performing arts and so on. They have great abilities and skills and may be training also but the world has become so corrupt that they are going to walk through a mine-field of sin, and they have to say to the Lord, ‘I will give that up rather than go into a sinful life. I will enter into heaven, even without the exercise of that gift, that is far better.’ A better life, a better eternity: it is far better than entering into hell and forsaking the Lord and turning your back on salvation. These things matter and these are the issues, which the Lord puts before the disciples.
We thank God that though we have done many things of this nature which deserve eternal punishment, that Christ has found a way to save us. We have lived so many years of our lives for ourselves, disregarding God, treating him as nothing, insulting him, and slandering him. We would be bound to go to hell were it not for the redeeming blood of Christ, were it not for what he has done for needy sinners. How much we need his forgiving love.
There are people who have murdered babies and it goes on wholesale in our land and for that you would certainly go to hell eternally, where the worm never dies and the fire never shall be quenched, because a holy and a righteous God will avenge such great wrong done to innocent human beings. But Christ has borne that terrible punishment for you, if you depend upon him and love him and yield to him. There are so many things for which we would go to hell – those who abuse themselves with mankind, those who are fornicators, betrayers of husbands and wives – we would certainly go to hell, but for the work of Christ and his taking that punishment in our place.