A Welcome Mat for Wanderers

Just don't misunderstand, Jesus is not sanitizing them.

He's putting out the welcome mat, not so that they can influence him, but so that he can influence them. And in the mind of Jesus, they're all sinners. They're all wandering. Which is why he's going to tell this, this parable.

They're all lost, no matter what they thought of themselves, no matter what they called themselves, no matter what others called them. Jesus knew who they were. Jesus' earthly ministry had a similar theme when it came to his interactions with others. He constantly showed grace to the humble and lowly, and he pronounced judgment on the lofty and proud. The religious leaders in Jesus' day looked down on others, but Jesus saw them for who they were. Those that the religious leaders despised, Jesus invited to repentance and a relationship with him.

And the good news is that he still does. Welcome to Wisdom for the Heart. Today, Stephen begins a series from Luke 15 called, Lost and Found.

This message is called, A Welcome Mat for Wanderers. More than likely you've spent some time hunting for something you've lost. It could be your car keys. Last hour, a lady came up and asked me if I knew she'd lost her car keys this morning, had to take an Uber to get here.

And I said, I didn't know that, but I'll tell the second service all about it. I thought that was a tremendous commitment to do that, right? That was wonderful. Maybe you've looked for that TV remote or maybe some heirloom that you've lost, misplaced. And maybe you have gotten old enough to where you've had that experience of looking for your eyeglasses only to find that you're wearing them.

It's not a happy moment, is it? Well, if you're a parent of a little one, you've probably experienced the sheer panic of suddenly losing sight of your child at some store, grocery store or the mall. And your heart races as you look for them. You told them not to wander away from the cart. You told them not to leave or disappear and there they went and you didn't see it happen. At every aisle you cross over looking for them, your heart races even more until you see them. There they are in the toy aisle, just as happy as can be. You have that sudden mixture of emotions, joy and murder just sort of mixed together. You don't know whether to punish them or hug them.

You probably do both. I read recently of a little church on the edge of a small town. The church was about to put on their annual Easter production. Only this year they were pretty excited because they had added two special stars to the show, the production, to sheep. They were kept out in a pen behind the little church in the backyard. About an hour before the program was to begin, the sheep somehow got out of the pen and they were seen running away. The author wrote, I don't know why maybe it was stage fright, you know, who knows, but off they ran toward town.

The play's director, Sandy Musman, along with her two young children ran after them. They spotted one of them running to a backyard where a woman was sitting out there in a lawn chair and as they raced past her after the runaway sheep, the woman hollered, did I see what I thought I saw? Sandy hollered, yeah, sheep escaped from the church, which raised some questions, but eventually the church's pastor joined in the search.

Everybody in town knew him. And when they asked him what he was looking for, he'd say, a lost sheep and they'd all hang their heads. And he'd say, no, no, no, a real one.

I'm looking for a real one. Well, eventually they tracked down one of the sheep near the community college. They never found the other one, but the program had to go on and it seemed perfectly fitting because the opening act was entitled the lost sheep. Well, that happens to be the title of one of the most famous parables ever delivered by the Lord. If you have a copy of the New Testament with you, we're going through the gospel by Luke and we're at chapter 15 now. Chapter 15, the content of chapter 15 is probably some of the most well-known content in all the Bible. Jesus is about to deliver three parables of losing something valuable, a sheep, a coin, a son.

In fact, the word lost is going to show up eight times in this chapter. Jesus is going to deliver parables about lost and found. By the way, the word parable means to place alongside.

In other words, what Jesus will do is he often does is tell an earthly story, but he places alongside it an eternal principle. Now, before we get into this first parable, Luke sets the stage by telling us there's some drama going on as it were backstage, so to speak. He writes here in verse 1, now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to him.

Isn't that a precious statement? They're all drawing near to him. All the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled saying, this man receives sinners and eats with them. The Pharisees, as you may know, were the religious leaders of the day. Scribes were the Jewish attorneys.

They were experts in interpreting Mosaic law. They're upset here because Jesus is receiving sinners. The verb for receiving means welcoming and the tense is present, meaning he's continually welcoming them. This is sort of his pattern.

This is what he does. He even eats meals with them regularly. He's putting out a welcome mat for wanderers like tax collectors and sinners. That's great news, by the way, because if he's doing that to them, that means he'll do it for you and me.

We can come to him as well. Now, the religious leaders have already expressed their frustration with the Lord for eating with tax collectors and sinners back in Luke's gospel, chapter 5. It won't be but a few chapters ahead in Luke chapter 19 where they're going to complain again because Jesus leaves or eats and then leaves the house of a notorious tax collector named Zacchaeus. So they're grumbling and Jesus answers their objections.

We'll get to it eventually in chapter 19 where he says this. He says, I have come. This is why I've come. I have come to seek and to save those who are lost. That's why I've come.

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever admitted to Jesus that you're lost? You're wandering.

You don't know which way to go. So you cannot be saved by Jesus Christ until you've admitted you're a lost sinner in need of salvation. I've met a lot of people over my years of ministry in this town who aren't saved because they will not admit they're sinners. We'll get along just fine until they hear enough of the gospel. They hear me telling them they're lost.

Then that becomes offensive. Like the Pharisees and the scribes here, they had no trouble with tax collectors being considered sinners. They need saving. They're in deep trouble with God no doubt. They inflated the tax rates. They skimmed off the top and lived affluent lives all at the expense of making their own people poor.

You can imagine how utterly despised they were. Now by the way, don't miss the fact that Jesus doesn't argue with the fact that they're sinners. Jesus never defends their extortion. He isn't downplaying in any way shape or form their sin. He's not accommodating their evil.

He's going to call them out of that world. He's got the welcome mat out here and he's about to place this alongside this earthly story, this eternal principle that no one is beyond the reach of God. If you thought back in the first century, there's somebody beyond the reach of God, it would be a tax collector. No one is beyond the grace of God.

That means you and me. Well this infuriates the Pharisees, of course, because they've been teaching the people. Let me quote from a first century rabbinical teaching. There is joy before God when sinners perish from the world. They believe God withdrew from sinners. Here's Jesus welcoming sinners.

So Jesus is obviously not related to God in any way shape or form. He's welcoming them. But just don't misunderstand, Jesus is not sanitizing them.

He's putting out the welcome mat, not so that they can influence him, but so that he can influence them. And in the mind of Jesus, they're all sinners. They're all wandering.

Which is why he's going to tell this parable. They're all lost, no matter what they thought of themselves. No matter what they called themselves.

No matter what others called them. Jesus knew who they were. Reminds me of two brothers well known in their town for their crooked business dealings, their underworld connections. Then the younger brother died, somewhat unexpectedly, and the older brother wanted to give him a funeral fit for a king.

He called the funeral director and made the most expensive accommodations arrangements possible. Then he called the town's most prominent minister and made him an offer he thought the minister wouldn't refuse. He offered the pastor $100,000 and he said to him, I'll give you $100,000 so you can put that new roof on your church I've heard you need.

But there's this catch. I want you to deliver my younger brother's eulogy and in that eulogy I want you to refer to him as a saint. The minister paused but then agreed. Funeral day approached. The whole town showed up wondering what the minister could possibly say about this notorious criminal. The pastor got up and began by saying, the man you see in the coffin before us was a liar, a thief, a reprobate, and a deceiver. He destroyed the fortunes of countless people in this city.

Some of you are here today. This man did every dirty, rotten thing you can think of. He was a vile man. But compared to his older brother, he was a saint.

I'd like to use that one day. I don't know if I ever will be able to. Let me tell you, beloved, it doesn't matter what's in your eulogy, doesn't matter what some minister calls you. I've heard some people sainted at funerals who were not saints.

It doesn't matter what they call you or think of you. Jesus knows everything about you. Let me tell you, the only person, since he does, who has any shred of hope before God is the person who recognizes at some point in their lives that they are lost.

They are sinful. They are in need of being found by the shepherd. Now, that's the eternal principle alongside this earthly story. Let's listen as Jesus delivers the parable. Go to verse 4. What man of you, Jesus says to all of them, 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. Now, they all immediately got the urgency of this story. No shepherd would say, well, you know, you win some, you lose some, we're fine.

They've got ninety-nine. No shepherd would say that. The shepherds, certainly in Jesus' day, lived difficult lives. They risked their lives often in their rugged existence. Pasture land was scarce in that world.

The narrow central plateau was only a few miles wide. It ran down the steep cliffs. Sheep often wandered. A hundred sheep was relatively a large flock. It might have even been a community flock. There seems to be every implication more than one shepherd is involved, even though only one is highlighted. At night, the sheep would be brought together in some kind of crude outdoor enclosure, typically made of rocks simply piled on top of each other to create these rather crude walls. The shepherds would guide the sheep through an opening. There's no door, just an opening. In fact, the shepherd was the door. Jesus will use that analogy later on. And they will come through one by one and they will be counted. They would also pass under the shepherd's rod as he counts them.

They would call it passing under his rod. The shepherd would use his rod to sort of part the wool if he felt that there were some bruises or scrapes or signs of skin disease or parasites. Sheep's heavy coat of wool had the ability to hide problems, defects, diseases. So it was important for the shepherd to examine them if he sensed there was something wrong.

That's interesting. I've read that even today at sheep shows where they compete, the wool of sheep can be expertly clipped and shaped to make the sheep appear heavier, stronger, larger. So the judge has a small wand about the size of a rod. And like that shepherd's rod, the judge will part the wool to get a more realistic viewpoint.

We use that phrase, by the way, to this day of trying to pull the wool over someone's eyes. This comes from the world of shepherding. So the shepherd uses his rod to find ways to detect need for care, but also to count. And here in this parable, he counts. He's missing one. He's only counted 99. Well, Jesus, if you notice, says here that he left the 99 in the open country. That means he would have left them with another shepherd. If he hadn't, by daybreak, he'd be missing all 100.

So off he goes. He's going to find this wandering sheep. I have read in my study that these shepherds were experts at tracking missing sheep. They could follow hoof prints of their sheep for miles over the hills. It wasn't unusual, in fact, for a shepherd to have to do this all in a day's work. The important thing here is the commitment of the shepherd to care for the sheep. See, sheep, I've also learned, don't have the instinctive ability to find their way back if they get lost.

Timothy Laniac, who we've had speak here, wrote in his wonderful journal of experiences as he traveled with Bedouin shepherds for a year working on his doctorate in the Middle East. He writes, even the hardy mountain breed with which I worked was susceptible to pneumonia, pasturella, hypothermia in the winter, scab and scrapy in the summer. They ignorantly push their heads through fences and get cut. They try to climb trees to pick at foliage and get their legs caught. They fall down embankments, get bitten by snakes and stung by wasps.

They gorge themselves on sour leaves and swell up like balloons. They starve, freeze, fall ill, but, get this, every affliction they face is countered by a good shepherd. In other words, you better be following the right shepherd. You know, the average person out there on the street will tell me about their good doctor, I got a good doctor, or a good prescription, or, you know, a good diet.

I don't really want to hear about that, but I'm going to tell them about their good diet. You need to know who my doctor is. Do you know who your shepherd is? Who are you following? Who's influencing you? Who do you like?

Who do you listen to? You might be lost today and the kind of shepherd you need is the one here in Luke 15. In fact, we're told here in verse 4 that he's going to go after the one that is lost until he finds it by the way. To the mind of the religious leaders as they hear this idea, they had no concept theologically of God being anything other than a God that welcomes repentant sinners. They had no concept theologically of God searching for a lost sinner.

That was mind-boggling to them. That's why it's such an incredible revelation where Jesus says, I came to seek and save the lost. You want to hear a little deeper theological truth alongside this rather earthly story, and it's this. If you are saved today, it is not because you found him. It is because he found you.

He was searching for you. And notice what the shepherd does here in verse 5. And when he says he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders rejoicing. Doesn't necessarily mean the sheep can't walk. The analogy of the parable would be simply to suggest to us that when the shepherd takes you home, which will be heaven, it isn't going to be by your strength, but his.

It isn't going to be by the strength of your two feet, but his. He will carry you home. So Jesus is effectively fulfilling the promise King David prayed way back in Psalm 28 when David prayed, Oh Lord, save your people and be their shepherd and carry them forever. When does Jesus become your shepherd? When he has become your savior. And it becomes your savior when you admit you need saving, humbling in that. You admit your loss to trust him, to pay for your sins, to call on the Lord.

And the promise of scripture says, whoever calls upon the Lord, the name of the Lord shall be saved. And when that happens, you're safely on his shoulders. He's going to carry you home. Now when that happens, that is when he finds the sheep safely.

Now on his shoulders, there's a party, a celebration that begins, which is rather interesting to me. Verse six says notice there. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors saying to them, rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost. Just so I tell you there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents and over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance. Look down at verse 10, the same idea again. Just so I tell you there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Jesus is actually moving beyond his parable here to deliver new revelation. He says twice, I tell you, he says, I tell you, let me tell you something you don't know.

It's as if he pulls back the curtain. We're given a peek into heaven. There is rejoicing in heaven that is launched at the conversion of every sinner. In the second parable, we'll get to Lord willing next Lord's day. I want to spend a little more time on what this says about heaven. There's evidently a little communication system going on we're not always aware of.

I want us to think about it. But how does Jesus know this? How does he know what they're doing in heaven when a sinner is converted? It could only be true if he indeed fulfills in his incarnation the promise of what is said of him in John chapter three and that is he is the one who came down out of heaven. He's seen it.

This is the principle of pre-existence. This joyful celebration begins when the sinner is saved and someone who is lost is found. Are you that wandering sheep today?

Then you qualify. You qualify to claim him, to be found by him as your shepherd. David Roper who writes for the Daily Bread, you may be familiar with that little devotional, wrote about one particular woman named Edith. He actually met her one day and then wrote about her testimony. She told him that she wasn't interested in religion, wasn't interested in God, but sensed one weekend hopelessness, helplessness, discontent and decided that she would go to a church, the nearest one to her apartment that Sunday morning. When she arrived and settled into her pew, eventually the pastor got up and read the text for the day and the text was Luke 15 verses one and two. He got up and read and it was his custom to read from the King James Version. He read verses one and two. He got to the end of verse two and read what it said and it said this, this man receiveth sinners and Edith with them. But here's the way Edith heard it. This man receiveth sinners and Edith with them.

She sat upright in her pew. He's talking about me. You got to write your name in there.

It has to become personal. It isn't just that Jesus died on a cross, but that he died for you. It isn't that he died for the sins of the whole world, 1 John 2, but he died for your sins. It isn't just that he's a good shepherd, but that he's your shepherd. Edith told David that it was at that moment that the Lord began to work in her the truth of the gospel that she was that lost sheep, that sinner.

She asked Jesus to become her shepherd. That was Stephen Davey and a message he called, A Welcome Mat for Wanderers. This is lesson one in a six-part series called, Lost and Found.

We'll bring you the remainder of this series in the days ahead. Wisdom for the Heart is a production of Wisdom International. You can learn more about our ministry at wisdomonline.org. If you have a question or if there's a way we can help you personally, our phone number is 866-48-BIBLE. Please be sure and join us again next time right here on Wisdom for the Heart. We'll see you next time.