Sermon Tone Analysis

Good morning.

We have just come through our message series called, Soul Activity, where we spent 5 weeks examining the Greatest Commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength in specific detail.

As we allow God to align our lives to His truth, and as we love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we are going to be compelled to action, because a love like God’s cannot sit still and it cannot remain quiet.

And perhaps the most important way that we are compelled by God is to love what Jesus loves, and to rejoice in what He rejoices in.

If we love what He loves, we will care about what He cares about, and we will seek after what He seeks after, and so on.

Jesus loves people.

And unfortunately, most people do not love Jesus.

And those that do, or those who are open to investigating and learning about Jesus are often ostracized and marginalized by the world.

Jesus came to reach the outcasts, the marginalized, the oppressed, the dismissed, the abused, the poor, the widow, and the orphan.

And that’s the message series we are beginning today, Outcasts.

For the next 5 weeks, we will look through the book of Luke to see just who Jesus went to, who He ate with, and the obstacles that He overcame to seek and save the lost.

We just learned what it means to love God with our everything, and now we will learn what second Greatest Commandment means, that is, “to love our neighbor as ourselves.”

Lets pray.

Please open your Bibles to , and we are going to read three parables of Jesus and look at them briefly this morning.

Some theologians and biblical historians have nicknamed this section as, The Gospel of the Outcasts because a large portion of are about Jesus’ compassion and action concerning the social outcasts of His day.

As our Outcasts series progresses, we will look at specific people, but for today, we will take a 30,000 foot view so that the overall context can be established for the series as a whole.

Here is one of the main obstacles that Jesus had to overcome.

You’ll notice that verse 1 says that that tax collectors and sinners were drawn to Jesus.

You’ll also notice that the text does not record Jesus resisting their presence and/or company.

Tax collectors were among the marginalized and ostracized in Jesus’ day because their work was considered dishonest or immoral.

The reason tax collectors are nicknamed “sinners” in this section is not because Luke, the author, was designating them as such, but this was how the Pharisees referred to them.

And you can see in verse 2 how the Pharisees complained and grumbled about Jesus’ association with such people.

Obstacle 1:

Religion

Religion essentially means “to do with great fervor”

When you do something “religiously” you are doing it with passion and conviction.

That’s not a bad thing.

But religion divorced from faith is toxic.

Faith is our complete and total trust in Jesus to do for us, in us, and through us what we cannot do ourselves.

So religion, when it is an honest outflowing of our faith is a good thing.

But when religion is disconnected from faith, it becomes an unforgiving ritual.

Religion is humanity’s attempt to get to God on his/her own.

And have you noticed that there are two I’s in religion?

I can do it

I can’t do it (this needs to be a certain graphic, which we will make together on Wednesday)

Either way, faith is nowhere to be seen, and to be honest, neither is Jesus.

The Pharisees had so strived to perfect their religion that they didn’t live by faith and so its no wonder that they didn’t recognize Jesus as Messiah because they weren’t looking for Him in the first place.

And so, we see here, and we will see again, how religion separated from faith was a constant obstacle to Jesus’ ministry, and He was constantly being interrupted by the religious leaders of the day, and being asked religious gotcha questions, so that the religious wizards-of-smart of the day might somehow be able to religiously disqualify Jesus.

Their efforts didn’t work, and we are about to see why.

But right here, I want all of us to ask ourselves this question:

Does my personal religion get in the way of me sharing my faith with the lost?

Is there something about your religiosity that dismisses people because they don’t measure up to your standard of righteousness?

More often than not, that will be a challenge for us today, so we need to examine ourselves right now.

Now, how does Jesus overcome the obstacle of religion?

And, for us today, we can look at this as a blueprint for overcoming the religious spirit that might rise up within ourselves.

Let’s continue in .

This would have been a very common situation in Jesus’ day. 100 sheep was the average size for a flock, and the “open country” would have been a relatively safe area.

Every night, the shepherd would take a count of the sheep.

In this case, one was missing, and so the shepherd leaves the 99 to find the missing 1.

Toilet paper roll in the toilet illustration

I would just take the loss, but not the shepherd.

For the shepherd, no losses are acceptable.

Because once a life is lost, you can’t go to the store and buy another 12 pack of double-sized rolls that are so good even bears want some.

No, when a life is lost, it is lost.

The only time a lost life can be found is during its time on earth.

So the shepherd leaves the 99 at night to find the lost 1.

Because if that 1 is lost at that moment, it won’t be able to be found again.

What kind of shepherd are you?

Are you like me and my toilet paper?

When God prompts you to reach out to someone do you obey?

Do you reason with God and figure that, “oh well, someone else will get to them eventually.”

Or, after a long day of tending sheep, you finally finish your count, and you’re ready to go to sleep, but God wants you to stay up, go back out, and reach the missing 1, will you do it?

These coins are most likely drachmas, which were common currency of the day.

The coins in question may have been part of the woman’s headdress, as some head coverings were adorned with coins in that day.

Perhaps more likely, the ten coins were all she had in terms of money, and therefore to lose 1/10th of everything is a pretty big deal.

The woman would light a lamp, as her home was likely poorly lit with few windows, and she would sweep her dirt floor in the hopes that she could identify the coin by the sound of its metal clinking about with other objects.

Here again, if you’re like me, if you drop a penny somewhere, you’re not wasting time to look for it.

Its virtually worthless, and you can just find another one that someone else dropped sometime.

But for the woman, she didn’t have 99 more just it.

She had 9 more, and even so, this 1 was important and valuable to her.

This coin, while it may have looked insignificant on the outside, and while it may have looked like just another coin to everyone else, was so uniquely valuable to the woman that she told her neighbors and had a dinner party to celebrate the fact that she had found this one lost coin.

Question to consider:

Do I see the lost in my city like they are just one penny among a bunch of pennies?

A bunch of pennies makes a dollar, a bunch of sinners makes the lost?

Or do I see the lost as individual, exponentially valuable creations of God, who were lost to sin and who God wants me to reach out to with the message of His love and grace?

Do I see the lost as unique and significant, or as just another in a long line of others?

And here we have the very famous Prodigal Son parable.

In the time, a father would divide his estate among his sons, giving his firstborn son a double-portion, this means that, according to tradition, the older son would receive two-thirds, and the younger would receive on-third.

With that said, however, the Bible doesn’t specify how the property was divided, but certainly the older brother knew what his portion would be upon his father’s death.

So the younger son takes his inheritance and wastes it on temporary fun.

A famine hits, and all of sudden, he can’t find work to earn more money, and there is barely any crops being grown, let alone food for sale.

In that day, he would have resorted to eating what were called, “pods,” which were carob seeds, a commonly used pig food.

The younger son had fallen so low and had become so insignificant that “no one gave him anything” - which tells us that he was totally neglected by society.

When he came to his senses, we read of his initial repentance.

While his physical motivation to return home was hunger, he really longed to be with his father.

And he knew that, according to tradition, he could not come back as a son, he had no right to do so after squandering his inheritance, so he prepared to come to his father as a hired hand and maybe he might get hired to do work on what could have been his land.

The Expositor’s Bible Commentary explains:

21–24 The son’s speech was never completed (v.

21).

Instead the father more than reversed the unspoken part about becoming a “hired man” (v.

19).

The robe, ring, and sandals (v.

22) signified more than sonship (Jeremiah Parables of Jesus, p. 130); the robe was a ceremonial one such as a guest of honor would be given, the ring signified authority, and the sandals were those only a free man would wear.

Marshall (Gospel of Luke, p. 610) doubts Manson’s assertion that the robe was “a symbol of the New Age.”

The calf was apparently being “fattened” for some special occasion (v.

23); people in first-century Palestine did not regularly eat meat.

Note the parallel between “dead” and “alive” and “lost” and “found” (v.

24)—terms that also apply to one’s state before and after conversion to Christ (Eph 2:1–5).

As in the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, it was time to “celebrate.”

But the older son was jealous.

He listed all the things he had done that were “righteous” and certainly did not want to share the best foods with his sinful brother.

Certainly a spirit of self-righteous religiosity.