Gathering the Lost

One interesting factor we've found in planting a new church is that "gathering the lost" is not as easy as it sounds.

Many lost people don't know it. Some lost people are in denial. Others who are lost are quite lost and take a lot of work and effort to become "found" again.

Then there are people who are believers, but for various reasons, live like lost people. That is, I think, perhaps the most serious kind of "lost" there is.

In His sermon on the mount, Jesus teaches us about attitudes that are blessed; one of them is the attitude of being "poor in spirit."

I take this to mean that there is a sense of lostness about a person's soul--that apart from God, he or she knows there is no hope.

I pray God will help me be lost, like this, every day--and that I might (to paraphrase the Apostle Paul), be "found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own, that is from the law, but a righteousness that is from faith, from first to last."

Praise God; I once was lost, then was found, and now I live in the lostness of my need for God every day.