Let's turn in our Bible to Luke chapter 15. Luke chapter 15, we'll be looking at the first 10 verses. Verses and stories, parables that are very familiar to us. But I trust that the Lord has something to say to us again this morning. Luke chapter 15. If you remember, Jesus has been... a quite extended dialogue with Pharisees, religious teachers and leaders, and rebuking them and rebuking the crowds. Jesus has been just calling people to the seriousness of discipleship and who will be invited to taste the heavenly banquet. He's challenging the false assumptions of the Jewish leaders, and we're going to find him doing that again in our text this morning. Luke chapter 15. Let's read the first 10 verses. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to him, and the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, This man receives sinners and eats with them. So he told them this parable, What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors saying to them, Rejoice with me, for I found my sheep that was lost. Just so I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who need no repentance. Or what woman having 10 silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost. just so I tell you there's joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Let's pray a moment. Lord, this morning we need to hear your voice. We are, Lord, maybe tired, distracted, maybe just spiritually weary, but Lord Jesus, thank you that you came for people like us, and so give us ears to hear this morning, in Jesus' name, amen. The title of my message is Loving the Lost. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria passed away, and as was the custom for Habsburg kings, he was to be buried in the imperial crypt that is underneath the church in Capuchin, Austria. The emperor was carried in his royal casket, and his parade came to the doors of the cloister of the convent there in Capuchin. And the Grand Chamberlain, the king's representative, went to those big massive doors and took a silver cane and knocked three times on the door. From the other side of the massive door, the porter asked, who is there? The Grand Chamberlain replied, I am Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovania, Galicia, Archduke of Austria, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Krakow, Duke of Lorraine, and on and on, listing all of his royal titles and his estates. After he was finished, the porter refused to open the door and said, I don't know you. And so the Grand Chamberlain knocked on the door once again, and once again the porter says, who is there? And the Chamberlain replied, I am Franz Joseph, His Majesty, the Emperor, and the King. And the porter again said, I don't know you. And so the Chamberlain knocked on the door for the third time, and the man asked again, who is there? And this time the Grand Chamberlain simply said, I am France, a poor mortal and a sinner in need of mercy. And the friar said, then you may come in. And the doors were opened. the traditional funeral ceremony for the Habsburg kings. It's called the knocking ceremony. It was choreographed, intended to teach a message that only sinners are allowed into the kingdom of God. That titles and earthly fame, earthly privileges, whatever, mean nothing when it comes to the kingdom of God. It teaches us, it's just a good insight again for us today, of what we have here in Luke 15. That the kingdom of God doesn't work like the kingdoms of this world work. That the only people who are allowed into the great doors of the kingdom of heaven are people who don't deserve to be there. People who have no rights, no claims. Only bad people get into heaven. That is not what our world assumes. It's often not what the church assumes, but it's the absolute truth. I remember hearing a sermon by Rico Teiss and he said, I came to Christ because I am a bad man. And I hope that's your testimony, too. The gospel is a shocking reversal of what we would have expected to be true. And we have that reversal in our text here this morning. We have surprises again. As we've been studying the gospel of Luke, Jesus is waging war of sorts with the religious leaders. primarily waging war with are the false assumptions of the Jewish society. Assumptions about the character of God, assumptions about what true religion looks like, assumptions about how to get righteousness, how to be right with God, who gets into the kingdom. All of these things were simply assumed and they were falsely assumed in the Jewish community. And so Jesus is hammering at the false assumptions of God's people. Chapter 14 ends with Jesus with that familiar refrain when He's completed a teaching saying, He who has ears to hear, let him hear. And what Jesus means by that is He recognizes there are some who do not have ears to hear. There are some who would be standing right in front of Jesus and they're as deaf as a stone. His words simply don't penetrate. They can't receive the truth. They can't imagine that Jesus is actually who he seems to be saying that he is. It doesn't make sense to them. They can't really believe that the way of discipleship is as demanding and as urgent as Jesus says it is. So when Jesus says, so therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple, people would just shake their heads and, that just doesn't seem plausible. Renounce everything for this man, this Galilean, and so they walk away. But some people by the grace of God did have ears to hear. And they received and they considered what He said. And what we find in Luke 15 is there's this surprise concerning who listens and who doesn't listen. Who has ears and who doesn't? You would expect the religious people, the church people, particularly the leaders who know their Bible you would expect them to be seriously considering what Jesus has to say. But we find, actually, that they're exactly the ones who can't hear. And the people you would not expect to receive Jesus' words, the tax collectors, the sinners, the notoriously evil, sinful, broken people, they're the ones that are gathering around. And so, just two points this morning. First, the gospel paradox, and then gospel parables. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled. And so here you have the scene. People are gathering around Jesus. The sinners are gathering. The religious people are grumbling. The sinners are drawing near to Jesus. fascinates me to see how sinners found Jesus to be attractive. I mean, true sinners, not, we use the term, but tax collectors and prostitutes and the drunks, the people whose lives were a mess, they're coming to Jesus. They seem drawn to him. Now, why would that be? It can't be because they sensed that Jesus shared their perspective on life or shared their values. He clearly didn't. It can't be because Jesus didn't make a big deal about religion. Jesus made a big deal about things like sin and judgment and hell. He talked about those things all the time. It can't be because Jesus preached sort of a cheap grace, just do your best, God understands, don't really worry about how to gain favor with God. All the things that people today often assume is necessary if you're going to establish rapport with really sinful people, Jesus doesn't do any of them. and yet they are irresistibly drawn to him. Jesus says hard things like there's a narrow way that leads to heaven, and the way is hard. And unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, you're never gonna enter the kingdom of God. Not things that you would expect to be attractive to sinners. So why are they so drawn to him? Well, I think the answer is because he seemed to care about them. They are gathering for precisely the same reason that the Pharisees are grumbling. Jesus seems to actually care about these people. He does not mind being with them. He receives them. He eats with them. That's a big deal. To eat with someone, to have that sort of intimate fellowship, is almost to condone their behavior. You see, they're drawn to Jesus because he doesn't treat them the way that the religious people of the day would, particularly the leaders. And so they would be gathering around, showing up at the most awkward moments. Remember when Jesus is having a meal at a Pharisee's house, and this woman comes, a known sinner, and she starts weeping, sobbing over Jesus' feet, and then she loosens her hair and begins wiping his feet? It was incredibly awkward. It was embarrassing. Commentators suggest that a woman's hair should never be seen in public, that it would not have been more inappropriate if she had removed her robe. And yet here she is, at the feet of Jesus, letting down her hair in this public disgrace, this display, and Jesus receives it. And everyone around the table, the lights go on. Jesus cannot be a prophet. And people who hear the story, the tax collectors and the sinners, sense there's something profoundly different about this man, this teacher. And so you have those who are gathering and those who are grumbling. This man receives sinners and eats with them. In one nice tight sentence, the Pharisees have captured unknowingly, unwittingly, the essence of the gospel. Yes, this man eats with sinners. He receives sinners and eats with them. So why are they grumbling? Well, just try to put yourself in their shoes. They come from a long tradition. Rooted in the Old Testament, the Old Testament has so many laws about ceremonial cleanliness. There are things that you need to avoid if you're gonna be worshiping in the house of God. You need to avoid dead bodies. You need to avoid various things that just make you unclean, ceremonially unclean. Well, the rabbis took hold of that concept, and over the years, they'd added all sorts of rules and guidelines which were intended to help God's people remain ceremonial clean. The problem was that more and more the rules came to be, avoid Gentiles, avoid unclean people. And so these Pharisees, these rabbis, just assume that if you're serious about holiness, you stay away from people who are serious about sin. You don't go to those parts of town. You don't engage, you don't hang with or in any way condone unclean people. Now that's not that strange or foreign to us. I think we can understand it. I think if you entered some sort of questionable bar or some establishment, and it's dark inside, and you go in there, and you find me at the back table playing poker with some clearly unsavory characters, I don't think your first thought would be, That's really cool, the pastor's hanging with sinners and just hanging out with some lost sheep. I think your first thought would be, I hope he doesn't see me, and your second thought would be, what is he doing here? What's a pastor doing playing poker in the back room with unsavory characters? What about if you saw me downtown someplace having a meal with the local head of Planned Parenthood? How can pastor engage in polite conversation with such evil? So we have a sense of this. Jesus is doing that sort of thing. And that's why the Pharisees are grumbling. They don't know how to make sense of this. What's going on here? And so Jesus tells his gospel parables. Three stories. We're going to look at two this morning. But all with the same basic message as Jesus is trying to manifest the heart of the Father. And so you have the situation. In each parable, Jesus presents something that is very valuable has been lost. A sheep, a coin, a son. Illustrations that would be very easily for people to identify with. A shepherd is so common. Many of the people listening maybe had been shepherds in their past, or maybe some still were. But there are people who take care of the sheep out there in the hills. And they would be responsible for the sheep they were caring for, and they would have to count them. They don't have branding. They would gather them together in the evenings, and if there were supposed to be 100, the man counts, and there's only 99. He counts again, and there's still only 99, and he realizes that one is lost. And a woman had 10 coins, and one of them is lost. Some commentators suggest this was possibly, if not likely, a reference to a woman's wedding necklace, where she would receive this on her wedding day, the necklace made of 10 coins. This would be a family heirloom. And so, ladies, you can imagine, if you had something like that, and one of the coins is missing, it's not just the value of the coin itself, it's all that it represents and what it's a part of. And so she eagerly gets to work looking for it. You see, these people have a deep sense of the lostness of the valued item. The shepherd realizes that this lost sheep is not just missing from the fold, but is in grave danger. There are wild animals about and a sheep is no match for them. The sheep will probably not survive the night if he does not find it. The lady also has a deep sense of the value of what is lost and so she immediately gets to work to find it. I think one of the applications here, we need to have, as a church, a functioning theology of lostness. A cognizance, a deep cognizance that people without Jesus are in immediate danger. They're in critical danger. If they do not come to faith in Christ, they will be eternally lost. A few years ago, I read a book by Tom Rainer, The Surprising Insights of the Unchurched. And he was looking at churches that are effective in evangelism compared to churches that aren't as effective in evangelism. And one of the things that differentiated the churches that are effective in evangelism, where people are coming to faith, is those churches and the pastors that lead them have a functioning theology of lostness. Rainer points out that any Christian will say people need to be saved. Every Christian believes that. But Rainer says the thing that differentiates the churches that are actually growing evangelistically is they are convinced that if people are not saved, they will go to hell. that people are in a lost condition. And one of the things that's happening in the church is we're losing a cognizance, a realization of the lostness of people. I think it's one of the things that's happening with secularization, where ideas like original sin and divine judgment and wrath and to hell are losing their plausibility. So when we look at people who seem like they're living fairly good lives, we're not sure exactly how to approach them with the gospel. It doesn't seem like they really need anything. Their marriages are doing okay. They're really a success at their work. And even when we meet people whose lives are clearly falling apart, we're not quite sure how to come at it. And I think it's because we're losing the categories of original sin and total depravity. Which puts the gospel, you see, in clear relief. That is what the gospel came to resolve. Rico Thais was speaking of this, and he said when he first heard, he of course was an unbeliever, but he said when he first heard about original sin and total depravity, he said, I was so relieved. Finally, someone could explain me to myself. I knew I was that bad, but no one seemed to believe me. And so Rico is under the conviction of the Holy Spirit and he's just trying to explain to people how wicked he feels. And people say, Rico, you're a good guy. You're not a bad guy. But when he heard about the doctrine of original sin and total depravity and then realized that that's what the gospel was for, the pieces fell into place. And so we need to remember that people are lost. By birth, people are born in sin. By birth, people are born under judgment of God. The cemeteries that you drive by are not there by accident. They're there by the sovereign design of God as a continual reminder to this world that we live under condemnation of sin. We do. And that if people are not reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, they will spend an eternity in hell. That's what Jesus, one of the things he's trying to communicate. When Jesus was walking through this world, he saw lost people. He didn't see good people and really failing people. He just saw lost people. No matter if they're prostitutes or priests, it doesn't matter. All needing to be found. And that's why He came, to seek and save the lost. And so there's a search. The situation is lostness. There's a search. Which man of you, having lost one, does not immediately leave the 99 and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? So which one of you is just going to shrug your shoulders and say, well, I guess we lost one tonight, right? And go to bed. No real shepherd would do that. No woman would say, oh, that's too bad. We lost one of the coins on the family heirloom. Oh, well, it's the way it is. You go looking for it. You look diligently. You look urgently. In fact, the lostness, you see, drives the search. It makes people, the sense of the value of what's been lost, it makes them give up their time, give up their sleep, give up their resources, their reputation, whatever they are intent to do this thing, find what's been lost. And they keep looking until they find it. Both parables have the same phrase, until they find it. And both parables end with rejoicing, if you notice that, the celebration When he comes home, verse six, he calls together his friends and neighbors saying, rejoice with me, I found my sheep that was lost. So just so, just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance. Now of course, there are no righteous people who need no repentance, but Jesus is making a point here, isn't he? He's saying, you folks assume that God is pleased with you, the good people, the people who've got your things in order, who are doing it right. I want you to know that God's great joy is for sinners like tax collectors and prostitutes who repent. There's joy in heaven when a sinner is found. Now why does Jesus want us to know this? Two reasons, we'll wrap up. One, he wants us to know the character of God. You see, one of the great sins that people commit is that we begin to make God in our image and we think that God is like us. And the Jews were doing the same thing. And the Jews assume that his heart is for the good people, and that God is disgusted with evil people. He sort of tries to avoid the failing people, the sinning people. In fact, they believe that God has great joy in judging and condemning the Gentiles. That was a conviction. But Jesus, you see, is countering that assumption. that God's heart is for the lost. He desires their salvation. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He wants them to sense the passion that God has for lost people being found, lost people of every stripe, people who wear their pants too low, who've tattooed their entire body, who enjoy living on the federal dole, and for people who, on the other side, are very successful, who dress very nice, who are externally moral but utterly lost. God does not desire that they be lost, but that they be found. And so Jesus wants us to see the character of the heart of God. God has a passion to see people redeemed, to see people found. But I think the most fundamental reason Jesus is telling the story is it's a rebuke. to the false assumptions that he found. These stories are often preached as evangelistic sermons, and they clearly have an evangelistic sense to them, but Jesus is telling the story primarily to rebuke, to call these Jews to repent of their wicked attitudes, their false assumptions, and their lack of concern for lost people. You see, these folks don't care that people are lost. It just seems right to them that Gentiles ought to be lost and wicked people like tax collectors should go to hell. That seems fitting. It seems appropriate. And so Jesus, you see, is rebuking them. for their lack of concern. They would avoid sinners in public and ridicule them in private. They made it very clear, these people, that even when they engaged in business or in some sort of relationship with a Gentile, that this was a spiritually unclean person, someone who would have a lot of cleaning up to do before they would be allowed in the circle of the righteous. Friends, we have to realize that the world assumes that we think like the Jews thought. The world assumes that we think we're better than them. They absolutely assume that. They assume that we believe that God is willing to love them and that we are willing to receive them when and if they clean up their act. So when they stop doing the drugs, when they stop listening to the wrong music, when they get a job, when they get their life in order, then they can be like us. And when they get their kids to behave, you see, that's what they assume we think. The question is, is that what we actually do think? Is that what we actually do think? Tax collectors and prostitutes walked into our building this morning The lady with too tight of a skirt and too much makeup and too messy of a life How comfortable do you think she would probably feel? Do you think that she would sense that we're able to see the way that Jesus sees that we are that we would be willing to see a lost sheep, a lost coin, someone made in the image of God who just needs to be found and brought home? Or would she sense that she's got work to do before she could really be a part of a righteous group of people like us? I think we just need to let Jesus rebuke us a bit. because there are times where we can easily fall into and just be blind to the way we present ourselves, blind to how we come off, blind to our lack of concern, blind to, you know, we're just busy doing our life, we're busy keeping it together and we're not really thinking about The fact that the people we work with, the people we shop with, the people we live with are utterly, absolutely lost and will go to hell unless they come to Jesus Christ. Friends, we have work to do. I have work to do. This is something that we've been praying about this year particularly, but this has got to be something that we don't just make a sort of a topic of prayer, but something that we hear our Lord Jesus talk to us. It's not okay. It's not okay for us to live in a lost world and have little or no concern about that lost world. It's not okay. So how do we change? How do we grow? Well, it happens. by receiving the gospel truth on the first part, and that is to, Sunday after Sunday, come as people who know that they are lost or were lost in the fullest sense of the word and have no right to be here, but it is the grace of God alone that allows us, sinners, all of us, to come. There's something incredibly freeing about the gospel because it reveals us, it exposes us. We're not better, we're not different. put us in the right place at the right time, and we will do the most wicked things. But Jesus Christ has sought us out, and we come this morning to Lord's Supper. It's just a great reminder that we are so wicked that the Son of God had to die for us, and we are so loved that he was willing to do so. Let the gospel break through our failure, our lack of concern, our lack of love, our self-righteousness. Let the gospel break through that in your own life this morning as you just think about how this truth impacts you and your life. And then, in light of the gospel and in the power of the gospel, that we say, Lord, give us a heart like the heart of God. Give us a heart that cares for lost people. Give us a heart that rejoices. in a sinner coming to repentance in Jesus Christ. Lord, give us the heart of your father. If we pray prayers like that, prayers that according to his will, Jesus promises that he'll answer. Let's pray together. Lord God in heaven, I thank you that this morning you admonish and rebuke us even. Lord, we have busy lives and we have cares of our own. And yet, Lord, so often we have little cares for this thing that grips your heart, Father. You have a great passion that the lost be found. And so, Lord, I pray that you would reorient our lives according to your priorities. I pray, Lord, that you would give us courage to speak I pray, Lord, that we would take the step, invite someone to church, invite someone to our small group, invite someone into our home, into our lives, that we might be a bridge that Jesus would walk over and enter their life and bring them home. So Lord, we need your help. We come to the table this morning confessing that too often we are like the Jews you were talking to. And so we come this morning as poor sinners who need mercy, who need grace. And we thank you that you're willing to meet us. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.