How to Identify a Lost Person
Portrait of a Changed Life, Lesson 2
By Pastor Matt Black
13 January 2008
Lord's Day morning
Ephesians
4:17-20
Theme: Have you ever heard of identity theft?
Statistics[1]:
More than 3.23 million people have had their identity stolen. This means, somebody who you don’t know opens up new accounts in your name, and spends your money and your reputation as if they were really you.
Identity theft costs $53 billion dollars and 300 million hours in lost time annually for these 3.23 million people.
There is another kind of identity theft going on in our country. It is among those who claim to be saved. We all know the words of Jesus who said, “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? 23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:21-23).
Now look over at Ephesians 4:17. This morning I want to show you how you can identify a lost person. Essentially this passage shows that they lack fruit. We are going to look at five of them this morning.
You can identify a lost person not by what they have, but what they lack. They may be living in the world as a lost person or they may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Lost people are everywhere. I want to show you how you can identify them. They may be a card carrying Christian, and the majority of people in the USA do carry that card—they profess to know Christ, but this morning I want to give you the profile of our suspect. That is what Ephesians 4:17-20 tells us.
You can identify a Christian. Jesus said “by their fruit ye shall know them”. If you love the world “the love of the Father is not in you”.
The five identifying marks that unbelievers lack are:
Let’s see if you can pick them out as we read this morning. Would you open your Bible to Ephesians 4:17-20 and stand with me as we honor Jesus Christ this morning? We are reading His Book, and He is present with us today.
“This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, 18 Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: 19 Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. 20 But ye have not so learned Christ; 21 If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus: 22 That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; 23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; 24 And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”
[Prayer for guidance]
We are going to look at five evidences of Christianity that lost people lack this morning.
Introduction: This morning though we are looking at how to identify lost people, this is not a message that will discourage Christians. This message is designed to give Christians great assurance and joy and hope. I want to inspire and motivate Christians this morning. Because as I said the way you identify a lost person is not by what they have, but by what they lack. My hope is that if you are a Christian, you will delight in the fact that you actually have the evidence and fruit in your life that Christ is present with you! Now these are common evidences that every one will recognize, and you either have them or you don’t.
So for Christians, I want to inspire and encourage you. As you hear this message you I hope you find yourself saying, Yes, I have these marks! I’m saved! Praise God! And my hope is that you will worship God because you are saved, and that you will have a holier life as a result. I want to get to the very heartbeat of the Christian life this morning, and I want to contrast it with a life without God.
The lost live for self-achievement. The saved lived for abasement and adoration of another “that He might increase and that I might decrease”. The lost are self-centered, the saved are Saviour-centered. “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain”. Either Jesus is Lord of your life or you are Lord. That is the difference between heaven and hell.
I. Lost people lack a divine Purpose. Paul says in verse 1, “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind”. All unsaved people walk in the “vanity of their mind”. A lost person’s thoughts are vain. We are commanded to “love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength” (Luke 10:27). The Christian says “For me to live is Christ”! A Christian does not have a vain mind, but he has the Mind of Christ.
Illustration: Let me illustrate it this way. I hold in my hand a Bible. A person can have a vain mind and know this Book very well. Anyone can understand it from a historical or informational perspective. It can inspire any person saved or lost on planet earth to be a better person. It can give any one on planet earth instruction to live a better life—have a better family, run a better business, have better friendships and relationships, whether a person is a believer or not. This has been proved over and over again. But knowledge alone does not make anyone a Christian. Ultimately a lost person has a purpose for living that is outside of the Person of Jesus Christ.
A. They have Purposeless Riches. The lost look for things to satisfy them. Those without Christ are taken in by the deceitfulness of riches. What is the lie about riches? It is that there is purpose for laying up treasure on earth. That it actually comes to something.
People love earthly prosperity. Jesus said in Mark 10:34, “how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!”
Baal worship is the worship of prosperity. Baal was the Prosperity god. Baal worship is alive and well today.
1. Natural Prosperity does not equal purpose! “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). Esau sold his soul for a bowl of lentil soup. It is an grossly unfair exchange. In the same way, what is money to the soul? Money can comfort your body, but it cannot comfort the soul.
We are living in the most prosperous times in the history of the world. Even our poor people are rich compared to the rest of history.
2. What will give you purpose is to have a supernatural prosperity. James 2:5 tells us as much, “Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?” If you are a Christian you do not trust in riches. Neither do you think you are more spiritual if you are poor. You “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew 6:20).
If you are a Christian, your purpose is not to earn money but to please God! Your purpose is glorify God and love and enjoy Him. Whether you prosper or not is up to God.
You can pick out the Christians because they do not complain at financial adversity. They rejoice that their treasure is in heaven. Neither are they greedy when they are prospered. They give their money away. Our purpose is not in riches but in the Redeemer!!
B. It may be Religion that lost people turn to for purpose. Purposeless Religion does not help a person. Lost people have a “form of godliness but deny the power thereof”. They have form without fire and that is fatal!! True religion transforms the very heart and soul of a person: “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). But there is nothing new and supernatural in the lost. They can have religion. They can have Baptist fundamentalism. But God doesn’t call us to come to Baptist fundamentalism. He calls us to come to Christ!!!
Catholics, cultists, false teachers, and even atheists all know the Bible very well, and some of them live and have lived healthy and even somewhat happy lives as far as earthly morality is concerned. There are some very honest Catholics and cultists and even false teachers and atheists who are all self deceived, but at the same time do not violate their conscience. They keep their word. They are sensitive not to lie. They are ethical. There are even professing atheists who can live according to the principles of the Bible simply as a book of instruction.
Remember that Paul was a Pharisee of Pharisees and concerning keeping the law, his conscience was blameless. But none, and let me emphasize, NONE of what I have just described to you is anything close to Biblical Christianity. Paul, when he was Saul the Pharisee, was a candidate for the Lake of fire.
Application: You can be a Baptist Fundamentalist and go to the Lake of fire. It is not knowing good doctrine that makes you acceptable in God’s sight. You are abominable in God’s sight until you are drenched by the blood and righteousness of Christ. Your Baptist fundamentalism if practiced apart from the Spirit of the Living God is more abominable than any Muslim or Hindu on the earth.
C. Purposeless Recreation. Ashteroth was the goddess of pleasure in the ancient world. Now let me tell you that Ashteroth worship is alive and well today. People find their purpose in recreation. They are glued to their TVs, to their PlayStations, to their Computers. They love their movies and their vacations and their travel. Pleasure and ease are a drug that make people forget the pain of life.
The recreation of a lost person is designed to make him forget. He is amused. “A” means “no” or “without” and “muse” means “to think”. So amusement is something you can do without thinking. It is vain. Now the Christian’s recreation is like God’s recreation. On the seventh day the Lord rested! He didn’t stop thinking. He didn’t amuse Himself. He didn’t go to sleep. The Lord in Heaven never sleep nor slumbers. He REFLECTED. He thought deeply about His work, and it brought God Almighty pleasure. Man’s highest recreation is to feed on Christ. To feed on the “Bread of life”. To “taste and see that the Lord is good”. To meditate on the beauty of His holiness.
The Christian has purpose. All things work together for good. The Steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord!
II. Lost people lack divine Perception. Verse 2 tells us that these “Gentiles” who “walk, in the vanity of their mind” are having their “understanding darkened”. That’s a funny way to say it, but it’s written that way for a reason. It’s not a one time thing and then man gradually comes to his senses. No, this word is denotes an ongoing condition or action that man will never naturally come out of. There is a continual, ongoing condition of spiritual darkness. There is an absence of spiritual understanding. Paul says lost people cannot understand spiritual realities. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
A. A lost person’s vision is impaired. His understanding is “darkened”.
Illustration: Have you ever had your windshield covered with frost? Reality outside is darkened until the ice melts. The person who is lost doesn’t have the fire of the Spirit of God to melt the ice on his spiritual eyes.
A lost person cannot understand. He’s darkened. He’s vision impaired! He can’t see his own pride.
Application: He can’t see the silliness of living for the present instead of living for paradise. He enjoys a movie full of cussing and blasphemy and falls asleep in church. It’s fun for him to end his marriage and commit adultery. He’s vision impaired so he thinks God will just forgive him because he’s not that bad. He can’t see how bad and repulsive He is to a holy God. He’s like a man with bad breath. It doesn’t seem so bad to him.
Lost people are darkened spiritually, but they can learn truth intellectually. That’s not the problem. They are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). There is an inability to grasp spiritual realities. Spiritual realities are a bore. They are not penetrated and affected by truth, though they may know it well. They cannot do it until there is a change in nature. There must be a transplant of spiritual eyes. God must give you the eyes of Jesus Christ.
B. On the other hand, a saved person’s vision is awakened. A saved person “Trusts in the LORD with all his heart” and he does not “lean not unto his own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). A saved person sees everything through the eyes of Jesus. There is a spiritual perception.
· If you know Christ, then the “eyes of your understanding have been enlightened” (Ephesians 1:18).
· You are “looking for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10).
Christ has come to open the eyes of lost people. As Jesus said in Acts 26:18, He has come “To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.”
Until Christ does a supernatural work of opening the eyes, the understanding will remained darkened. 2 Corinthians 4:4, says it well. You see, “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”
So you can identify a lost person by what they lack. They lack divine Purpose, and they lack divine Perception.
III. Thirdly, Lost people lack the divine Presence. They are “alienated from the life of God”. Do you hunger and thirst not for prosperity, but for the presence of God?
Illustration: A lost person is like a computer without a hard drive. Have you ever seen those fake computers? It looks like the computer is lit up, but it’s just a decoy, a sticker. There is no life in them.
A. There is no divine Learning. As verse 20 says, a lost person has not yet “learned of Christ”. Or as verse 21 says, they have not yet “heard” his voice or “been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus”. A lost person does not know the presence of God. There is an alienation from the life of God. This is the main core of the problem. People have not been quickened by the Holy Spirit. Lost people cannot have anything but superficial changes because there is nothing but human power.
B. Since there is no divine learning, there is no divine Living. Ephesians 2:1-3 describes this condition: “were dead in trespasses and sins; 2 Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: 3 Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” What brings us out of this mess? It is Jesus Christ personally teaching us. A lost person may live this way, but Ephesians 4:20 says “ye have not so learned Christ”. We have heard His voice and “have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus” (verse 21).
A lost person has no ability to do the will of God. All he can do is imitate the Christian at best with his flesh. But Paul says in Romans 7:18, “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,)dwelleth no good thing”. Jesus said as much in John 6:63. He said, “[T]he flesh profiteth nothing”. With human power a person cannot much more than be moral and live an organized life. The Christian tastes of the power of the world to come!
C. Lost people are are “alienated from the life of God”.
Lost people can have emotion. They can be moved and affected by the Word of God. But emotion is a natural event in the heart and life of every person, saved or lost. To be moved by a story is a far cry from repentance and faith.
Illustration: In Louisiana, where I lived as a child, they bury dead people above the ground in a concrete coffin vault. They didn’t used to, but because of the water level, the coffins used to creep up out of the ground. The dead were moving in a sense—there is activity. They are being pushed up simply by their environment, but they are not alive. There may be movement, but it’s a far cry from a resurrection! They are dead! And it’s the same with the spiritually dead. There can be twinges of conscience. A lost person can be deeply moved by the Gospel. He can find the fact of Jesus dying on the cross to be emotionally powerful and even make an emotional commitment to Christ. But that is not what saves a person. What is it that saves a person? I’ll tell you. It’s right here in this verse. It is the “LIFE OF GOD” invading their soul! It is a spiritual marriage union with a thrice Holy God through faith. It is a spiritual resurrection.
After Pentecost, we have the promise of the very life and presence of God! The Holy Spirit would come upon every one of God’s people. We would have the life of God INSIDE of us!! Jesus Christ says “I will never leave you nor forsake you”. If you are a Christian, this is more precious than life itself.
IV. Lost people lack divine Passion—divine affection or what we like to call conviction. They are as verse 18 says, “alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart”. Lost people love the world. If you love the world “the love of the Father is not in you”. There is a veil of ignorance over their heart. This is described throughout the Bible. He is alienated from the life of God, and nothing fills that void.
A. A lost person has a heart that is senseless. A person blind from birth doesn’t know the beauty around him, he is ignorant of the colors and the shapes and the textures around him. So a lost person is also ignorant of the beauty of God. Their heart is ignorant. They have no real comprehension of the greatness of God or the greatness of their sin. They are as verse 18 says, “alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them”. People have more education to day than ever in the history of the world. It is not that people have a problem with their intellect. They can comprehend things intellectually, but there is a spiritual blindness to them.
They can superficially know all the right things. They can obey and listen to their conscience. But having a strong conscience is not the same as being converted.
B. A lost person has a heart that is sightless. Unbelievers have a “blindness of their heart”. Listen, “Today if you will hear his voice harden not your heart”. The word “blindness” is a blindness that comes from hardening. It is translated most of the time as hardening. The Greek word is “porosis” which was originally used to describe something “harder than marble”.
· Paul says those without Christ have a veil over their understanding, like Moses had over his face to hide the glory of God.
· Ezekiel says the heart is hard—as cold and hard as stone! And God must do a radical spiritual surgery and break the heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh.
V. The lost person has no divine Power. He is controlled by another power: the power of the lusts of the flesh. They “being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness”. The unconverted are enslaved by the LACIVIOUSNESS or LICENSE of their flesh. The Flesh has total power over them so that they OBEY the powerful desires of the flesh even the UNCLEANNESS with GREEDINESS.
A lost person has no power to do anything that pleases God. He can only go on doing what he knows to do. He knows how to sin. He is helpless because of this. As Ephesians 2:3 says, it was among these people “whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.”
The lost person has no way to help himself. Emotion will not bring a person to Christ. The Holy Spirit alone raises spiritually dead to life by the power of His Word which gives life. The Holy Spirit has no helper. Man does not assist God in anyway, any more than Lazarus assisted Christ at his grave. Caterpillars don’t fly. Butterflies fly. Man’s only hope is a spiritual endument with power. Why?
A. By nature he is a slave to his callousness. He has no spiritual sensitivity. Lost people are “past feeling” (verse 19). They are calloused. They cannot blush. They may be upright and moral, but their hatred for sin goes only to a certain level. You see
“This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, 18 Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: 19 Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. 20 But ye have not so learned Christ; 21 If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus: 22 That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; 23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; 24 And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”
B. By nature he is a slave to his selfishness. The lost person is “past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness.” This word means “a disposition of the soul incapable of bearing the pain of discipline”. It means an internal liscence to do anything that pleases me. Anything goes as long as I am happy. In other words, man becomes a god to Himself. Satisfying his pleasures, whether it means the comfort of not being bothered, or satisfying the flesh or gratifying the ego. It is utterly self-centered.
C. By nature he is a slave to his fleshliness. A person who feeds his flesh ultimately becomes an addict of some kind. There are all kinds of addictions. They “work all uncleanness with greediness”. A lost person may be greedy for seemingly good things, but they are unclean because they take the place of God. Let me give you an example of how fleshliness turns good things into unclean things.
1. How about rest? The righteous have rest and peace in the Lord. God gives rest to the righteous. Rest is good, but when it becomes laziness or a way to cut yourself off from your problems, it is unclean. Fleshliness can turn rest into an addiction or in other words, an idol. Lost people who deal with depression often become bed bound because of irrational fears or uncontrolled thoughts. A Christian who may experience this will not stay in bed, but obey God no matter what he or she feels like. A Christian is addicted to pleasing and loving God.
2. How about alcohol? Paul said to Timothy, “Take a little wine for your stomach’s sake”. Alcohol is good as a medicine, and it has its place. Some of you have used Nyquil. That’s got a high alcohol content. But those without God become addicts to alcohol or other drugs because they want to numb the pain of life. Fleshliness turns medicine into substance abuse. A Christian may need to take medicines from time to time, but He goes to God for the pains of life. In fact a Christian welcomes pain as the will of God and rejoices to “know Him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death” (Philippians 3:10).
3. How about lust. God gave us marriage to show natural affection, but the flesh has turned marital love into pornography, and that industry is GREEDY. And men and women are addicted to this lust.
4. What about greed? God gives us the capacity to work, he gives us the desire to work and the work ethic. But the human heart turns it into greed.
5. What about gluttony?
Conclusion: Now there is no natural deliverance from the lost condition. There is only one answer: a supernatural work of God. You must be “taught of him as the truth is in Jesus”. You must “learn of Christ”. You don’t ultimately need to come to me. All I can do is point you to Him.
Let me encourage Christians this morning. If you are saved, you lack none of these things.