When I was a Senior pastor at a church in East Nashville, I was getting ready to preach on a Wednesday night after our church family had a meal together. A church member came to find me and said there was someone standing in the stairwell who was lost. This was nothing new, people frequently got lost in our neighborhood because our church was on McGavock Pike. The Opryland Hotel, Grand Ol’ Opry, and Opry Mills shopping center, as well as some other restaurants and hotels were also located on McGavock Pike, but they were on the other side of the river. To remedy the problem, we had printed up some maps that showed people how they could get to the bridge that would take them to the Famous Country Music Mecca, a huge indoor shopping mall, and a fancy Hotel that featured 9 acres of beautiful indoor gardens. As I walked across our fellowship hall and up the steps, I was wondering to myself, “why didn’t that church member just give him directions?” As I walked up to him, I introduced myself as the pastor and asked him if he was lost. He answered “yes, I’m lost.” I said, “hold on, I have a map in my office that will get you where you need to go,” and I quickly started up the next set of stairs because I was supposed to preach in just a few minutes. The sweaty man with a painter's hat, dressed in a t-shirt and jorts with paint on them, began to take large steps to catch up to me with a pained look on his face. He exclaimed once again, “Pastor, I’m lost.” To which I responded, don’t worry, I have a map that will help. He grabbed my arm and said, "you don’t understand, I am lost and going to hell and I need Jesus!” I was speechless and chuckled out loud at my own spiritual insensitivity, but it finally registered and I said, “Ooooh! Well let’s get you saved right now!” He told me that he had been painting the second story of his house and God told him that he was lost and he needed to get off that ladder right then and go to the church on the corner and get saved. And that’s what he did. A few moments later, when I had given a very simple presentation of the Gospel story, that man prayed a prayer asking Jesus to save him. I invited him to dinner, but he was embarrassed by his sweat and paint covered clothes, but he went home as a new man who had been found by Jesus. Though I was late to our Wednesday night service, I definitely had a story to tell my congregation. How silly of me to offer something so second rate like a map to hear some of the best country music, or shop in some of the best retail space at the time, or stay in a four-star hotel, when the man wanted to know how to get to heaven. I still get chill bumps when I think that I was in the presence of the Holy Spirit in those moments and that God had involved me in the eternal salvation of someone, even when I was so clueless. There were 25 other churches in a 3 mile radius of ours, one of which I could reach with a well thrown rock, but somehow God sent him to our church for that divine mid-week intervention.
Jesus had just saved a small lost man up in a tree in Jericho named Zacchaeus when… “Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”(Luke 19:9-10 NIV11) After that incident in Nashville, I was reminded that we should always be expecting Jesus to be saving lost people around us and He may even use us to be a part of His lifesaving work.
