We are looking at Jesus' response to the mutterings of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. And we, it's important for us to remember as we look at the two parables today that this is kind of a continuation of what has already been said in chapter 14 that Jesus' teaching ministry continues what he had taught in chapter 14 needs to still ring in our ears about humility and the way we go to parties and such, the way we invite people on the fringe to our own parties, people who can't pay us back, not just our friends and this sort of stuff, that our life is more than networking and getting ahead and such. If you remember right before chapter 15, the very last part of what Jesus was teaching was that to be his disciple means you must hate father and mother and sister and brother and children, yes, even your own life. And Jesus was using hyperbole, he meant to suggest and teach, I must be number one in your life significantly, number one, so that by comparison the others might be considered hate. He wasn't calling us to hate. But he does say at the end of that teaching that he says in the same way if any of you does not give up anything he has, he cannot be my disciple and he goes on salt is good if it's salty but if it loses its taste, it's no good for anything, neither for the manure pile or for seasoning and such. And he finishes with these words, let him who has ears to hear, let him hear. Now it's important to remember that when Luke was writing this report, he was not saying okay, chapter 1, verse 1, and so on and so forth, the chapter in verse editions were hundreds of years later. So the last thing we hear Jesus say is let him who has ears to hear, and then Luke in his narrative says now the tax collectors and the sinners were coming to hear him. And it uses the exact same word. And so the idea is these are folks who hear when Jesus is saying and say I've counted the cost. I thought about it. Jesus is worth living for and these were dying for and they were coming to him. And this is what brings about the mutterings of well not so much this is what brings about the mutterings when Jesus receives these guys who hear this call and are responding to it. This is what makes the mutters that this guy receives sinners and eats with them. And so Jesus gives his response. As we look at it, there's some important things to keep in mind before we get to the proposition that's in your bulletin and in the outline and such. First of all, Jesus says in verse 3 that Luke tells us in verse 3 that Jesus told them this parable. And then we're told three stories, actually two illustrations in the the Greek would say which one of you having a hundred sheep. Translated a little different in the IV but the idea is all three of these aspects go together. The lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son, all go together. It's one parable. It's one teaching him. And even though we're looking at it over several weeks and we're not looking at the parable of the protocol today, we need to keep in mind that that's connected to it. And a lot of progression takes place between the parables and some of the main points will end up there but they go together and that's an important aspect for us to remember. Another thing I want to point out is just some of those aspects of progression we have a lost sheep, one out of a hundred. We have a lost coin, one out of ten. And then we have a lost son, one out of two. And again, as we look a little deeper, we may say two out of two. But there's a progression there. And it also it goes from ownership of coins and cattle or flocks, a sheep, to sons, to a deeper relationship. And there's reason for that progression as well. There is certain aspects of repentance that are hinted at here by what Jesus says, I say to you that there's more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. But in the parable, he'll begin to spell that out, what it means when the son comes to his senses and so on and so forth. So we'll look at these sorts of things. But this morning, as I've studied and prepared for this, first of all, I've read lots of books. I thought I'd recommend some to you. Philip Keller wrote a shepherd's look at Psalm 23. If you've never read it, it's a good read. It's kind of a classic lot of insights on shepherding and what it means that the Lord is our shepherd. If you've been around, you know that I was recommending for some reading Jacob and the Prodigal by Kenneth Bailey, another good book. And then he's written several books. Another one that Kenneth Bailey has written is The Cross and the Prodigal. And I recommend those to you. As I read these books, as I looked at commentaries, as I just studied the text and such, one of the things I'm convinced of is there's more there than I've seen. And there's more that I've seen that I can possibly say to you, but I've tried to distill things down. And this propositional sentence, so I've written, I've written it out for us. Lord willing, it'll help me stay on track on what to focus on. And I think it does distill what is in the text, what Jesus is getting across. So let me just read it to you. Value, seek, find, and restore repentant sinners in the love of Christ. Now the reason I worded it that way is I was taught in seminary to reduce your message down to one sentence and that there should be as few words as possible. And so I used as few words as possible. It really should be we must or we should all value, seek, find, and restore repentant sinners in the love of Christ. That that aspect of I left the you must out there because it can stand just by saying, hey, value and so on and so forth. But that's what's there. And that's what Jesus is trying to get across. You know, he hears the muttering of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. And it's as though he says to them, yes, you're right. I do receive sinners and eat with them. I'm glad to see them. In fact, I want you to know that I value them deeply. I rejoice when they turn to me and are saved. So you're right in your accusation. He'll redefine it and say, it's not that he receives sinners and eats with them and it's just this big party. He'll redefine it as I look for the lost. But he says you're right on that point. And it's critical to see that he also is talking about what it looks like in the covenant community. What does it look like among the people of God? You have the the Pharisees which were lay people but leaders among the Christians or among the the Jewish people of the day and the the scribes or the teachers of the law. Again, not priests, not elders, but very important people. And here they are muttering and Jesus is giving a word of correction to them and saying, look in the community of faith. When tax collectors and sinners repent, we receive them with joy and we restore them to the life of the church. And Lord willing, we'll see these things as we look at this text through this proposition this morning. And the first thing I want to say by way of the points under the proposition is in order to effectively seek and find the last sheep you must first value them.
I think the parables mean to teach that just from the very surface of them. You look for what's important to you. Anymore in our society, if you drop a penny or lose a penny, you don't think of a thing about it. In fact, there are some people that don't even want to bother with the change, you know, if it's not paper, if you're even using paper, you wouldn't look for it. But if you lose your keys on your way to work and you can't get to work all of a sudden, they become very valuable to you and well, you don't stop looking for them until you find them. And if we move it again into the personal range of people, when we love someone and they're lost, we start looking for them. And so Jesus gives us something of this and the parable. We'll start with the coin on purpose, but with the coin, a woman has lost, she has 10 coins and she's lost one. It's assumed that they're all about the same, a dragma, a day's wage. So figure out what your day's wage is. Let's for the sake of argument, say you make $100 a day. She's got $1,000 of total money and she's lost $100. She looks. There's value there. And she sweeps the house. She does what it takes to find the money because she's lost 10% of her value and she loves it. Now, when we think about the shepherd, in this day, shepherds did not have a good reputation while the Pharisees would have some sort of job like Paul, the apostle was a Pharisee and he was a tent maker. That's how he made his money. So Pharisees had a job. None of them would be a shepherd. The shepherds were the poorest of the poor. They were illiterate. They were uneducated. They were not respected as a people. And yet when Jesus uses them in this teaching, if we just limited to that, we miss too much. Thus we had in our service the Old Testament teaching. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want to. There's so much written in the scriptures in the Old Testament of which the Pharisees and teachers of the law are fully familiar with that the Lord is our shepherd, that he's the shepherd, that when he sends the prophets, both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, to say, woe to the leaders of the church. He says, woe to the shepherds of the church. You let my sheep go crazy and go astray and you haven't been seeking them. And God saying, I myself will go look for them in the prophecies of the coming of our Lord Jesus. I will raise up a righteous branch for David. In both Ezekiel and Jeremiah, this is mentioned. And thus our Lord Jesus would say, I am the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. And we say, the Lord is our righteousness. So Jesus talks this way. And the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, they should hear more than they see. They shouldn't just see poor and educated shepherd. They should hear the Lord is my shepherd. God values his sheep. God pronounces woe to those undershepherds that lose the sheep or squander the sheep or take advantage of the sheep. God promises to care for the sheep all the days of the lives of the sheep so that they will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. There's great value. Why does Jesus look for the loss? You see, values them. And that's great. Our Lord loves them. The Bible says we've been bought with a price. We have been purchased with the blood of Christ, precious, valuable. In fact, we might even say to the extent that we value something to that extent, we look, we search. Take just a minute to think both corporately as a body and then individually as a church. Today's a great day. We've heard two testimonies of teams that are searching, speaking, just making friends with a young boy who comes from a family that's committed to their atheism. It's just loving him and working as a team with other shepherds who who are also talking. A woman whose life is all messed up and goes from one bad situation to another. Loved, valued, taken care of. Not too long ago, we had a choral camp where we were looking for a lost sheep that's batting as beautiful. We encouraged the nursery workers, the children's church workers, the Sunday school teachers to show the children Jesus, to tell them about Jesus.
We hire a pastor to preach Christ, crucify. A lot of our budget goes to missions. Yeah, think about our vision statement. It's in your bulletin. If you want to look at it, it's on the cover. Inside cover, our vision is to glorify God and just skipping down to the end, reaching out to one another, our community and the world with the love of Christ, reaching out to one another. I just mentioned to various ministries within the church where we do that and we could include the life groups and shepherding ministry and such to our community. We've mentioned those sorts of things with the oil change. We could mention the manner or heartland of centerville, the retirement community that was prayed for earlier on the choral camp and going down to date and gospel mission. We're trying to do that. We're trying to look. 10% of our budget goes to world missions, at least a major part of that 10% of our budget. There's some local missions of church planting here where we're still pretty much in our community, but we're supporting people in what's called the 1040 window, right? The hardest place they have to teach English. They have to live outside the 1040 window and kind of commute in or telecommute into the window, but we're supporting people who do that. We support people in closed countries who find other ways to get in there to share the gospel. So let me ask you personally, do you value the lost? What are you doing? How are you involved in the life of lost people? A lot of ways to get involved. A lot of programs. That's a great way to start to connect with a bigger team and to share the gospel. Let's move on. Not only do you have to value the sheep so that you will effectively seek and look for them, but in order to find a lost sheep or coin, you must search in places where they're lost. I'm a simple man. What can I say? It's just if it's not on the surface, I may miss it, but there it is. They had to look where they were. Again, I think it's important the sheep is wandered off. Jesus uses that illustration because we'll sing it from time to time, prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. She'd have a way of wandering off. In fact, when this is kind of an insult to sinners, isn't it? They're like sheep. All we like, sheep have gone astray. It's what we're prone to do. She pernought the smartest animals in the world. They'll follow the pack without thinking, or they'll just kind of wander off on their own. And they'll start to, I mean, they'll eat ground down to nothing. They'll eat the grass vegetation nothing, and they'll eat their way to wherever so that they'll find themselves on some sharp cliff or crag where they're in great danger because they've just wandered off. And the shepherd has to go find the sheep outside the fold. By the way, we shouldn't think, okay, it's kind of like a communist thing. Well, why don't you care for the 99? You know, the Jesus and Jesus is here. I would understand there would be other shepherds. There would be pens to put the sheep there. It's not just the who cares about the 99 they're cared for, but the one is important. In fact, the security of the 99, if the shepherd says, well, I've got 99, what about who cares about the one? Well, then the 99, no, it's the group that's important, not me individually, but he values the individual. You're a sinner today? Are you a sinner? Here is a sinner? Hear that. He values the individual. He cares about you. And he goes to where you are. He goes out. He looks. He leaves the fold, and he begins to look. I think about what that looks like. And again, we've talked about some of the things we do, the oil changes here, the coral campus here, Dayton Gospel Mission. That's a step out that way. That's a good thing. The check teams going out and they're doing something kind of outside the box that way. And I think there's room for tons more. There's incredible ministries to the people work together as teams to reach prostitutes around the world trying to to save them from the sex slavery business and just from that kind of lifestyle. And it takes a team that way. It takes ways to keep safe. It takes a lot of involvement and safe houses and all sorts of stuff to break into that sort of situation. It takes team to find where the sinners are because he goes to where the sinners are and it takes wisdom to strategize. How am I going to do that? How am I going to go to where they are? How do I, how do I reach the lost? If I know where they are, if I know they're at this party, I'll go there. And Jesus did, right? I mean, Jesus said to Zacharias, the tax collector, Zacchaeus. Excuse me. Hey, I'm going to your house to eat today. He ate with Levi. He hung out at the at the well in Samaria where the woman would come and he would start up a conversation with her. And we look for those plays. We look for those places. How do we, how do we reach the lost? How do we do it? We just hang out in talk or shoot hoops or whatever. We find people on the path. I was thinking about this yesterday. When I'm walking, there's a little park by my house. And it's got a walking trail about a half a mile lap around it. And I'm walking and there's some people playing basketball. And I'm not, I have a bad back. I didn't do that. But I'm walking circles, walking two dogs. In fact, and there's this family and their husband, wife, and kid. And they they're stopped. And they're actually arguing. And I walk by and they, I greet the guy who I have face-to-face contact with. But then they're following behind me. And I can hear their arguing. And it's very disconcerting. And I'm thinking, so how do I reach these people? I didn't. I didn't start a conversation. I didn't butt in and say, hey, look, can I be a part of your argument? But,
but I think we have to find ways that on the highways and byways, on the on the bike trails and walking paths, on at the job, at the parties afterwards, or the dinner parties, or the family gatherings that we we look there for Lax. The woman is interesting. She's lost a coin. And where did she lose it? In the house. She lost it in the house. She, there's not a lot of windows. They don't have window panes. So there may be slits, there's a little bit of light coming in. But in mid-day in the desert, in a house out there, you light the lamp. And you sweep, maybe in mud floor, maybe a rock floor. It may take a little bit of work. But it's in the house. Progression, think about that. There's this, there's this lost sheep that's wandered away. And there's this lost coin that's lost in the house. And there's this son who wanders away and squanders his wealth in the pagan land and ends up feeding pigs. And there's this lost son who refuses to come into the party because he already is. He's still a part of the house. Can't help but wonder. I mean, that's why we should preach Christ in our nursery, in our children's church, in our Sunday school classes, from the pulp that in our life groups, we preach Christ and we find lost people right here. Some of the testimonies that that I'd love to have shared from during the services, some of our saints who came to Christ at 30 years old grew up in the church, thought they were Christians. And in their 30s, came to understand that they didn't know Christ at all.
So we look, we look, we look. Number three, when the lost are found, they are restored with joy.
We'll spend more time on this, but it's even in our text here. When the lost are found, they're restored with joy. There's restoration. We don't see it really with the coin so much. Just Jesus' commentary afterwards, but we do see it with the sheep. There's the restoration. The shepherd finds the sheep and puts the sheep on his shoulders. It's not like the window we have where it's a little lamb in the crook of the arm. No, it's a heavy sheep. It's a full-grown sheep and it's over. The belly of the sheep is on the guy's neck and he's got his feet in his hands and he carries it and he restores it to the fold. But with both stories, the text tells us in the same way, verses 7 and verse 10, in the same way, I tell you there's more joy in heaven over lost sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance. That's 7, verse 10 is similar to that. He's suggesting there should be restoration. What's he say in verses 6 and 9? In verse 6, the shepherd calls his friends and neighbors. Come and rejoice with me because I found my lost sheep. Come and rejoice with me. I found the lost coin. There's this community aspect and that's where the restoration takes place. Remember, Jesus is talking to the covenant community. There's all sorts of people. There's great crowds that have been listening and the sinners are hearing him and repenting and he's welcoming him and receiving them and that's what causes the murmur and when Jesus teaches, he's correcting the murmuring of his children and in all three stories, there is a celebration. Come and rejoice or the next story we'll see. Make Mary with me. That's the way it's supposed to be in the Christian community. There's restoration. The sinner is restored. There's some important things here. How do we know when the lost is found? Because with a coin and a sheep, that's pretty easy but with people, it's life's a little complicated, isn't it? I mean, just think of the next parable who's lost and found in that story. Well, it's interesting that what Jesus says is in the same way I tell you, there's more joy over a sinner who repents. In fact, in verses 7 and 10, the word repent or repentance is mentioned three times. I think we see it with the sheep this way. The sheep doesn't run away. The sheep hears the voice of the shepherd. The sheep's gone astray. The sheep's lost. The sheep hears the shepherd's voice and just sits there. The sheep contributes nothing to its elevation. It just sits there. But its repentance is it accepts the master on the master's terms. No struggling, no fighting, no running away. There's already a relationship. That's what repentance looks like there. We'll talk more about it in times to come. But that's it. I think there's a connection with repentance and joy. I'm sure of it in our personal lives that it happens. The timing of it is not always the exact same. Sometimes there's not a lot of joy coming up to repentance. There's sometimes there's not a lot of joy in saying, okay, here I am again, a stinking sinner. I can't believe I blew it again. And there's no joy there. But if repentance really is relational, we know the shepherd and we hear the shepherd's voice and we respond to them. There's joy. And it's just that way. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful but yet for those who have been trained by it afterward comes the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Hebrews 12-11. And there's joy on the other side of it. And there's joy in the community. I think about my conversion at 19. My families on all sorts of different places as far as spiritual where they are, spiritually where they are, and yet they are all rejoiced when I repented. And I think that's true when someone comes to know Christ. There's just such joy. There's certainly that way with the Father and with the angels in heaven. And what Jesus is saying is, this is the way it's supposed to be among my people. That's one last point. You have to know the love of Christ, to show the love of Christ. You have to know the love of Christ, to show the love of Christ. And I know about it. Know it. You can teach about the love of Christ and not know it. But when you know the love of Christ, you will show it. When you know the height and depth of length and breadth of the love of God, and are filled up with all the fullness of God, then I just know wonder that he does it immeasurably great beyond what we can think things through the church. It's just the way it happens. You know the love of Christ. You show the love of Christ. You see the greater we see as holiness, the greater we see the fact that he forgives our sins, whether tax collector centers type of sin or or Pharisee, teachers of the law kind to sin. When we see that he forgives us, when he loves us and he's tall together holy, and he delights in us and we're loved by him, our hearts are changed. And we love. How are you at loving? Maybe you need to spend some time being loved. I mean maybe you feel love. There's that. I love man. I'm not holding anything against anyone. If Christ is forgiving me, how could I possibly? And I love people. I love looking for the love. Praise God if that's where you are. If you say no, I don't love this person. I don't love this person. I'm annoyed that this person is even coming to church or using God in their language or something. Then maybe what we need is the love of God, the focus on the love of God at that point and to see how he's loved us so that we can show the love of God. I find this to be the hardest in the Christian life because in our flesh, in our on our own, we don't do this. As Christians, we understand that it's Christ's love, Christ's kingdom, and that's what we should live for. But when it comes to dealing with sinners or lost people or trying to correct those who are going astray and restore them to the faith, we often err on one side or the other. We're all either so soft that we never talk about sinners directly as Jesus did. Or if we decide we do need to talk about sin, we're so harsh that the person doesn't want to hear us because they they feel judged by us and well we've judged them. And yet Jesus is able to so lovingly say what the truth is and talk about sin and yet love the person. That's what he calls us to. We struggle with that. We're either too nice or too harsh. Often, I don't mean to say that that's everybody's problem, but that's certainly what I struggle with and I see that. And the answer is to know the love of Christ. I spread. Father, make us to be a people who know the love of Christ, who love the high standards that Jesus gives us in his word whether it's to not let adultery in our hearts or to love you more than mother, father, sister, brother, even our own lives, all that sort of stuff to hold to that and to pursue righteousness and holiness, but to love so well that when we're helping someone else in the same thing, we hold the high standards of our Lord and the incredible love of our Lord together. Thank you Lord Jesus, let you seek your last. Amen.