36. Who is Jesus?
May 15th, 2011
I lost my Coin, and my Sheep
Jesus finished His dinner with the religious people and went on His way. As He traveled crowds of people gathered around Him to hear Him speak and so Jesus starts telling them what it means to follow Him. He says you have to hate your father and mother, your children, your spouse, even your own life. What He means is that we have to love everything in our lives, including ourselves less than we love Him. He is not trying to decrease the love we have for our family but to increase our love for Him. Why is that important? Jesus is preparing us for to take up the mission of sharing His love with the world. Jesus mission is not going to be easy, so if we are going to follow Him, we are going to have to love Him a lot. When you love someone you care about what they care about. The more you love them the more you care.
Erica used to be a news reporter and anchor. In my life I never really watched the news. I just didn’t really care to watch a thirty minute news cast everyday as it didn’t really interest me. When I met her I started watching the news. I didn’t suddenly desire to see the news everynight, I cared about it because I love her and she cares about it. When you love someone the things that are important to them become important to you.
Open your Bibles or your bible apps to Luke 15:1. Jesus is showing us the importance of loving Him the most so that we can care about the things that He cares about. Jesus teaches us how to follow Him so that we can carry out His mission of loving and saving the lost people of the world. Jesus calls us to love Him the most, so that we can share in His joy when the lost are found. In this chapter Jesus tells us three parables about the joy of finding something that has been lost.
Lk 15:1 Now the tax collectors and “sinners” were all gathering around to hear him.
Lk 15:2 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
Crowds of people start gathering around Jesus. The religious guys look at this crowd and they don’t see people, they see sinners. Lost and hurting people are coming to hear Jesus speak and all the religious leaders can see is that the people are tax collectors and sinners. Theses respectable ‘godly leaders’ would never associate with such dirty, ungodly, sinful people. Birds of feather flock together, so hanging out with sinners makes you look like a sinner. These religious guys would certainly never stoop so low as to eat with such filth. Jesus eats with sinners, talks with sinners, He even allows sinners to be His disciples. The religious leaders see this as a sign of moral failure on Jesus part.
The religious leaders actually start griping about how Jesus spends time with sinners. These sinful people are coming to Jesus to learn about how to live a better life and the religious people complain? This is like getting upset when a doctor heals one of his patients. They don’t like that Jesus, the popular teacher hangs out with the bad boys, the rough crowd, the people that smoke and have tattoos and vote democrat. They start judging Jesus by the company He keeps; He even let’s tax collectors follow Him.
Tax collectors were not the most popular guys. They were Jews who sold out their own people to make money. Tax collectors were in charge of gathering taxes for a region. A percentage of what they gather goes to support the evil empire of the Romans. The rest goes right into their own pockets. So these guys were professional thieves and extortionists. These were the guys on top of the pyramid scheme that took advantage of everyone else. They squeezed every penny they could out of their own countrymen so that the evil empire that ruled them could have more money. They were helping fund tyranny. So they were not popular. They were viewed as traitors and they were treated the way we might treat a terrorists. If you looked at the responses to the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead you’ll find a lot of Christians who said things like: praise God, now he’s in hell. Christians were happy about the fact that a person died without knowing Jesus.
This is how the Jews would have treated the tax collectors. If a tax collector died everyone else would celebrate. The Jews hated tax collectors so much so that they were not even allowed to tithe at the synagogue. You know you are hated when you are so bad a church won’t even take your money.
The sad thing is: not that much has changed. Most people, if they saw their pastor walking into a bar would freak out. Many of them wouldn’t ask why he was there or what he was doing they would just go ballistic. A pastor should go into a place like that with people like them. If they saw a well known Christian leader having dinner with Lady Ga-Ga a lot people would go ga-ga about it.
There was a professor at Ozark who when driving on campus would not pick up a girl who was walking outside even in the winter. He wanted to protect his integrity so he wouldn’t ever be alone in a car with a girl who was not his wife. I understand his reasoning and the importance of it, but how sad is it that Christian people can be so judgmental that we have to pass on opportunities to do what Jesus would have done just to keep the religious people from going all batty on us?
Jesus hangs out with sinners, He eats with sinners, because He wants to save sinners. The best way to reach the lost is to spend time with them. Jesus meets with sinners, He doesn’t just demand that they come to Him, He goes to them. He seeks out the lost. Jesus invests in sinners to save them from their sin.
Lk 15:3 Then Jesus told them this parable: Lk 15:4 “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? Lk 15:5 And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders Lk 15:6 and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ Lk 15:7 I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.
Shepherding is an illustration that would be easy for Jesus audience to understand. They are an agricultural economy and they had sheep everywhere. These are small, close-knit towns of people who would often help and support each other. So they all had a pretty good idea of how shepherding worked. Anyone who has been around sheep knows that sheep get lost rather easily. They are not the smartest of creatures and while they are grazing they just wander around without any real rhyme or reason. It would not be uncommon for a sheep to stray so far from the herd that they became lost without even noticing. They start out eating with all the others and by the time the wandering sheep looks up it is all alone. They aren’t clever enough to find their way back so they will typically just lie down and whine until someone finds them.
So we have this shepherd who is in charge of 100 sheep. This is an average flock, nothing really special. He’s a middle class guy he makes enough to get by but he’s not exactly Bill Gates. Sheep were not only a valuable commodity there were like the family pet. Each one had a name and the shepherd knew all their different personalities. He took care of them every day, he watched over them, guided them, played with them. Without their shepherd the sheep were hopeless. The shepherd would raise his sheep almost like children. So when one goes missing it is a big deal.
One of his sheep gets lost and this shepherd goes to look for it. The shepherd did not abandon his other sheep. He would leave them with helpers to watch over them while he devoted himself to seeking out the lost and bringing them home. Often times the shepherd would gather a little search party to play a little Where’s in the World is Carmen Santiago with the sheep. So even if the people in Jesus audience were not shepherds odds are they would have been a part of one of these search parties at some point. When this shepherd found his lost sheep he would put it on his shoulders and carry it back to safety. This was a time of great joy for the shepherd as what was lost had been found.
Throughout the OT sheep were used as a symbol of God’s people. It’s not a very flattering comparison as sheep are dumb, helpless, and hopeless; which is exactly what we would be without God. So naturally God being a shepherd is going to look for His people when they get lost. There is a great excitement that comes from finding something you lost. I remember when I was waiting tables in college I lost one of my tip books. I had several hundred dollars in my wallet and had only misplaced like $15 but I searched all over the restaurant for it and when I found it I was more excited about the $15 I found than the hundreds I hadn’t lost. God values all of His people, we are all precious to Him, and yet still there is a great sense of joy and excitement in the heart of God when a ‘lost soul’ is found.
This parable focuses on what was lost. A sheep cut off from all the others, alienated and alone. Much like the tax collectors would have been. What happens: the sheep was lost, the shepherd goes and finds it, and the shepherd carries it back to the flock, and he rejoices with his friends. They have a party and lamb chops for dinner. Kidding.
God and all of heaven rejoice when one lost person comes back to the kingdom of God. Think about it: our work in carrying out the mission of Jesus can bring joy to the heart of God. We can cause God to rejoice when we play a part in bringing His lost sheep back home. This is the true reason we should share our faith. Telling people about the love of God is not an obligation we should dutifully carry out, it is a wonderful opportunity for us to bring a smile to the face of our father in heaven.
When you love someone you desire to make them happy. Jesus tells us what we can do to make God happy. If you want to cause Him to rejoice: seek the lost and love them back to the kingdom of God.
Lk 15:8 “Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? Lk 15:9 And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ Lk 15:10 In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
The first parable focuses on what was lost. This parable is focused on the search. The coin this woman lost is a drachma. It was a day’s wage. Since women did not have their own jobs losing one of her coins would be a big problem. No more new shoes or cute pursues for this lady. So the coin is very valuable to her.
This lady doesn’t want to wait until morning. She searches with a strong sense of urgency. See the floors at this time were made of dirt, so the longer something was lost the more likely it was to stay that way. The same is true with people, the further they get from God living in their sin and running from Him in their lives the less likely it is they will ever return to Him.
Time is important, the call is urgent. A significant commodity, and important resource, a valuable person has been lost. We need to stop what we are doing and invest our time and energy into finding them or what may have just been misplaced will become totally lost. We live in a world that is lost, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. God’s desire is for all people to make their way back to His kingdom.
So often we get this idea that God is this great big task master piling to-do lists of righteousness on our lives. The reality is that God is a shepherd, and we are His sheep. God cares so deeply for His sheep that His heart breaks for the lost. He pursues them, desires them, and loves them. God wants all people to be saved. He desires that all His lost children would return home. As Christians we are a part of the community of God. So when one of His precious people goes missing God calls us to join His search party. He asks us to come with Him on His mission of seeking and saving the lost. God allows us to be a part of the search so that we can share in the joy of those who are found.
After everything Jesus has done for us, in giving His life so that we could have life, in saving us from our sin and ourselves what could we possible offer Him in return? Partnership. We can makes God smile, we can start a party in heaven every time we go out and bring someone who doesn’t know Jesus into a relationship with Him. You realize how significant that is? There is something that we can do to show the all powerful, creator, king, God of the universe that we love Him. There is something we can do to make Him smile: seek the lost, care for the hurting, feed the hungry, and look after the sick. For when a lost person becomes a found person all of heaven rejoices; and we can give them something to celebrate when we take up the mission of Jesus and we bring people to Him.
