The Pearl Or the Furnace

When I was a little boy, I had a treasure magazine that you could place mail orders from, and this magazine was geared towards kids because it had things in it like shrunken heads and rubber snakes, and it advertised all these neat things that a boy of eleven would be interested in. I remember I used to save up my money to buy these treasures out of this adventure magazine. I would do anything to make money.

I would rake leaves, shovel snow, run errands, anything to save enough money to order something out of that mail order catalog geared towards kids. And I'll never forget getting a package I ordered from this treasure magazine. It was a little white box with a soft cushion on the inside, and sitting on that cushion was a real pearl from the South Seas.

It was a pearl oyster from the Indian Ocean. It was perfectly round, and it cost me a pretty penny back then in the 1960s when I bought it. I remember carefully picking up that pearl, rolling it in the palm of my hand, and looking at it with amazement, realizing that this natural pearl had taken a couple years to be produced, and it had to be found by a real pearl diver.

This was all exciting to an eleven-year-old boy who felt he'd just purchased something of extraordinary value. And in the Gospel of Matthew, it speaks of a pearl. In Matthew chapter 13, you can turn in your Bibles there now, we will be in verses 45 through 50.

And in this chapter, friends, there is mention of a pearl of inestimable value, a pearl of great price. And in this passage, there is also mention of a furnace of fire, which speaks of hell's torments. The title of my message today is, The Pearl or the Furnace, as each of these speak of both heaven and hell.

When I was a boy sixteen, I worked in a grocery store as a sack boy. One of my duties was to take the cardboard boxes that the produce came in, and flatten them with a box cutter, and then stack up those boxes, carry them to a furnace in the back of the store, and throw them in there. The furnace was an old cast iron model with a heavy door.

I'll always remember the sensation I got when I opened that cast iron door and saw those white hot flames. The heat was so powerfully intense that it would singe my face. The heat of that furnace was a fearful thing.

I dreaded going to that back room and opening the door of that horrible furnace of flames.