A Greek philosopher once walked the streets of Athens in broad daylight, holding a lantern. When asked why he had a lantern in broad daylight, he answered, "I am looking for an honest man." He was making the point that honest men were rather rare, and worth searching for. Honesty is a virtue, but a rare one.

About 300 years later, Jesus walked in Palestine, and instead of looking for honest men, he looked for sinners. In Matthew 9:13, Jesus said, "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." And in Luke 19:10 he said, "The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."

And the disciples said to him, "Wake up, Jesus, and smell the coffee. There are lost people all around you. You don’t have to seek for them. They are swarming around you." And Jesus replied, "Maybe I need a lantern. I need to seek those who are lost."

Well, no, Jesus didn’t really need a lantern, and he didn’t need coffee – but he did come to seek the lost. What did he mean by that? When he was literally surrounded by lost people, why did he seek the lost? – And how did he go about it?

Well, we don’t know everything that Jesus did, but we do have in the Bible four descriptions of what he did: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They say that he went around from town to town, healing the sick and teaching the people. In those days before TV, radio and newspapers, traveling teachers were the main form of entertainment. Anybody could go to a town, announce a public speech, and people would show up. They didn’t have time clocks to punch or appointments to keep – they could just go when there was something going on, which wasn’t very often.

So Jesus comes into town and his disciples spread the word: Jesus of Nazareth is going to speak at 3 o’clock, and he can heal the sick, so if you have any sick people, bring them along. And so they came, and they were healed, and Jesus taught the people. And that’s how Jesus went about seeking the lost. He was looking for people who needed help, and he helped them, and he taught them. He was looking for people who were cut off from God, and he helped re-connect them.

Jesus’ message was simple: The kingdom of God is near, so repent, and believe it. He didn’t prescribe heaps of sacrifices or lots of rituals. All he said was to repent. Turn to God, and that is all that you need to do to be accepted by God. No rituals needed – just trust him.

So when Jesus looked out at the crowd of people, he saw a lot of lost people, but he was also seeking the lost – he was looking for people who would admit to the fact of being lost. He did not come to call people who already felt righteous – he came to call people who were willing to repent, people who felt cut off from God and wanted to be close again, people who were willing to start all over, with a message of forgiveness.

Jesus had some rather harsh words to say about self-righteous people. Woe to you, he said, you are lower than snakes’ bellies. You are majoring in the minors, worried about trivial things while you have forgotten what God is really like. You are looking down your nose at people when you aren’t so perfect yourself. You don’t think you need to repent, so you are in for big trouble. The kingdom of God is near, and it’s good news for some people and bad news for others.

And Jesus quoted the words of Micah: I desire mercy and not sacrifice. That’s what he said in Matthew 9:13 right before he said he did not come to call the righteous, but the sinners. God wants mercy and not sacrifice. This was a crucial part of Jesus’ mission and method. He was looking for the lost; he was looking for sinners. Those are two ways of saying the same thing. And he’s saying, God’s not big on sacrifices, but he is big on mercy. Jesus was looking for people who knew they needed mercy.

Now, the self-righteous people were just as lost as anybody else, and that is basically what Jesus told them. Look, you folks, if you act like this, you are headed for hell.

These people were lost, but they wouldn’t admit it, and they wouldn’t change their attitude unless somebody convinced them they were wrong. And the Bible shows that Jesus didn’t convince very many of them to change.

But Jesus did come to look for the lost, to bring good news of salvation to the lost. He offered forgiveness, not just in what he preached, but also by what he did. All his healings were parables of grace, of God loving the person. And Jesus taught grace when he talked with prostitutes and tax collectors and fishermen. God wants you to come, he said. You don’t have to do anything to earn it, and you can’t even do anything to earn it, but turn to God and he will turn to you. It’s that simple.

You don’t have to be super-religious like the Pharisees, careful with all the unimportant details. The main thing that God wants is simply that you treat your neighbor with respect and love. Sure, you have failed in this, but don’t worry about it. Don’t think that you have to offer heaps of sacrifices or give lots of money. Just turn to God, and he will accept you. Make a new start in life, and believe the good news!

Now, how did Jesus seek the lost? He told some parables about seeking the lost. He told a parable about a shepherd who left 99 sheep and went to look for one lost one. This is not a parable of how to pastor a church – this is not a good practice for pastors to do. Jesus told Peter that his priority was to feed the flock, to take care of the sheep. He can’t just run off and abandon them. But Jesus told the parable of the one lost sheep not to illustrate a policy of seek-them-out and carry-them-home and abandon-them-while-you-look-for-more. No, the parable was simply to highlight the fact that God rejoices at every sinner who comes to him. That’s the point of the parable. God wants sinners to come to him.

In all the parables that Jesus gave, we have to be careful that we don’t read more into them than Jesus intended. He is not telling us to treat people like sheep, or like coins. He is not telling us to put lost people on our shoulders and carry them to church. No, he is simply emphasizing the fact that God is seeking the lost, he rejoices in sinners who repent. He’s not mad at them – he is eagerly awaiting for them to come home. He doesn’t have a long list of chores for them to do or payments to make to pay their debt back. No, the way is open, the kingdom of God is near, all you have to do is change your attitude and believe the good news. Don’t be afraid of God as if he is angry – change your attitude about that and realize that he loves you and wants you to live with him in joy and peace and love.

Jesus told one parable that the kingdom of God is like a big fishnet that catches all sorts of fishes, both good and bad, and they will be sorted out when he comes back. Now, Jesus did not give this parable as an evangelistic strategy. We do not set up snares to trap people. We do not force people into churches.

Jesus told another parable about the kingdom being like seeds sown in the ground. He is not saying that people have nothing to do but sit around. He is not saying that people have no choice as to where they are in life, whether they are good soil or bad, whether they are weeds or grain. No, I think he meant exactly the opposite, that he wanted people to bear fruit by choosing to be good plants in good soil for the gospel, by choosing to bear fruit instead of being a parasite on others.

You see, when we look at these parables, we have to consider whether Jesus is talking about inanimate objects that can’t think for themselves, or whether he is talking about human beings who can made decisions, either for or against the gospel.

For example, he told a parable of two sons, one who did what his father wanted and the other who did not. And the whole point of the parable is that people have a choice as to what they will do. And in another parable he described tenants who rented a vineyard, but rebelled against the landowner. Again, the parable shows that people have choices to make, and God lets them make those choices. He wants them to make a certain decision, but he doesn’t force them to.

In the parable of the wedding banquet, he invites people to come in, but he doesn’t force them to come. He punishes them if they don’t, but he doesn’t force them to come. And if they come in the wrong way, he punishes them, but he doesn’t force them to come. God is looking for the lost, seeking the lost. Now, that is everybody on earth, but he doesn’t force them to come. He invites them, and lets them make their own decisions.

Some people already know they are lost, and it seems that these are the sort of people Jesus looked for the most. He offered hope and mercy and forgiveness and acceptance. He did not try to make them feel bad first – they felt bad enough already – but he offered them good news.

Consider for a moment how Peter and Paul searched for the lost. Peter preached in Jerusalem, mainly, and Paul traveled from city to city. He was surrounded by lost people, but he went looking for … for people who would respond. These are the lost, the people who will respond. There were hundreds of thousands of lost people in Antioch when Paul went away from that city to look for lost people in Cyprus. And there were thousands of lost people in Cyprus when Paul left there and went on to Pisidia. He wasn’t just looking for lost people in general – he was surrounded by them – but he was looking for lost people who would accept the gospel. Paul and Peter and Jesus looked for people who would respond. These were the lost they were looking for.

In one sense, everybody is lost, and in one sense Jesus wants to save everyone. But he is especially looking for the lost, those people who will respond to his message of forgiveness and salvation. He is looking for people who will admit that they need help.

And when we seek the lost today, we don’t have to look far. Just look outside the windows and you will see the lost. There, we have identified them. Is that all we have to do? No, that’s not the point. The lost are those who are willing to respond – that’s who we are looking for most of all.

How do we find out if they will respond? Well, one way is to ask them. We can ask them, If you died tonight, do you know for certain that you would go to heaven? Some people will respond to that, and some won’t. We seek the ones who will, and the way we find out who they are, is by asking the question.

Another way we seek the lost is to invite them to come. We invite them to worship services, or somewhere else. It’s like we are disciples asking people to come listen to Jesus.

Another way to seek the lost is through our actions. We show them acceptance, to help them realize that God wants them. We might provide some physical needs for them, or we might just show them acceptance. People throughout our society want to be accepted. They think that God doesn’t like them, and they feel rejected by God and think that Christians won’t like them, either.

The story is told of a man who invited a prostitute to church, and she replied, "Why would I want to go to church? I feel bad enough about myself already." She characterized church, and Christians, as people who would make her feel bad.

Would we make her feel bad? Would I? Perhaps I would – I am not as welcoming as I could be. Would Jesus make her feel bad? Apparently Jesus made people like her feel welcome, to feel accepted, to feel like somebody cared about her for the first time in her life. That is what it means to seek the lost. If a lost person shows up in church, we need to seek them, not avoid them. We need to make them feel welcome. We can’t require that they be as good as us before we welcome them.

Our actions communicate a message, hopefully of grace. Our actions can reflect the gospel, and our actions can invite people, or turn them off. We can seek the lost in the way that we treat other people.

Now, I am certainly not perfect in the way that I treat others. I’m not a prostitute, but I am a sinner, and that means that I don’t always treat other people the way that I ought to. Even though I try to be like Jesus, I am not, and I need grace not only from God but also from you. We all need grace, and we need to extend grace to other people. That is part of the way that we try to not just find the lost, but to keep the lost.

We not only need to find disciples – we need to disciple them, to teach them more. Seeking the lost means more than just identifying them and getting them to say yes to a gospel presentation. Seeking the lost means keeping people, too – keeping them from getting lost again. The commission includes both finding and keeping. When we are surrounded by lost people, seeking the lost means a lot more than just identifying them for who they are, or preaching at them. It means inviting them to come to God’s party, not just through our words but also through our actions. We need to invite the lost and welcome the lost.

How do we know who is willing to respond? We can ask. We can also be sensitive to their needs, to recognize their feelings of lostness. You see, everybody out there has unfulfilled desires. They have spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst that they don’t even have the words to describe. We can learn to recognize those needs, and how to get people to recognize those needs, and to learn how to tell people that Jesus can meet those needs. We can be trained to make disciples, to get new disciples, to teach the ones we have. We can care about other people.

Consider this story. On October 10, 2001, a five-year-old boy was found crying in a park in Tucson, Arizona. No one knew who he was, and the boy was too young to tell them where he had come from. The department of social services took care of him while the police investigated. It took them about two days, but they eventually found where the boy lived. And his parents said, Oh, Johnny? You mean he’s not here? I thought his brothers were taking care of him.. You see, Johnny had been lost, and no one cared.

Well, this story is really a parable. God has all sorts of children who are lost, and he tells us, the older brothers and sisters, to be looking after them. But sometimes it seems that nobody cares. We think, Man, 90 percent of the population in California is lost, and we can’t take care of them all. And we get so overwhelmed that we don’t take care of any of them.

Now, we can’t get neurotic about it and think that we are spiritual failures unless we round everybody up and compel them to come in. No, Jesus’ parables, and his own actions, show that we do not need to be neurotic about the people who choose to ignore the message. But it does mean that we have to care, and we have to be about our Father’s business, and we have to be involved in the commission that Jesus gave the church, that is, to preach the gospel and make disciples.

We need to be alert to people’s feelings and needs, and we have to be ready to give an answer to people who need hope, especially those who realize their need for hope and answers. We need to be ready, not bashful.

Consider Jesus in John 4, when he talked with the Samaritan woman at the well. Now, in this case, Jesus did not go into town to preach the gospel – probably because he knew he would not be welcome. Seeking the lost does not mean barging into places where we are not welcome. There is a time and a place for the gospel to be given a fair hearing.

In this case, Jesus was sitting at the well and waiting for the lost person to come to him – and she did. The woman came up to the well, and Jesus asked her a question. He didn’t ask her about dying and going to heaven, but he asked a question that had an easy tie-in to the gospel. And the woman responded to that, and Jesus talked more. This interaction is one of several models we can use for personal evangelism, for talking about the gospel with friends or total strangers. This was a low-key way of seeking the lost.

And consider Peter on the day of Pentecost. What did he do to seek the lost? Nothing in particular – the crowd was already there and he just responded to the situation and told people about Jesus. He was seeking the lost without even trying, just by talking about Jesus, and thousands of people responded.

Paul traveled land and sea to take the gospel to new areas. In some cities, it seems that he didn’t preach the gospel at all. In others, he preached for a while and then moved on. His style of seeking the lost was different again. There’s more than one way to seek the lost, but it all involves the gospel of Jesus Christ. Basically, we seek the lost when we speak about Jesus. We tell people about him, and that gives people a chance to respond. And it seems that it is helpful if we help people realize that they are making a choice. We can ask them, Does this make sense to you? Does this sound like something you want? What do you think about this? depending on the situation.

Let’s turn to Luke 15, to see one of the greatest parables about seeking the lost. Last week Pastor Bermie spoke about the parable of the lost coin. This week, let’s look at the parable of the prodigal son, also known as the parable of the lost son. What do we see here about seeking the lost?

Luke 15, verse 11: Jesus continued: "There was a man who had two sons. ¹² The younger one said to his father, `Father, give me my share of the estate.' So he divided his property between them. – The father let him do it. He let the son make his own decisions. He let the son become lost because the son wanted to be lost. That’s the way God is. He lets people run away from him. He lets them make their own decisions, and we have to respect that.

^{LK 15:13} "Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. ¹⁴ After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵ So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. ¹⁶ He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. – Now notice in this that Jesus says nothing about the sins of the young man, except the sin of wasting money. Jesus stresses his poverty and his physical need, not his moral problems.

^{LK 15:17} "When he came to his senses, he said, `How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! ¹⁸ I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. ¹⁹ I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.' ²⁰ So he got up and went to his father.

So the son here makes a decent financial decision: he wants a job and thinks his dad might give him a job, and he rehearses a speech that he thinks will get him the job he wants.

Verse 20: "But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

So it seems that the father was sitting on the front porch, just waiting for the day that his son would come back. He hadn’t gone to the far country himself to look for his son. He was not seeking the lost in that way, but he was waiting for the lost son to come to him. If he had a lost sheep, he would go look for it, and if he had a lost coin, he would look for it, but when he had a lost son, he had to wait for the son to come to his senses, to make his own decisions. That’s one way to seek the lost – be ready for them when they come to their senses. Welcome them, run to meet them, and greet them warmly. Be glad to see them, even if they come in rags and smell like pigs.

^{LK 15:21} "The son said to him, `Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. '

But the father didn’t give him time to finish his speech. Verse 22, ^"the father said to his servants, `Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³ Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. ²⁴ For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate.

So the point of the parable is like the parable of the lost sheep, and the parable of the lost coin: God loves it when people repent and come to him. It does not matter how many sins they had before; the important thing is that they are coming home. Throw a party! Rejoice!

You see, we have all been prodigal children. We have all had times when we drifted away from God and did our own thing in our own way, and we have come back, and we have all been welcomed by God with open arms, with love and honor. The church may not have been so welcoming, but God was, and that’s the point of the parable.

Ah, but the parable doesn’t end there. It could have ended there, but it doesn’t. Jesus goes on to tell the parable of the older brother:

^{LK 15:25} "Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶ So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ²⁷ `Your brother has come,' he replied, `and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.'

^{LK 15:28} "The older brother became angry and refused to go in.

Now, just as we have all been prodigal children, we have also been in the situation of the older brother. If we have been in the church for several years, we have all had opportunity to object to some new person or another. Hey, wait a minute, we think. "Why are they letting that person come to church? Why are they letting that person have a ministry? What’s the church coming to? Those people aren’t as good as I want them to be." And we don’t feel like celebrating.

But God is celebrating, and he wants us to join the party. Verse 28: "So his father went out and pleaded with him. ²⁹ But he answered his father, `Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. ³⁰ But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!"

The older brother didn’t feel appreciated, did he? I feel like that sometimes. Why should I bother, if nobody likes what I do? Hurt feelings are a lot more demotivating than hurt fingers. But God says, "Look, I love you, too. I wish you’d see these lost people the way I do. I wish you’d celebrate the way I do.

Verse 31: `My son,' the father said, `you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. ³² But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' "

And that’s how the parable ends. We don’t know whether the older brother came to his senses and joined the party, or whether he continued to sulk in self-righteousness and be a party-pooper. Is he going to seek the lost, or stay away? Is he going to welcome the sinner who returns, or is he going to demand penance?

You see, the parable isn’t finished yet. We get to write the end of the story. Will we seek the lost, will we join the angelic party?

Help us, O Lord, to think like you do. And how can we do that unless we read your words and hear your message? Sometimes it seems that we are in a far country, wasting our time. We need to return to you, and we know that you will welcome us. Help us, O Lord, and forgive our sins, and help us forgive those who sin against us, and help us welcome those who turn to you. For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.