Ron Hutchcraft Ministries - Leaving the Life-Saving Station - #4295

Friday, June 27, 2003

There's a stretch of the Outer Banks of North Carolina that's known as the "Graveyard of the Atlantic." Hundreds of ships have been lost there over the centuries. So it was there that something called the United States Life-Saving Service was born. They established these white frame buildings called life-saving stations every seven miles along that treacherous coast. The Life-Saving Service was a spawning ground for heroes. In one case, for example, a ship was in distress with four men staying alive by just holding onto a mast. Six of the seven men from the closest station went out into a storm that could very well consume them - after leaving a verbal will with the man left running the station. After 22 hours without food or sleep, they brought those four stranded men back alive. Incredible heroism like that was the norm for these men of the life-saving stations.

One interesting observation: never in the history of the Life-Saving Service did a drowning person come to the door of their station and ask to be rescued. In every single rescue, the rescuers had to leave the safety of the life-saving station and go out into the surf and the storm to keep someone from dying.

Well,

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Leaving the Life-Saving Station."

It's the nature of rescue. You have to leave the comfort of the life-saving station to save those who are dying outside. The life-saving station is a great place to get rescuers strong enough to go out into the storm to bring people in. And it's a great place to bring people after they've been rescued. But if we wait for dying people to come into the life-saving station to be rescued, most of them will die without a chance.

That's the nature of spiritual rescue. Over the years it's been known by many names - evangelism, soul-winning, witnessing. But we may have lost the urgency of what's really at stake. Every lost person you know who has never begun a personal relationship with Christ, every lost person within the reach of your church is, in the words of the Bible, "perishing ... staggering toward slaughter," (Proverbs 24:11 ) "without hope and without God," (Ephesians 2:12 ) and ultimately, someone who will be forever, in the Bible's words, "shut out from the presence of the Lord" (2 Thessalonians 1:9 ). They are spiritually dying people, and their only hope is rescue by someone who is close enough to save them.

Sadly, we've been waiting for them to come to one of our meetings, our programs, our religious places, our life-saving station. But Jesus said in Luke 19:10 , our word for today from the Word of God, that "the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost." He said that in the house of a reviled tax collector, where Jesus had been criticized for going. But Jesus shows us that you have to go where the lost people are to rescue them. You have to seek them if you want to save them.

We keep having programs to rescue the dying - and few of them ever there. The plan of God is for someone like you - an everyday follower of Jesus Christ - to be the one to rescue the dying people around you. If we have to go where the lost people are to rescue them, you already are where some of them are. Don't just let them go on dying. Leave the safe, comfortable spot and take some risks to rescue them. You follow the Man who left the comfort zone of heaven to risk it all, to give it all to rescue you. Now He's asking you to join Him in rescuing some others who will die forever without Him.

There is nothing greater you can do with your influence, nothing greater you can do with your life than to rescue someone who would have died otherwise; to help someone else be rescued from hell and be in heaven with you.