A college student stayed out one Saturday night past curfew, and was hurrying back to the dorm. He decided to take a shortcut through the local cemetery. It was a dark, cloudy, gloomy, moonless night. As he felt his way from gravestone to gravestone, cemetery plot to cemetery plot, he suddenly fell into a recently dug, open grave. He immediately clambered to his feet and yelled for help, but he was too far from the street and the hour was too late. He tried to climb out, but the sides were too steep and slippery. Finally he decided to curl up in the corner of the grave and go to sleep until morning, when help surely would arrive.

He had just drifted off to sleep when a second student took the same shortcut through the cemetery, and fell into the same open grave. As he yelled for help and tried to climb out, the noise awakened the first young man. From the corner of the grave on that dark, cloudy, gloomy, moonless night, the first fellow said to the second, "You can't get out of here." But he did.

Tragically, the story makes a Scriptural point: we live in a spiritual graveyard. One third of our world has never heard the gospel, or even the syllables "Jesus Christ." One third has never responded to what truth they have received. And much of the last third is composed of cultural Christians, people who are not Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish, so they must be "Christians" if they are Americans or moral people.

As we have seen in our Friday series, much of our society does not believe that it needs what we offer. Only two percent of Americans are afraid they might go to hell. "Truth" is personal and subjective; Christianity is "your" truth but that doesn't make it "my" truth. As we continue this Lenten season, how do we help our friends trust the Christ we love? Do we let them try to climb out of their spiritual graves, or curl up in the corner? Or do we go and get them out?