My daughter starts a new job today as a social worker, so I prayed there would be a Christian co-worker in her office. Then I started to worry: What if it’s a Christian like me? (This is a variation on the worry of a father who watches his 16-year-old daughter go off on her first date and hopes the guy is not like he was.)

When push comes to shove you know what a Christian should be like. When your daughter’s soul is at stake, you don’t need a seminary class. Demoninational affiliation becomes meaningless. You want someone who is more charismatic than not, even if you yourself have always avoided charismatics; someone who talks about Jesus at socially inappropriate times. You want a person who is not so “sensitive” to the cultural situation that it’s never going to be the right moment to bring up the subject.

You don’t necessarily want someone who has done it all right in her life. That’s fine. But I would prefer a person who has done business with God, maybe has a telltale limp like Jacob. She will not be appalled at anything my daughter has done because she knows her own heart. She will not be put off by my daughter’s initial disdain. She will know the Bible well, but will not be proud of doctrinal correctness. She will be a person who is more or less regularly overcome with emotion at the thought of Jesus’ love.

She will find time, by hook or by crook, to reach out to my daughter with the gospel, because, after all, she’s really only an ambassador moonlighting as a social worker.

If you had a bit of spinach stuck between your teeth, or body odor so bad your co-workers were snickering around the water cooler, would you want someone to tell you? Then if you know hell is real, and you know people who are headed to a Christ-less eternity, should you not tell them?

That’s how my friend Jayne Clark introduced the three-day topic of the Judgment at our women’s retreat at Harvey Cedars Bible Conference in New Jersey last weekend — and I couldn’t escape the logic of it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a sermon on hell. I mean one that lingered there and let you smell the sulfur, not just a passing poetic reference.
There is, of course, that famous Jonathan Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” And I’m ashamed to say that, like old Barnabas, who “was led astray” by peer pressure in an unrelated matter (Galatians 2:13), I was slipping into the camp of people who say nice things about Edwards in spite of that little trip to woodshed in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8,1741.

But Jayne helped me remember how I myself got saved. This Christian guy at L’Abri took a fancy to me, and didn’t fancy me being damned, and kept saying, “Andree, please become a Christian.” It was as unsophisticated as that.

“Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation….’Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountains, lest you be consumed’” (Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”).