Walk into most church buildings, whether it be those mega-churches with high-tech media screens, or the rich ones with gold-plated pews, or the out-in-the-woods hillbilly/redneck churches, and you'll most likely find someone saying, "Seek the lost! Find the lost! Draw the lost back to God!" Yet sometimes, in the fray of these words, we lose touch with reality, we forget that we, too, were lost once, and somehow we forget how much God has made our lives worth living. At some churches you will even find, and this compliments my utter astonishment, a preacher screaming into the crowd, "If you haven't made Jesus Lord of Your Life, then you are going to burn in Hell, you miserable sinners!" This fire-and-brimstone theology, let me point out, isn't very effective.
Somewhere along the line we've seen those who do not know first-hand the love of God as "lost," "sinners," and "unbelievers." Yet I look into the Scriptures, at the beautiful words of Jesus himself, who is the very embodiment of the love that all disciples of Jesus cling to in their hearts, and he doesn't only refer to those who need him and yet do not have him as "lost," "sinners," and "unbelievers." Yes, he does make these statements sometimes, don't get me wrong, but they aren't exclusive.
I imagine Jesus' eyes burning with a mysterious passion, his muscles gushing with divine adrenaline, as he speaks of those he loves and calls them such names as "missing" and "treasured." I think that, maybe, if we got away from the us-and-them mentality, got away from the miserable sinner and hell-and-brimstone theologies, if we looked at people in the lens' of Jesus - seeing them not as ungodly sinners on a high road to Hell, but as missing and treasured children of God who are lost and seeking direction - and we are there to show them their Father once again, evangelism will mean something new to us, and more importantly, we would be ever closer to imitating Christ.
Somewhere along the line we've seen those who do not know first-hand the love of God as "lost," "sinners," and "unbelievers." Yet I look into the Scriptures, at the beautiful words of Jesus himself, who is the very embodiment of the love that all disciples of Jesus cling to in their hearts, and he doesn't only refer to those who need him and yet do not have him as "lost," "sinners," and "unbelievers." Yes, he does make these statements sometimes, don't get me wrong, but they aren't exclusive.
I imagine Jesus' eyes burning with a mysterious passion, his muscles gushing with divine adrenaline, as he speaks of those he loves and calls them such names as "missing" and "treasured." I think that, maybe, if we got away from the us-and-them mentality, got away from the miserable sinner and hell-and-brimstone theologies, if we looked at people in the lens' of Jesus - seeing them not as ungodly sinners on a high road to Hell, but as missing and treasured children of God who are lost and seeking direction - and we are there to show them their Father once again, evangelism will mean something new to us, and more importantly, we would be ever closer to imitating Christ.
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