FIRE ALARMS

These days I find that many of the unsaved in today’s world respect us believers for our virtue, and character. But alongside that, that respect for integrity and virtue, comes a very aggressive violent hatred for the message. They’ll like us until we tell them, whether from the pulpit or the marketplace.
“Everyone who does not believe in Jesus Christ is headed for eternal hell forever,” 

and then everything changes.
The message is narrow, it is exclusive, it is confrontive, it is condemning, it is judgmental, it generates hostility. Jesus said in John 15 and 16, “They hated Me, they will hate you. I’m just telling you they will hate you; they hated Me. They killed Me; they’ll kill you.” And what we see in the early chapter of Acts on the one hand is respect; and on the other hand, they start killing the apostles. They kill James, and they kill Stephen, and the slaughter begins, and it becomes a great slaughter very early in the book of Acts. And one of the principle motivators of that slaughter is a man named Saul.
So on the one hand, the world is in this tension that they admire the transformation in our lives, and the joy, peace, love that marks us. And if we never say anything, everything would be fine.
 But when we do what we’re supposed to do, which is to alarm the unconverted, when we press the issue of judgment and the gospel – and it’s the exclusivity of the gospel. When we say, “Anyone who denies the person of Jesus Christ as revealed in Holy Scripture is on the way to eternal hell,” that is a very, very narrow message. 
And that’s exactly what the apostle said in chapter 4, verse 12: “There’s no salvation in any other than Jesus Christ. If you don’t come to Christ, your entire system of Judaism is absolutely on a road to hell.”
That’s the message. It’s offensive; it’s exclusive. It puts all false religion in the same category; none is better than the other. In fact, In fact, none is good, they’re all bad. And we are called to alarm the sinner.
 We should be the world’s “smoke alarms”, and we need to be going off. We need, on the one hand, to be admired; on the other hand, to be feared.
That’s kind of how I view myself. On the one hand, I want people to look at me with favor, because there’s a kindness there. There’s love and compassion, for unbelievers, both the religious lost and the pagan lost. 
But my experience has been as soon as the message reaches them, the narrow message of the gospel, that whatever favor I might have from them is immediately replaced by the hostility toward the gospel.
Folks has this been your experience also, or just mine?