GOSPEL TO THE LOST

"In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope. But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to Him through the blood of Christ."  (Ephesians 2:12-13 NLT)


It is a Gospel to [people] who are without God, sinful, bewildered, anxious, discouraged, self-sufficient and proud yet destroying themselves and others, caught in a desperate plight from which they cannot extricate themselves.  The Bible characterizes [people] in such a state as "lost", and as being "without hope in the world"...  And let no one suppose that such a term as "lost" is merely a bit of conventional theological jargon.  It stands for a terrible reality, a reality which modern man in his modern predicament knows only too well from his own bitter experience.  It gives rise to the voices of despair which haunt our radios, our newspapers, our fiction and poetry, our stage and screen, our doctors' offices, our hospital wards, our grisly nightmare of atomic war, and the conversation of common people who no sooner meet than they begin to bemoan the fate that has overtaken the world.


-- Lewis J. Sherrill in Lift Up Your Eyes [1949]




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