Stop Sharing Sheep
Notes
Transcript
Stop Sharing Sheep
Luke 15:3-10
Series Slide
Good morning and welcome to worship on this, the first Sunday of Lent. If you have my devotional, To the Cross and Beyond, it is now time to start reading it if you are going to be on track to finish it on Holy Saturday. If you aren’t following along with mine, I hope you have some plan for Lent, some process that you will be following to grow in your faith and devotion during these weeks leading up to Easter.
Last week, we began a new sermon series, “And You will be by Witnesses” based on Acts 1:8 and the fact that God has called each of us to be His witnesses. Along with that series, we started a journey with memorizing scripture, and this month’s verse is Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
So, now we are going to take a moment to work on that verse together.
Acts 1:8 (1)
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Acts 1:8 (2)
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Acts 1:8 (3)
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Series Slide
That’s one way to begin memorizing scripture. Another way is to start reading and work toward reciting it daily. On day one, you read and recite it 7 times, then on day 2 it’s 6 times, then 5, and 4, and 3, and 2, and 1. Then you recite it once a day for a week, then you recite it once a week for the month. By that point, it will be embedded in your memory. You can actually use this method to memorize a verse a week and layer the verses through the weeks ahead. If you’re an overachiever, go for it. But for now, I want us to at least focus on a verse a month. Why? Lots of reasons, but one is that…
Joshua 1:8 tells us, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.”
Now, for those who missed last week, we touched on 4 points that will be the next 4 sermons. Today, we are looking at the fact that we have to stop sharing sheep and calling it church growth.
Sermon Slide
So, what is “Sharing Sheep?”
Bill and Mary have been at Main Street church for years, but recently the pastor has been getting a bit political. It seemed every sermon was dealing with politics and social justice issues… so Bill and Mary decide to go to First Church because they think the pastor just preaches the Bible and some of their friends go to church there.
At the same time, Amy and John have been attending First Church, but since their kids are getting into elementary school, they see that Main Street church has a better children’s program so they move over to Main Street Church.
Both Main Street and First Church celebrate the new members and call it church growth, all the while the Kingdom of God has not grown one bit… in fact, it has likely shrunk as fewer and fewer new people are attending either church.
That’s sharing sheep. Don’t get me wrong… there are valid reasons for people to move from one church to another. I welcome those of you who have joined us from other churches and denominations, and I want you to grow in your faith here and work with us to make new disciples and spread scriptural holiness across the land. But that isn’t kingdom growth.
And I’m not interested in growing my kingdom or First Methodist’s kingdom…. We must be about growing God’s kingdom.
That’s why we are taking these next weeks to focus on how it is that we can be His Witnesses. Because, when we are his witnesses… when we are leading others to Christ… when he are seeing baptisms and people coming to faith or being restored in their faith… that is when we are growing God’s Kingdom and celebrating with the angels in heaven.
So, with all that in mind, would you join me in prayer.
<Prayer>
Alexander the Great was considered one of the greatest military leaders and kings the world has ever known. Until the age of 16, he was a student of one of the greatest minds in ancient Greece, Aristotle. Alexander took the throne of Macedon in 336BC when he was only 20 years old, and by the time he was 30, he had amassed the largest empire the world had ever known. 332 BC, he became Pharoah of Egypt. Hieroglyphics found in the Temple at Luxor named him as Beloved of Ra, son of Amun, Alexander the ruler of rulers. By 330, he was ruler of Persia and set his eyes on India and attacked from the West in 326BC. He would spend three years defeating much of India, but in 324 he returned to Persia and died in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar at the age of 32 in 323 BC.
Why is all this history of Alexander important? Because his great Empire included the Holy Land and the Hellenistic Rule he established would alter the Jewish religious landscape for half a millennium. Upon Alexander’s death, the Ptolemy Empire ruled and carried on the work of Alexander. One of the important aspects of Alexander and the Ptolemy’s is that they allowed the regions they conquered to continue with their own religions and customs, but then infiltrated them with Greek culture, philosophy, and language. The result was what became known as the Hellenistic Jewish period. Again, why is this important? Because this gave rise to the Jewish sect called the Pharisees.
The Pharisees were trying to prevent the Hellenization of the Jewish teachings and help the people adhere to the Mosaic Law. The Maccabean Revolt was the result of this desire for religious righteousness. The Revolt started in 167 BC and led to the last period of Jewish Rule until the Roman Empire conquered the region in 63 BC.
Under Roman Rule, the Pharisees continued to try to lead the people toward religious righteousness according to the Mosaic Law. That, in and of itself, was a good thing. The problem was that they began to miss the purpose of the Law. They began to reinterpret the Law in ways that it wasn’t intended. For example, in 3 places in Exodus and Deuteronomy, there was a part of the Law that you should not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. Kinda a strange Law if you ask me. But when you look into the meaning, you realize that the Canaanites practiced a fertility ritual that involved this very practice. So, what the Law meant was, don’t participate in or do things that appear to be like the Canaanite practices. But, what did the Pharisees do with it? They built a “wall” or a “fence” around the Law so that you wouldn’t even get close to breaking the law… they outlawed the consumption of milk and meat in the same meal…. Then it became you can’t have dairy and meat in the same meal. You do know what that means, right? You can not eat a cheeseburger in Israel. You can’t even have ice cream for a dessert after dinner.
So, that is what Jesus was dealing with when he confronted the Pharisees. He constantly made fun of them for missing the point. In Matthew 23 he tells them… “You even tithe a tenth of your mint leaves but you neglect the more important parts of the law.”
That’s why we see Jesus eating with the Pharisees in Luke 14 and making such a big deal out of their law against healing on the Sabbath, and their constant jockeying for position at the head of the table, and the fact that the Great Banquet of heaven will include all those that have been rejected by the Pharisees.
Then we get to chapter 15 and we find Jesus hanging out with and eating with “sinners and tax collectors.” When he hears the Pharisees off to the side grumbling about his eating with these horrible people… sinners… tax collectors… these people who, in their mind, don’t deserve to even worship at the Temple…
You see, for these Pharisees, the “sinners” weren’t just those who broke the moral law, they included those who didn’t maintain the purity laws of the Pharisees. Therefore, if Jesus is eating with and hanging out with those that don’t maintain the purity laws that they had established, then he may be unclean too… at least in their eyes… So, they muttered against Jesus… they grumbled…
But then, Jesus tells a series of stories. 3 stories. Often, this chapter is called the “lost chapter” because it deals with the story of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. Now, here is the interesting thing about these stories. They seem to have the same point… that what was lost is found and the angels in heaven rejoice, but there are some caveats.
First of all, in all three stories, the ‘lost’ already belongs to the owner from the start. In other words, however the object was lost, it, they, still belonged to the owner.
Last week, we considered the fact that there are about 26,000 people here in Navarro County who either have no faith at all, or they believe in something other than Jesus Christ as their Lord. That means there are 26,000 people who are living a life outside the abundant life that Jesus offers… there are 26,000 people destined for an eternity separated from the God of grace and mercy… some might even call that an eternity of Hell.
Here is what we need to understand about those 26,000… they already belong to God. They are already the physical embodiment of the image of God. Our job isn’t to make them children of God… it isn’t to make them sheep of God’s fold… it isn’t to rescue them… our job is to return them to the God that created them in His image. They are simply lost…
Knowing that they are lost, we might ask, “How did they get ‘lost’?”
Well, one way was that it is just the nature of things. In the first story, the sheep got lost naturally.
The Sheep Got Lost Naturally
I think back to my youth and young adult years. There were seasons in my life where I simply wandered off… I walked away from my faith. I know some of you did the same thing.
And, we still see this today. However, the young today are wondering farther than prior generations. The rate of agnostic and atheist among the young adult generations has grown dramatically. A 2018 Barna Research study found that those of us in Gen X and older report about a 6% rate of atheism. However, 13% of Gen Z, those born between 1999 and 2015 claim to be Atheist and even more claim to be agnostic.
We can name a ton of reasons why this climb has been happening… For one thing, the Bible isn’t the only source for a version of truth anymore. Many of us are sitting on or holding a computer that has the ability of pulling up thousands of videos by supposed experts in any number of fields. Our youth are finding videos from people like Billy Carson, who claims to be an expert in religious documents… and he quotes documents like the Gospel of Barnabus to say that Jesus didn’t die… or that there was no Jesus… or the Gospel of the Wife of Jesus… to say that Jesus wasn’t God in the flesh.
They can find videos that tell them that the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Code of Hammurabi were around before the Old Testament and that people just copied these documents into the Jewish Torah. These “scholars” sound so convincing and authoritative… our young people are falling for these lies right and left. And yes, they are lies.
The Gospel of Barnabus and the Gospel of the Wife of Jesus have been discredited as forgeries from the 13-15thCentury. They were written on ancient Papyrus, but the only copies were written in Spanish and Italian and included aspects of Islam that didn’t even exist in the 1st Century.
A cursory comparison of the Enuma Elish and Genesis does yield some similarities, but there are stark and vast differences as well.
In the Enuma Elish, the gods got in a fight and the gods that died fell. Their dead bodies swirled around in space and the earth, the animals, and you and I are the result… in other words… You and I are the decayed matter of the dead gods… It also created a hierarchy where only the rulers are in the image of the gods, the rest of us are just trash. That is vastly different than the fact that you and I are created by a… ONE… loving and caring God who created us, male and female, in God’s image. You can study the writings and videos of other scholars like N.T. Wright or John Meade or Wesley Huff and hear the explanation of these differences. You and I don’t have to be PhD scholars like those guys, but we can point our young people to these experts as they spend time investigating their own faith. We can help them hear the truth in the midst of all these lies.
Yes, some of the 26,000 lost around us have simply gotten lost naturally.
But some of them have gotten lost by accident.
In the story of the lost coin, the woman accidentally lost the coin.
The Woman Accidentally Lost the Coin
Maybe this could be those that didn’t intend to leave their faith, but other things became more important… maybe a little neglect led to a time away from their church family, then a slip into some sin that drags them further away.
But, I think there is something else to notice in the woman and the lost coin. The coin she loses is called a Drachma, it was a common laborer's daily wage. She had 10 of these… and lost one. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that much money. I had a friend that once worked on the Tug boats in the gulf and he made $50 a day. If he had $500 in his pocket and misplaced a 50 dollar bill, he might be sad for a moment, but he wouldn’t fret too much… he wouldn’t waste a day looking for it since he had the other $450 and he would earn another $50 that day at work.
But this lady turns her house over as she looks for this coin. She spent costly oil lighting her lamp… she moved and removed her furniture, and swept her dirt floor… she spent the day looking for this one coin… she could have left the house and gone to her work, whatever it was… however she had earned the coins in the first place, and earned another coin…
But, she didn’t do that… she searched diligently until she found the coin…. Even though it wasn’t worth that much.
I remember hearing the phrase, “I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for him.” Meaning that whoever “he” is isn’t worth anything. There are certain people in society that don’t seem to have any value. Some think it might be the homeless… The drug addict… the foreigner… We don’t like to admit it, but we do place a value on others don’t we.
Well, here is the truth of this passage.
Everyone is worthy of God’s grace. Everyone you pass… the criminal… the drug addict, the illegal immigrant, the homeless… every one of them you pass by is made in the image of God… they already belong to God, they’ve just gotten lost and need a hand back.
A pastor friend of mine once told the story of a recovering addict that fell off the wagon. When he found out about it the man was somewhere on the streets in Austin. He told another friend about it in hopes of prayer, but the friend went to Austin and found the man. When my friend asked why, he said, “sometimes we fall in a pit and can’t find the way out… but when you’ve been there you know the way out. Sometimes, you have to crawl in the pit with them to help them find their way out.”
Even those who get lost accidentally deserve to have the grace and love of God poured upon them.
Finally we get to the parable of the lost son who got lost willingly.
The Prodigal Son got lost Willingly
We know the story… he took his inheritance, thumbed his nose at his dad, and went off to a foreign land where he wasted all he had in wild living. When a famine came, he had nothing and hired himself out slopping hogs. Keep in mind, this is in a Jewish context… being told for the Pharisees to hear… What the story is saying is that the son went to the land of the Gentiles… Jews didn’t have pigs… they are unclean, physically and ceremonially… no good Jew would be close to them… but this son ended up not only feeding them, but eating with them. When he comes to his senses and returns home, he shouldn’t even be allowed to be a servant in his father’s home. He has embarrassed his father, he has rejected his father, he has treated his father as though he were dead.
But what does the father do? He runs to him… he undignifies himself by running… he takes his pig slop smelling son into his arms… he puts a robe on him… he puts the family ring on his finger… he kills the fatted calf and throws a party for his son… for he was lost, but now he is found.
Sermon Slide
Friends, there are a lot of sheep in the pastures around town. I had the privilege of eating dinner at the Gideon Banquet on Thursday night. You know what I saw? I saw about 50 churches represented in that room…. Maybe more. We’ve got a lot of sheep pens in this town. Sometimes sheep wander from one pen or pasture to another… and that’s OK. But outside those sheep pens… outside each of our pastures…
There are lost sheep everywhere. We’ve got to stop being satisfied with sharing sheep between the pastures… we’ve got to find the lost sheep and bring them in.
“For, there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”
We need to start creating some parties in heaven… Amen!
