Bridge Builder: Lost People Matter To God

Opening illustration: Did you ever have a kid in your neighborhood that always hid so good nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Soon or later he would show up all-mad because we didn’t keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn’t playing the game the way it was supposed to be played. ‘There is hiding and then there is finding,’ we would say. And he would say, ‘It is hide and seek, not hide and give up.’

And we would all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn’t play with him anymore if he couldn’t get it straight. And who needed him anyhow. And things like that. Hide and seek and yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He is probably still going to do the same thing and make everyone mad. God is unlike that. When God seeks us, will He truly find us? Or are we just going to keep playing Hide and Seek with Him?

Introduction: One Bible commentator said sheep tend to nibble themselves lost – they graze from one tuft of grass to the next all day long with their heads down and, when they look up, they don’t know where they are or how they got there, and they certainly don’t know how to get back to the flock. It’s not that they’re particularly stubborn or rebellious or stupid, it’s simply their nature: Sheep stray and, when they do, they get lost. The Bible says, “All we like sheep have gone astray and turned everyone …” (Isaiah 53:6).

How does God pursue to seek the lost?

1. A Father’s COMPASSION for the LOST (v. 4a)

Rev. Branch of a church on the East coast said he felt that the Spirit was leading him to go down that street. He didn’t want to go. He wasn’t interested in what the folks down there had to offer. Plus, he was concerned about what his parishioners would think if he was seen on that street. He put up quite a fight, but, in the end, he went where the Spirit led him.

He said he drove his truck down the street and parked by the curb and asked the Lord, “Now what?” He sat there for a while, and slowly, people started coming up to the window and talking to him. They all knew who he was. They wondered what he was doing there. When they were convinced he wasn’t there to condemn them or cause trouble, they began opening up to him.

He came back to his church the next Sunday morning and told his congregation what he’d done. At first, they were pretty upset. “Why are you wasting your time associating with those people?” they wanted to know. He said, “Because some of those people are your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters, your aunts and uncles.” He wasn’t kidding, and they knew it.

In time, it transformed the church. They started taking food to the neighborhood one day a week and feeding all who’d come a delicious hot meal. As they ate together, people started talking to each other. But, before long, reconciliation began to take place, relationships were restored, and lost souls were brought back into the community of faith.

The Parable of the Lost Sheep speaks to us best when we hear it in the context of the MIAs – those individuals and families we know and love with whom we have, for whatever reason, become disconnected.

Illustration: William Barclay tells a little story in his layman’s commentary that I just love. It’s a little dated – set, I’d say it’s set in the 19th Century, but it makes a good point. A young doctor was backpacking across Europe. He’d traveled for several weeks – much of the way by foot – so that, from his outward appearances, he looked like a bum. He hadn’t shaved, his hair was long and matted, his clothes were dirty and worn. For some reason – I forget the circumstances – he became seriously ill. A couple of strangers found him lying half-conscious by the side of the road and got him to a hospital. The attending physicians examined him and shook their heads. One looked at the other and whispered in Latin, “What a worthless bloke. We’d do him a favor to let him die.” The young doctor lying on the table understood every word. He looked up and replied, also in Latin, “Never call a man worthless for whom Christ has died.”

So often, we give up too easily. When others fall through the cracks, we’re quick to write them off: “You can’t win ’em all.” Not so in the Kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is like a good shepherd who has a flock of a hundred sheep who, losing just one of them, will leave the others and go after the one that is lost until he finds it and brings it back to the fold.