Chuck Lawless on the Why of Lottie Moon

This week is the week of emphasis and prayer and fasting for foreign missions and Lottie Moon.  The Lottie Moon Christmas offering will be taken up Sunday and many are unaware to who Moon was or why we take this offering up.  In brief, this is an offering that goes to support foreign missions.  As one who has been overseas a couple of times doing mission work, I have seen how these funds promote the spread of the gospel overseas.  If we truly believe in the gospel, then we ought to take this offering more seriously than we do.  If we really love the unredeemed, then we will give.

Recently, Southern Seminary professor Chuck Lawless wrote an article in the Baptist Press on the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and why it is so important.  After sharing with the reader a number of stories and testimonies of lives changed by the gospel, Dr. Lawless writes:

We have seen firsthand the changing power of the Gospel around the world, and those experiences remind us that Lottie Moon dollars are still making an eternal difference.

What keeps me awake at night, though, are those who have never heard or who do not yet believe. More than 6,000 people groups around the world have no Gospel witness. By some estimates, as many 3.5 billion people have never heard the Gospel. Some 6 billion people are lost without Christ.

Six billion lives at stake, and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering provides almost 55 percent of the IMB's annual budget to engage this lostness. Clearly, Lottie Moon still matters.

Six billion people right now are lost and going to hell.  How can we sleep at night knowing that we have done nothing about that?  We are ambassadors of Christ.  We therefore have a message to declare and we ought to take that message, and the Lord of that message, more seriously.


Baptist Press (Chuck Lawless) - FIRST-PERSON: Why Lottie Moon Matters