Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Luke 15:3–7
“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?” (v. 4).
The Pharisees and scribes grumbled when they saw Jesus dining with sinners (Luke 15:1–2). As we saw in our last study, their complaining arose from a false estimation of their own sin—they did not fully see their own need for forgiveness—and from their belief that some sinners were so bad that they were beyond redemption. In other words, those who objected to Christ’s extension of divine forgiveness to those who were guilty of the most heinous sins essentially thought that some people were not worth saving.
The rest of Luke 15 records Jesus’ refutation of the ideas that God thinks that some people are beyond His saving grace or that some people are not worth saving. In the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son, our Savior reveals that the salvation of sinners brings our Creator such joy that He will go to the greatest lengths to save them, and that no sinner has fallen so far as to be irredeemable if God wills to save him.
First we have the parable of the lost sheep, found in today’s passage. Shepherding was a common profession in first-century Palestine, so the Jews well knew the phenomenon of a sheep’s getting separated from its flock. Jesus describes a situation in which a shepherd with a flock of one hundred sheep loses one and then goes out to find it, leaving the others behind (vv. 3–4). In light of Jesus’ explanation of the parable in verse 7, as well as other biblical passages that refer to sinners as sheep who have gone astray (Isa. 53:6), the lost sheep clearly represents a sinner who has wandered far from God, not remaining in submission to His shepherding.
The shepherd in the parable leaves the ninety-nine other sheep and searches for the lost sheep until he finds it and brings it home, and then calls his neighbors to join him in celebrating the sheep’s recovery (Luke 15:4–7). Economically speaking, the ninety-nine sheep together are worth more than the one lost sheep, but the shepherd pays no heed to that. That lost sheep is so valuable to the shepherd that he will leave the others behind in the open country, where they might encounter predators, to find it. Of course, the point is not that God, represented by the shepherd, ever leaves His faithful people behind; rather, the image stresses the incalculable value that God places on lost sinners. He will go after the person who seems least valuable to us, and heaven will rejoice when He recovers that person who has gone far off the path of godliness.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
God values lost sinners and seeks them out to redeem them. As Christians, we are to be His agents in this mission, going to sinners and proclaiming the gospel to them. Our churches must not become so inwardly focused that we neglect the duty of reaching out to the non-Christians in our communities. Let us consider ways that we can seek to share the gospel with the lost.
for further study
- Psalm 119:176
- Ezekiel 34:11–16
- Matthew 18:10–14
- John 10:11–18
the bible in a year
- Psalms 68–69
- Romans 3