Cue the music: Pulsating rhythm in a minor key
Cue the announcer: Serious…impassioned.
Now the script:
Their numbers are legion.
Their plight…beyond pathetic.
Yet to many, they are all but invisible: lost people. People living their lives on a trajectory toward the flames of Hell.
The horror of what awaits them—apart from God's intervention—ought to grip us and cause us to fall on our knees begging the Almighty to spare them.
Instead…the names of these people rarely make our prayer lists…our prayer meetings… our prayer chains. That is why I make the bold, if not uncomfortable claim, that for many of us who claim to be followers of Jesus, lost people are an endangered prayer species.
The fact that we are not sufficiently troubled about lost people to really pray for them says they are not really on our radar screen. What this actually reveals is that we don't, as a whole, have a lot of meaningful interaction with them. We tend to care about the people we spend time with. Since we don't spend much time with lost people, we don't have much care for them.
Not praying for lost people reveals a dual wickedness in our hearts. It says we are entirely comfortable enjoying the everlasting delights of heaven for ourselves–and equally comfortable with those outside heaven's gates experience the everlasting torment of Hell.
“We're in…they're out…and that's okay.” Except it's NOT okay.
It's never been okay to have found the life raft…but not care for others still thrashing about in the waters.
It's never been okay to hear Christ's command to make disciples and relegate that to mere good intentions.
It's never been okay to hear Jesus say, “The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost”…and then hardly bother Him to seek and to save the lost people in our own lives.
It's time you and I moved lost people off the endangered prayer species list.
It's time we prayed to the one who said, He is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”
It's time to pray for lost people.