Reforming (phase 1), Hell and Mercy (step 6), session 5

Is choosing hell over heaven the same thing as choosing sin over God's plan for us?

I am considering someone I know who has said, in unequivocal terms, that the sin in which he has participated all of his life is so much a part of him that he chooses it rather than choosing to love his family by laying down his life for them. From his perspective it is more a case of his wife not choosing to allow his addiction to continue to influence their children's environment. Maybe he isn't fully able to choose otherwise, but he has made it clear that he also has no interest in doing so.

Yep, this could be hell.

I don't know what makes us think that laying down our lives for each other is going to be easy. And I don't know what makes some of us manage to do that, or makes others of us refuse to. But only in sacrifice do we find glory, and if we are unwilling to choose sacrifice, are we not instead choosing hell?

And you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.  Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.  But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.  For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God -- not because of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.  - Eph 2, 1-10

I'm just including the entire text of the passage for this session. There's too much here, and all of it is cause for hope that God will get hold of this man whom I love and cause him to see his need and accept the gifts of grace and love which he rejects. He is no less deserving of them than I, and even though he is hurting those I love, he knows not what he is doing.

If it weren't for my belief that God's grace is greater than our sin, I would have no hope at all for this situation.