This is the story of a little boy who watches his father about to kill a chicken.
With an axe in his hand, the father cuts off the poor animal’s head before his son’s astonished eyes.
The hen’s head is gone, but it starts running and dancing around. The little boy cries out:
“Daddy, Daddy, look, the hen is dead, but it doesn’t even know it!”
In the churches that my wife and I visit, in France and elsewhere, I often wonder how many people in the audience are actually dancing, singing and raising their hands, without knowing that they are dead. Until we know Christ, we are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2 v 1).
I see a double tragedy in the Church today; the large number of people who think they are saved and yet are dead, and the large number of church leaders who have never thought of telling them.
I was recently preaching at a church service. Towards the end of the message, I invited those who had never given their lives to Jesus to do so. At that point, a man sitting in the middle of the congregation, his face very stern, said out loud: “Everyone here is already converted!”
Unfortunately, many people in our churches think like him.
But the reality is this; In our services, at our celebrations and in our youth events, there are many “chickens running around headless”.
Recently, on the terrace of a kebab shop on the Swiss border, three of us prayed with Philippe. He has been attending an evangelical church, has read the Bible but had never yet received Christ as his personal Saviour. At 11pm, as the big television screen was blasting out a football game, a 60-year-old man was repenting of his sins and finding Salvation.
Philippe was one of those who was dead and didn’t know it.
Timothée and Yukki Paton