Hell is an uncomfortable, but necessary, doctrine for Christians to tell unbelievers about, agreed Candace Cameron Bure and her guests on the latest episode of her podcast.
Pastor Jonathan Pokluda and Bure’s son Lev joined Bure for a discussion that focused on how people are deceived into finding their significance apart from God and into neglecting matters of eternal consequence.
“I think a great way the enemy deceives us is trying to make light of hell,” said Pokluda, who is lead pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. “I’ll share the gospel with people, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m going to hell.’ I’m like, man, if you really knew the horrors of hell, you wouldn’t be able to get out of bed if you were going there.”
Candace Cameron Bure, Jonathan Pokluda, and Lev Bure on Truth and Love in Evangelism
The theme of Season 10 of Bure’s podcast is “Your Story Has a Villain,” which is also the title of Pokluda’s forthcoming book. In the latest podcast episode, released on June 3, Pokluda, Lev, and Bure discussed topics including how quickly people’s legacies are forgotten after they die and how some people minimize the significance of hell.
RELATED: ‘Would I Ever Wear a Skirt’ That ‘Short’?—Candace Cameron Bure Talks Modesty With Her Daughter
“There’s nothing to numb pain in hell,” Pokluda said, addressing how people make light of the idea of hell. “It’s all of the pain of this world concentrated and realized.”
“There’s no laughter in hell,” he said. “Hell is—it’s eternal FOMO. You know, FOMO is the fear of missing out. Hell is the realization that you could have had a paradise with God, but you chose self.”
To illustrate his point, Pokluda shared a story about one of his daughters. When his daughters were young, they loved lollipops so much that getting one “might as well [have] been Disney World.” One time he got a lollipop to bring home to his daughter Presley, but then his wife told him that Presley had “made some bad choices today. You’re gonna have to discipline her when you get home.”
When he got there, Pokluda asked his daughter about her “bad choices,” and she acknowledged that she had been mean to her sister and disrespectful to her mother. He then showed Presley the lollipop. “I think she thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get grace,’” said Pokluda. Instead, he threw the lollipop away as a punishment.
When he did that, Presley completely lost her temper. “You would have thought I hit her thumb with a hammer,” said Pokluda. “I mean, talk about demonic possession. But she just goes crazy. She’s like, ‘I can do whatever I want.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa.’”
Pokluda said that he had previously purchased a box of expensive lollipops and was saving them for a special occasion. “She didn’t even know I had them,” he said. “And it’s like, the good stuff, you know? And I went and got it, and I showed it to her, and I slowly poured it out in the trash can.”
