Bottom Line Up Front: God’s Persistence Is Our Hope

Context & Scripture: There’s a latent danger in familiarity. “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days,” Franklin quipped. But when it comes to one’s standing before God, it has to do with being so familiar with something that we have suppressed the significance of its power. You’ll remember the Parable of the Lost Sheep, right? Here it is, just in case:

The Parable of the Lost Sheep

15 Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”

3 So he told them this parable: 4 “What man of you, 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? 5 And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. 6 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.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Lk 15:1-7, ESV).

Teaching: Did you notice who came near to Jesus here? The tax collectors. Guess how popular Jewish tax collectors were to their fellow Jews in Roman-occupied Israel? Exactly. Who else came? Sinners. Guess how laudatory it was to be labeled a ‘sinner,’ esp. by religious arrogant elites like the Pharisees? Exactly.

But then Jesus makes it even more overt, this teaching. What does the good shepherd do? He pursues the lost sheep. He persists in it. Why? Because he loves them. And the end result? Restoration. Rejoicing. Redemption. The key thing is to understand that we’re—by default—lost sheep, prone to wander, prone to error, lost in sin. Yet God persists. He knows his sheep, and even calls them by name.