What a message by John Litton. Read and enjoy.

Can you imagine the surprise this man received who, safe and secure amid an abundance of wealth, petted and pampered by all who knew him, having everything on earth his heart could wish, peacefully closing his eyes in death, then, without a moment’s interruption, found himself in torments?

He had heard about Hell during his lifetime, but had thought little of it as an actual fact. He had heard men argue that God was too loving to create such a place. He had joked about Hell, had often used the word as a swear word. He had told men in anger to go there. But that Hell was a real place and that he who had lived so securely, so voluptuously, on earth, should find himself forever in this place of awful torment—the thought crushed him with consternation and horror!

Our Lord describes in calm, measured words the revolutionary effect upon this man of the first five minutes in Hell. His whole attitude toward this life undergoes a radical change as the scales fall from his eyes and the terrible reality of Hell stands unveiled before him.

Before death, this man is lolling in wealth, eating and drinking, and so intent enjoying life he thinks of no one but himself. Revelling and feasting, he does not have God in his thoughts. In the next minute, according to Jesus Christ, he is a man on fire with desire to get men right with God, to get them to repent of their sins, to get them ready for the life beyond. Five minutes in the lost world makes this godless man want to be a soul winner, a preacher of the Gospel, an evangelist to his own family. Oh, how he prays for them! How he pleads their cause! How he cries out that his brothers might be saved from this place of awful torment!

Mind you—this man had never given the souls of his brothers a thought; but now all he can think of is, his brothers are lost and heading for Hell. He sees those five men blindfolded, walking straight toward a precipice. They are nearly there. A few more steps and they are over! Won’t somebody stop them! Won’t somebody rise from the dead and warn mankind of their peril!

He looks forward and sees that in a few years there will be an addition to his torment; for unless something is done to warn his family, there will come tumbling in upon him, in awful succession—one, two, three, four, five of his brothers, to add, if possible, to his misery. He cannot save his own soul, but he will do all a man in Hell can do to save his brothers.

Will you mark some of the tremendous lessons this man learned in the first five minutes in Hell.

1. He saw the reality and finality of the place called Hell.

2. He saw that all the arguments he had ever heard against Hell were utterly false and empty.

3. He saw that, if a man shuts God out of his heart in this life, God will shut that man out of his heavenly Home in the next life.

4. He saw that the cardinal folly of a man’s existence is for him to care for his body and do nothing for his never-dying soul.

5. He saw the urgent necessity of something desperate being done by believers on earth to save his unsaved brothers. He saw that the ordinary church or synagogue services would not do it. They had not and they would not reach them. Something unusual, something desperate will have to be done to awake them.

6. He saw that the one only business of believing men was to spend and be spent in warning the lost of their peril.

Soul winning, soul winning, soul winning—that was the burning message on the lips of this man in Hell.

Now, if a man could learn these tremendous lessons in Hell, then some preachers, yes, every preacher, ought to go there. They ought, if it were possible, to visit the lost world for five minutes to have their eyes opened to its terrible and eternal reality.

 John Linton, “Why Some Preachers Ought to Visit Hell,” in Great Preaching On: Hell, Great Preaching Series (Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1989), 75–76.