THE LOST ARE FOUND

INTRODUCTION

-A little over a month ago we marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the most horrible terrorist attack on American soil. How frightening it was for those of us that were alive at that time to see the planes crash into the twin towers, and then see them collapse, trapping thousands inside.

~Hundreds of people went on a frenzied search for those lost in the rubble who might miraculously still be alive, although there was very little hope that there would be.

~Genelle Guzman McMillan was one of the blessed ones to have been found alive in that rubble. This is how one article relayed her ordeal—it said:

McMillan's head was pinned between two pieces of concrete, her legs sandwiched by pieces of a stairway. Her toes had gone numb hours ago. Her right hand was pinned under her leg. Only her left hand was free. For hours, she had reached upward with that free hand into the blackness and dust, pushing and twisting her fingers into the small spaces between steel and concrete. She listened, too. She could make out rescuers' voices, emergency sirens, even the beeping of backing-up trucks. She tried tapping. She tried calling out, but her voice was barely a whimper. And so she waited…and waited…and waited. 27 hours after the towers fell, two firefighters found her barely conscious but alive. Genelle has the distinction of being known as the last survivor pulled from the rubble that used to be the WTC.

----One who was lost had been found

-The frantic search for the lost on September 11, 2001, is a reminder to us that there are billions who are lost in the rubble of sin and death, and there is a God Who is on a frantic search for them to find them and to save them.

-But God does not work alone in this endeavor---He has a special tool that He is using in this search, and that tool is His church. He expects His church to have the same heart as He has for the lost, which would mean that as He looks for the lost and wayward, the doors to His church would be open for the pursuit and reception of the sinners for whom the Lord Jesus Christ died.

-I want to lead Harvest Baptist Church in a couple of directions. First, I want to open the doors of the church (metaphorically) to send you (the saints) out into the community to actively search for the lost and wayward just as God did for us. And then I want the lost to know that the doors to this church are always open for you to come in and find your peace and hope and joy in Jesus Christ.

~Hopefully, this will remind us of one of the main reasons why the church exists.

READ LUKE 15:1-10

I want to briefly look at 6 elements found in these parables before we apply them to our lives and church:

1) The Self-righteous

-Because of Jesus’ love, compassion and open acceptance, the sinful dregs of society felt comfortable hanging out with Him—in no way did He condone sinful behavior or lifestyles, but His demeanor was such that He was approachable. Sinners had a friend in Jesus.

-But the self-righteous religious folks had a fit about Jesus’ open association with sinners. V. 2 says that the religious leaders grumbled that He received sinners and ate with them. In essence, what they were saying to Jesus was:

“Jesus, You’re supposed to be this great rabbi, and here you are hanging out with sinful people. Don’t you know that they make you ritually unclean And don’t you know that you’re supposed to be putting all your energy teaching the religious elite? You’re supposed to minister to the middle-class who own a home, have 2.1 kids, 1.8 dogs, white picket fences, vote conservative kind of folks. How in the world can you hang out with THEM? Jesus, just stick to taking care of people just like us”

-That’s the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, but the sad thing is that all across America there are churches in name only that feel and act the same way—they don’t want to dirty themselves by reaching out to the people in the highways, hedges and waysides. These churches had closed their doors to sinners and wayward Christians a long time ago, and in their own sin God will close their doors permanently. Or, to use a metaphor from the Book of Revelation: God will snuff their lamp out.

-Harvest Baptist Church, don’t ever, ever, ever close your doors to anybody, but open your doors to everybody—do not ever be like the self-righteous religious hypocrites----that means if a drug addict is looking for Jesus you better believe he/she will find Jesus here…if an immoral lady of the night is looking for Jesus, you better believe she’ll find Him here because our doors are open to reach them because that’s who Jesus died for, people like us and people like them—He died for everybody

-If in your mindset you don’t want to dirty yourselves or this church with those kind of people then something needs to change: either you need a new mindset or you need a new church or you need a new pastor because as long as I’m around our doors are open----it was that self-righteous way of thinking that prompted Jesus to share these parables because He wanted to make clear God’s heart and purpose—so within the parables themselves He makes some important connections that we would do well to connect to our own ministry as a church.

2) The Lost

-In each of the two parables something went missing, and what I want us to see is that these things that went missing mattered greatly to the one from whom they went missing. The sheep matters so much to the shepherd that he leaves all the other sheep in the open country to scour the earth to find the one. The coin matters so much to the woman that she lights a lamp in her windowless house, does some spring cleaning in the house even when it’s not spring, turns the entire place upside down to find that one coin. WHY? Because what went missing mattered to them

-In the perfect meaning of the parable, the sheep and the coin represent lost humanity, but for our day and time and purpose they can also represent wayward Christians who have walked away from the Lord and the Church. And what is abundantly clear is that lost sinners and wayward Christians matter to God—to Him, they are extremely valuable.

-Now if you love someone, what is valuable in their sight you deem valuable in your own sight. I deem my family very valuable to me, so if you love me you need to love my family. Well, we can say we love God until we are blue in the face, but if it is the truth then wayward Christian and lost people, no matter how low they are in the societal scale, should be of great concern to us.

3) The Caregiver

-In the parables you have two people: a shepherd who takes care of the sheep and a woman who has charge over some coins, and they both represent the Lord in the parables. And there are some amazing things we learn about the Lord.

-First, we learn that for God no one ever goes unnoticed. I mean, you have 100 sheep, and 1 goes missing. From an outside perspective you would think that all the sheep look alike and if 1 goes missing how would you know in that sea of white in the middle of a field. But the shepherd knows because he knows each sheep closely. He knows their temperament, He knows their habits, He knows their names, and He knows what makes them unique from all the other sheep.

-In the busy-ness of our society it is easy for people to slip through the cracks, be pushed to the wayside, and to be overlooked. But that doesn’t happen to the Great Shepherd. He knows all people and He sees all people and He desires all people to come to Him in a close, intimate relationship.

-And then secondly, we learn that God’s compassion runs deep and is to be imitated. Frankly, many people if they lost 1 sheep or 1 coin might cut their losses and say, well at least I still have 99 sheep or I still have 9 coins. But that wasn’t good enough for the shepherd or the woman. Like I said before the one sheep mattered, the one coin mattered.

-So, the caregivers in the parables represent a supernatural love and compassion. But the illustrations Jesus used would have really cut to the heart of His 1st century Jewish listeners. At that time shepherds were considered lower-class, uneducated urchins of their day. And, unfortunately, in that day, women were at times treated as third-class citizens. So, when the Pharisees heard Him use shepherds and women as the caregivers, they would have been shocked because that was so beneath them.

~But it is as if Jesus is using that thought against them: If the shepherd and woman whom you look down your nose at have such care and compassion for the lost, how much more does the Father in Heaven. And, therefore, how much more care and compassion ought you to have for the lost.

~Praise God we have a caregiver Who does not overlook anybody but with compassion desires all be saved. Therefore we, the church, being His representative, ought to make sure that no one slips through the cracks but that the hope and joy and peace of the gospel message is offered to all.

4) The Search

-It says the shepherd continually searches for the sheep UNTIL HE FINDS IT; and the woman searches carefully for that lost coin UNTIL SHE FINDS IT. We are given a picture of someone who actively pursues after something with complete persistence and will not give up the search until that which was lost is found.

-If you have ever had a child get lost, you know the panic you feel at first and the passionate unending search you do to find the kid. That happened to us many years ago. When we were in Southaven, MS, there is this baseball park called Snowden Grove that had several different complexes, and each complex had several different fields. So, Kyle was playing baseball in Complex A on whatever field, and I was in the dugout as dugout dad and Trish was in the stands cheering him on. Kenzie was probably 2 or 3 at the time and would always be playing with some other kids right there by the field. Well, Trish turns to check on Kenzie and she isn’t there. So, she gets up and starts to look and can’t find her. She asks me where she is and I don’t know. Trish and a bunch of other parents are going all over the place trying to find this girl. Well, Trish gets a phone call from our sister-in-law who was over in Complex B watching her son/our nephew playing ball, and she says to Trish, “Did you know Kenzie was over here?” This little girl knew that her Gran-Gran and Grandaddy and Aunt and Uncle and cousins were over in Complex B, so she decided to go on a little stroll all by herself to go see them. You’re at that moment where you want to just hug the kid and strangle the kid all at once.

-Well just as we wouldn’t give up searching for a missing child, God doesn’t give up searching for the lost. He pursues them, pleads with them, woos them, and loves them to bring them back to Him. Sadly, most run away from His pursuit, but that does not deter God

-So, here’s the thing, if God doesn’t give up, church we don’t give up either. As long as there is a lost person on this planet who needs Jesus, or a wayward Christian who needs encouragement to come back, we continuously go after them until they are found.

5) The Find

-Not every unbeliever who is pursued comes to faith, and not every rebellious Christian returns to God. But there are many lost who are found.

-There comes a time when the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached so that the unbeliever knows that they have sinned against a Holy God incurring His eternal wrath against them, and the only way to get out of the path of God’s wrath is to trust that Jesus took that wrath in our place on the cross and He rose again the 3rd day to give us eternal life.

-And when that person so trusts in Christ, like the shepherd who takes the sheep and carries him on his shoulder back to the flock, so God carries us into His glorious kingdom and we are made an adopted member of His family.

-then when the happens, {last element}:

6) The Rejoicing

-The shepherd finds the sheep and the woman finds the coin and immediately they call up all their friends and tell them to come over for a party to celebrate. Now, that might seem a little strange: I mean if a friend calls up and excitedly tells you that he found his missing sheep so come on over for a BBQ to celebrate…

-But that is the point, we get so excited about so much unimportant stuff, but the really good things we just sort of ignore. Yes I got excited when the Packers win—but there are things out there that are more important than the Packers or college football or sports at all. The eternal souls of people are much more valuable than anything else in this universe, and if people can get excited about found sheep or a found coin, how much more exciting is it when a person is found.

-vv. 7, 10—heaven has a party—there is great rejoicing and I pray as a church we join heaven in that celebration by being the catalyst for lost being found.

CONCLUSION

-Two thousand years ago, Jesus carried a cross up a hill, where He hung on it to rescue people who were missing from His Father’s family. He flung His arms wide as if to say, “Come. The doors of heaven are open to you.”

-We as a church open our doors wide as well, telling lost people that here at Harvest Baptist Church you will find a Savior and will find rest for your souls. Our doors are open so the lost can be found. Our doors are open so that Christians that have strayed can find their way back to their God. And our doors are open so we the church can go out in hot pursuit of those who are missing, buried under the rubble of sin.

-If 9/11 reminds us of anything, it is that there is an enemy—one who terrorizes our soul and would like nothing better than to bring our lives tumbling down in utter ruin. But trapped in the rubble, there is Someone looking for us, and He is using His church as the search party to seek us out----let’s go out and join God in this quest.

-Jim Cymbala, pastor of Brooklyn Tabernacle, gives the miraculous story of God answering prayer and showing His power through the BT in his book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. Years ago, starting out a small congregation, they caught the vision of God wanting to find the lost. The book tells about some members who felt a burden to reach the male prostitute drag queen subculture there in NYC. Talk about a group that is looked down upon and most church people would run away from. But these church members, knowing the heart of God, would go out and feed these people and give them blankets and share the gospel and just be Jesus to these people. Nobody would think that such people would ever darken the door of a church building. But much to their surprise, one Sunday morning, 27 of them showed up at the church. The church greeted them with open arms, loved on them, and a large number of them were found that day as they gave their lives to Christ.

-A group of people that most people would shun found open doors to the church that led them to open doors into heaven. The lost were found that day.

-Harvest Baptist Church, will we so seek the lost like that as well? Will we seek out the people that the Father is seeking? Maybe you want to come to the altar today and pray that God would use you to find some lost folk.

-But, maybe there are some here who are lost, well now you’ve been found, come forward today and trust in Jesus…