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I don’t know how to put a number on it, but if I were a betting man, I would bet 10% is actually a rather generous number. I know from reading Free Republic (not to mention Matthew 7) that many who believe themselves saved are woefully lost—and these are generally serious thinking people who are concerned with ideas and things like morality. Most people in this world are unthinking and frivolous.

A.W. Tozer died just over 50 years ago. He lived in a much different, and most here would argue, more moral and Christian America. Even so, Dr. Tozer believed 90% of CHURCH MEMBERS in his day were actually lost. Billy Graham has estimated that 85% of those who made professions of faith at his crusades were lost. Dr. W.A. Criswell, the prominent mid-century Southern Baptist, believed he would only see 25% of his church members in heaven. These are scary numbers to think about.

There is a huge problem in our land: the problem of false conversion. Men have no idea what the Bible really says about the way of salvation. They know what other men say. They know what their parents, pastor, or priest has said, but they don’t know what God has said. And they have so little concern with eternity they trust they have been taught God’s Word. But we are not to live that way. We must always compare what we have been taught with the Word of God to see that it is so, just as the Bereans.

There is no scarier passage in all of Scripture than Matthew 7:21-23.

“21 Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

I cannot imagine a more devastating plight than to stand before the Lord of Glory on that day and hear the four words “I never knew you.”