What if everybody who sits in your church and claims to be a Christian, really isn’t?
2 learnings that blew my mind:
1. If you draw a thirty minute radius around Lexington, Kentucky, there are 1200 churches in that circle.
2. Remember hearing a study that 80-85% of all Americans claim to be Christians.
Impossible. 85% of my friends don’t even claim. Almost everybody claims to know Christ. We know that’s not true. We started church to reach atheists. Transforming unconvinced people into whole-hearted followers of Jesus Christ.
We are studying the Sermon on the Mount.
– Jesus says on judgment day there will be many who say “Lord, Lord” who don’t know me.
– They will say “but Lord, we did.” – Jesus says, “I never knew you. The works you did were unauthorized.”
– I didn’t ask them of you. -I just wanted to know you.
This was fundamentally shifting. They may be in my church/in our churches.
– What if my folks are doing things that are “unauthorized”?
– What if we think we are making disciples but what we are doing is populating a Matthew 7 line?
– What if people are thinking they going to Heaven, but they are deceived.
– What if they get to Heaven and Jesus says, “I never knew you.” That stuff was unauthorized. I gave my life to know you.
It affected our teaching and preaching. The way I prayed. We loved people enough we owed it to them to help them understand.
Discussion Questions:
1. Realizing that only God knows someone’s heart, what percentage of your congregation might know about the Lord but not know the Lord?
2. Articulate a strategy to help people in your congregation realize the difference between knowing God and knowing about God, and how to apply that to themselves.
