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Lost people come first
Daryl Cornett
June 14, 2017
5 MIN READ TIME

Lost people come first

Lost people come first
Daryl Cornett
June 14, 2017

We all know that our purpose in church work is defined by the Great Commission. We know that making disciples is what Jesus has called us to do, which starts with the evangelization of those who do not know Him.

In one of my “sermon in a sack” times with the younger kids, my goal was to help them appreciate how much God loves and seeks those who are lost. I asked the group on the steps of the stage if they understood what it meant when the Bible referred to a person as lost or when we sang songs that referred to being lost.

Daryl C. Cornett

A 7-year-old girl spoke up and said, “Those are people who are running from God.” My heart leaped. Perfect.

We know the right answer but we also know that, if we are honest, we have a tendency to make church about everything but seeking the lost, to become preoccupied with either matters of corporate institutionalization or individual consumerism.

It seems that as a church progresses over a longer period of time, it can turn inward toward maintaining the status quo and preserving the institution. Programs that have existed for a long time can become ends unto themselves, with the goal simply to keep the organization afloat and financially solvent. And as long as this is achieved it seems that the church is healthy, even if none of it truly involves any real effectiveness in reaching the lost. This is when the deacons or elders along with the pastors fall into seeing their role as managing the institution instead of leading people to be on mission.

On the individual level, lots of people have come to see a church as something that serves them. They want their church to be a good, comfortable fit for them and their family. They size up its amenities (the preaching, the music, the children and youth programs, the facilities, the small group experiences, the kind of people who go there, etc.), deciding if the church serves them well. We often become preoccupied with making people happy. Not that we shouldn’t strive for excellent worship and great discipleship opportunities. But we shouldn’t be doing what we do to sell people on our church. But let’s be honest, that’s how we are thinking about it much of the time.

The biblical truth is that God wants us to go and seek the lost as our primary passion.

Our joy should be to put lost people at the top of our priorities. This was the passion Jesus expressed to His disciples after conversing with the Samaritan woman at the well. The soul satisfaction of doing the Father’s will in seeking the lost and revealing Himself was His spiritual food. He told His disciples to lift up their eyes and look at the harvest already ripe. He pushed them out of their comfort zone and instilled in them a sense of urgency in regard to the lost.

We must stop exhausting ourselves running after disgruntled or absentee church members, and use that energy to go after the lost and unchurched no matter who they are in our community.

Jesus told a parable of one who invited certain people to a big dinner. All those he originally invited gave excuses of why they couldn’t come when the time approached. The man (representing God) grew angry at their response and instructed his servant to go out and invite the unexpected ones – “the poor, crippled, blind and lame.” He would waste no more time on those who had been invited and refused. There were always others who would respond.

We need to get over people who are chronically unfaithful and uninvolved. We need to stop strategizing how to get them back. We need to care for these folks as well, but at some point we need to cut them loose and go invite others. The lost are all around us. They need to always be our first and greatest passion.

If the lost are running from God – and they are – then we have to be running in the same direction after them. We have to overtake them and confront them with the grace of the gospel. We know that they will not all come when invited but we are promised that some will. God calls the church to go after the lost. Jesus did this and taught us that this should be our passion too.

If the church is truly going to be the church, then we are going to have to get a whole lot more comfortable with being uncomfortable. We must allow God to break our hearts for the lost, and trust God to use us to bring the same Good News that came to us to others who don’t know yet that they even need it.

(EDITOR’S NOTE – Daryl C. Cornett is pastor of First Baptist Church in Hazard, Ky., a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and former associate professor of church history at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Cordova, Tenn.)