Are unbelievers ‘lost’?
Before you came to faith, were you 'lost'? Many Christians, and peculiarly evangelicals, would answer 'yes' for a range of reasons. Most often this question is answered in relation to theological categories, and the 'objective' sense of the term: existence 'lost' can mean that we are lost to God, or that (in Pauline terms) we are however living according to our sinful human being nature rather than walking past the Spirit. If nosotros recall that Jesus' death on the cross paid a great price for us, it must have been to save us from something serious, and that includes whatever our destiny would have been had we not come to organized religion and discovered God'due south beloved for us. In this sense, the opposite of being lost is existence saved.
But 'lost' can also have a subjective sense to it, describing how we felt before and after coming to faith. I have been writing about evangelical spirituality for a Grove booklet (due out at the end of this calendar month) and it was interesting to reverberate on the language of the experience of coming to faith within the evangelical tradition. Jesus' death is often described in the gospels in terms of being the paschal lamb, sacrificed as a Passover offering to initiate a new exodus and renewed covenant, which would suggest a primary agreement for spirituality of conservancy equally freedom from slavery, but evangelical spirituality has tended to focus elsewhere. Jesus dying 'for our sins' suggests our estrangement from a holy God, and this sense of being 'lost' has oftentimes been prominent in evangelical devotion.
I was lost and Jesus constitute me, Establish the sheep that went astray,
Threw His loving arms around me, Drew me back into His way. (Francis Rowley)
Although this was written in a Victorian hymn, I call back singing it in the belatedly 1970s incorporated into a chorus. Here we encounter the language of Is 53, which is behind some key passages in the NT about Jesus' decease, 'all we like sheep have gone astray', become the basis not simply of doctrine but of the experience of being saved. In its most common use, these two sense of 'existence lost' become quite blurred; because nosotros know (theologically) that nosotros were lost before we were saved, we as well look dorsum and see how we felt we were lost before we were institute by God.
And for some people, the sense of being lost was very real indeed. We recently stayed with friends, a couple i of whom had been a lifelong Christian, just the other of whom had had a dramatic conversion experience. He had been brought up in an alcoholic home, had left to travel the world, and was himself addicted to drugs when he stumbled into a pocket-sized evangelical church building and been confronted by God in a most dramatic style. His sense of being lost was quite tangible, and he had no difficulty in identifying the moment of change. I heard of a similar story in church last week, where a member of the congregation talked well-nigh her father, who has been ambitious and unpleasant until his own dramatic conversion which then led her (and other members of the family) to faith for themselves.
This sense of radical change is something distinctive to evangelical spirituality. Equally David Gillett highlights (in his excellent study Trust and Obey), evangelical spirituality is a 'twice-born spirituality' (using the language of John 3.3 'you must exist born again'), that is, it focusses on the radical difference betwixt the new life of organized religion and the old life of unbelief.
Evangelical belief gives pride of identify to the didactics of St Paul about the radical discontinuity between the life before and after the transforming work of Christ in the individual: 'So if anyone is in Christ, at that place is new creation: everything old has passed away, see everything has become new!' (2 Cor 5.17). (p 25)
Paul is here expounding something similar to Jesus' proclaiming that the 'kingdom of God is at hand'; the anticipated age to come is hither, and in Jesus' death and resurrection the time to come eschatological age has broken into the present. The only appropriate response is a radical change of direction in life, hence his call to 'repent'. Only as Paul takes this bulletin into the pagan world, the sharp stardom between Jewish belief and do and the infidel world becomes the sharp distinction between life before and after our encounter with Jesus. For many evangelicals, even if there is not a single moment of conversion, this sense of radical departure is a key part of their spirituality.
Alister McGrath has complained that there is not enough written about the distinctive of evangelical spirituality, and laments the way that evangelicals borrow from other traditions rather than the riches of their own. In role to accost this, he wrote his ain volume on evangelical spirituality,Across the Quiet Time.It is a reflective exploration of the fundamental themes in this tradition—and what is really fascinating is that he starts with a chapter on 'Being Lost'. In it, he tells stories of his own feel of being lost, and what information technology was similar both to exist lost and then to be found. He and so asks the reader to imagine vividly the experience of being lost, what that feels like, and then the experience of existence institute and all the emotions that that involves. This opens the style to theological understanding.
This is a central theme of the question. Without Christ, we are hopelessly lost in a nighttime world. Nosotros long to find our way abode, but we have no idea where that home is, or how to get there. But in his bang-up honey for us, God sent his son Jesus Christ to bring u.s.a. home. Christ does not show us the manner – through his cross and resurrection he opens upwards the road to heaven was non there earlier. And he does not only pointed to that route, and tell us to walk down it. Instead, he makes the journey with us. (p 27)
He goes on to explore the idea of being in debt, and having our debts written off, and being trapped so existence released. This leads into a reflection on the parables of Jesus in each of these areas, and focussing detail on the 'parables of the lost' in Luke xv. These parables have become paradigmatic for evangelical experiences of conservancy, specially the parable of the 'prodigal son' (really the parable of the loving father). Then I tin can remember as a student listening to an exposition of this parable in a academy mission when I was a student. Later all, what other parable would you plow to in talking to not-Christians well-nigh their lostness and God's love?
But this focus on 'lost then institute' does create some challenges for evangelicals. The starting time is a challenge in reading these scriptural texts. The experience of being lost so found is often associated with the motion from existence irreligious to become religious. Only Jesus was preaching to those who already thought of themselves as the people of God, even if they were on the margins of that identity—he was speaking to Jews, and not to pagan gentiles. (The theme because reworked of course in Paul's theology, where he is talking largely to those who were formerly pagans.) This has meant that evangelicals have had to piece of work hard to make sense of the saving work of Jesus as existence role of a continuous narrative of God's interaction with his people (every bit argued by Tom Wright and others) rather than as immediately relevant to unbelievers without the historical context that information technology comes in.
But there is besides an experiential challenge: unlike when as a child I lost my parents in the supermarket and knew I was looking for them, the recognition of being spiritually lost is a retrospective i, non a prospective one. In the supermarket, I already knew what it was to have been accompanied by my parents, and then the sense of losing them and beingness lost was clear and tangible. But that was non the case for me spiritually: whatever the theological reality, the experiential reality was not one of have known God and and then 'lost' God in a biographical sense. Though Paul, in hindsight, calls himself 'the chief of sinners', there is little indication that he was secretly agonising about his own sin and failure whilst persecuting Jesus' followers. He just realised his fault once he encountered Jesus, and for many people their sense of being lost only comes into focus when they realise they have been found. The narrative of the experiential motility from lostness to foundness therefore often does non resonate for those who have not yet had this experience.
In fact, I suspect that for almost people outside of the church building in gimmicky British culture, when they are confronted by the merits that they are lost and Christians are found, they simply struggle to relate to information technology. They don't feel lost, whatever nosotros might claim to exist truthful spiritually. They might be quite content with the life they are leading, and the suggestion that they are 'lost' just confirms for them that the Christian message has no relevance to their lives.
Thinking about the examples of preaching and announcement in the New Testament, particularly in Acts, it is hard to find an case of the appeal to the sense of existence lost. Well-nigh preaching focusses on what God has done in Jesus, which provokes the need for decision, and alongside that is the theme of the distinctive lives lived by Jesus' followers, including miracles which themselves provoke questions and heighten the need for response. Perchance information technology is fourth dimension to recognise that the linguistic communication of 'lost' and 'found' is for a celebration of what God has done for usa in the community of faith, rather than (primarily) the shape of proclamation for those outside?
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