BACK40 E130 - One Side of Hell, Wielding Power

In this episode we start with hell: whether part of its suffering will be the final realization of how much God loved us, why hell is better understood as the natural end we were all headed toward than as a punishment God adds, and why a good God is the one who stepped in to save us from it. Next we talk about power. If God grants us authority over other people, what is the most God honoring way to use it? We look at Jesus' words in Matthew 20, why the higher you go the more you have to serve, and the difference between leaders people fear and leaders people love. From there we ask how to correct sin without driving someone into secrecy, starting from Solzhenitsyn's picture of prisoners in the Gulag who learned to hide everything to survive. We finish on cheap grace, mercy that looks the other way without calling for repentance, and on the difference between shame and conviction.