What It Means To Be Lost Series

“What Does it Mean to Be Lost?”

Introduction:

A little boy opened the big and old family Bible with fascination; he looked at the old pages as he turned them. Then something fell out of the Bible and he picked up and looked at it closely. It was an old leaf from a tree that has been pressed in between pages.

"Momma, look what I found", the boy called out.

"What have you got there, dear?" his mother asked.

With astonishment in the young boy’s voice he answered: "I think it’s Adam’s suit!"

In 1998 459,841 people or one in every 5 deaths in America were attributed to Coronary Heart Disease. That is how many die. A vital key to defeating heart disease is to determine how many are LIVING with heart problems.

On any given day I would bet that more than one out of five people die outside of Christ, and the key is to determine how many people are living with the heart problem before it kills them.

What does it mean to be lost? By that I am not referring to not being able to find your way around town and I am not talking about a hit television show. Being lost implies much more than that. We hear lot of talk about the lost and reaching the lost, but none of us will ever be motivated to reach the lost unless we know what it means to be lost. Perhaps there is someone here who has been thinking that they were a Christian, but you realize that you are lost. I want to look at what it means to be lost this morning.

In this world there are literally millions upon millions of people who are lost and need Jesus, and unless they come to him they are going to spend eternity apart from God.

A lot of times we will talk about how we want friends and family of ours to come to the Lord, but we don’t really mean it. Apparently there are a lot of people among us who don’t believe in Hell. I know that intellectually everyone here would probably agree that there is a real Heaven and a real Hell, but many don’t completely believe that. The reason I know this is because if you really believed in Hell and understood it the way the Bible describes it you would do a lot more to bring people to Jesus.

There are a lot of lost people out there and it is your and my duty to reach them for Jesus. If you really believed there was a Hell you would tell your lost parents about Jesus because you don’t want them to be there. If you really believed there was a Hell you’d tell your children that they need to get right with the Lord, so they don’t have to go there. If you really believed there was a Hell you would tell your best friends and your worst enemies about Jesus because you don’t want them to go there. I hope by the end of this message we, as the church will run out the doors to tell people the Good News of Jesus Christ because we better understand what it means to be lost. We need to stop sitting around and talking about how nice it would be for those loved ones of ours to share the same faith with us, but we need to be bold and tell people the Truth in love.

I believe in order for us to properly grow in our faith we need to be reproducing ourselves in the church. There is no such thing as a Christian who does not bring people to the Lord, and if you don’t believe that statement then ask Jesus what he meant about throwing the trees that did not bear fruit into the lake of fire. I heard someone say that we are a generation of mules, we have many hard workers, but we are not reproducing ourselves. The hard work that we do is of no avail if people aren’t coming to Jesus. The church building was a waste of time of people aren’t coming to Jesus. Our study of the Word and fellowship is useless unless people are coming to Jesus. There is a world full of lost people, and they are your friends, parents, siblings, neighbors, and they are lost and we must do something about it. Ok, Jason, I understand that there are lost people, but what does it mean to be lost?

Text: Luke 15:11-32

I. What Does it Not Mean to be Lost?

Before we can look at what it means to be lost we have to look at what it does not mean to be lost. In the world today there are many misconceptions about what it means to be a Christian and how you can be identified as a follower of Jesus. Being a Christian is more than just going to church and understanding about Jesus, being a Christian is a way of life. What does it not mean to be lost?