At a recent gathering I attended a young international university student told us how his heart was breaking, and I started to wonder why. Was it because of some personal loss, a relationship break up or death of a loved one? No he told us, his heart was breaking over the spiritual status of three unsaved friends. This was a most moving moment, a young man whose drive in life was not his study or career or having a good time or sport but the horror of the eternal destiny of those without Christ, especially those with whom he was in regular contact. This young man’s passion and pain for the lost we see in Jesus when he wept over Jerusalem, over the ‘religious’ people the Jews, those who rejected him. For he knew the horror that was coming upon them, both in the short and also in eternal terms.
What food for thought is this and what an indictment the lack of passion for the unsaved of many in ‘Christendom-model’ churches, especially as we start a new (southern hemisphere) year of the various ministries we are involved in. Whether it will be a fruitful year for the Kingdom of God will I believe depend to a large extent on the degree to which we ‘cry Jesus tears’ for the lost, for only such pained passion will provide the drive and level of commitment required to face the tide of paganism flooding (western) society.
Christians are people of the New Covenant, the ones who by definition have the new heart Ezekiel prophesied (Ezek. 36:26, 27), a new heart that is Jesus heart, one that weeps for the lost. It is not an accident that Jesus spoke more about hell than heaven, for he knew the awful destiny of those who rejected him (actively or passively it makes no difference), and he cried over them.
If 2015 is to be fruitful for God, it will only be to the extent that our hearts are breaking over the spiritual state of our families, friends and the people in the society around us and the awful fate that faces them outside Christ. It is only as we feel that pain, that horror that will drive us to reinvent ‘Church’, to set it free, to create an ‘Unbounded Church’ a –
“Church as we haven’t known it
for a society as we haven’t known it”
and to the extent that we cry Jesus tears, and are prepared to get out of our comfort zones, because our hearts are breaking with Jesus heart for the lost. Lukewarm Christianity-Lite will not cut it!
May it be so.
Martin Bragger
unbounded church 