A sermon preached at Covenant Presbyterian Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas on March 8, 2026.
Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable: “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? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. 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 than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. “Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:1–10).[1]
We find factual statements of the gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the Bible. We may think, for example, of the protoevangelium in the third chapter of Genesis, where God promises the offspring of a woman victory over Satan.[2] We may think of the ram in the thicket substituted for Issac in Abraham’s sacrifice on Mount Moriah.[3] We may think of the statement of redemption in the introduction to the Ten Commandments.[4] We may think of the prophecy of Isaiah’s suffering servant, upon whom has been laid “the iniquity of us all,” who has “brought us peace,” and through whom “we are healed” (Isa. 53:5-6). And, of course, through the Gospels, to Acts, to the Pauline epistles, to the general epistles, through Hebrews and James, concluding with Revelation, we find the gospel throughout Scripture.
Yet, have you ever considered its presence in the mouths of its opponents? For example, in seeking to destroy Jesus, the high priest Caiaphas said to the leaders of Israel, “it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish” (John 11:49-50). Little did he know in his murderous heart that he had perfectly described the substitutionary atonement of Christ. Or, remember the shouts of the people assembled in Jerusalem, pleading for Jesus’s crucifixion, crying out, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matt. 27:25). What they cried out for evil, God meant for good, cleansing us of our sins through the shed blood of Christ our Savior. And, lest you missed it, we hear it in our passage today, a beautiful testimony to the grace of the gospel: “This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). Praise God, he did and still does!
Luke sets the stage for this statement, telling us that “tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near” to Jesus (15:1). Tax collectors were, according to John Chrysostom, “the personification of licensed violence, of legal sin, of specious greed.”[5] If you were concerned about your reputation, they weren’t the sort you wanted drawing near. Of course, the same could be said of the sinners who joined them, those given up to
a debased mind to do what ought not to be done,” those “filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. . . . envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. . . . gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Rom. 1:28-31).
You know the kind; those who “were dead in [their] trespasses and sins . . . following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air . . . [living] in the passions of [their] flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:1-3). You know, those people. Not the kind a good man ought to associate with. Praise God, he did and still does!
The Greek word translated “receives” in the Pharisees’ allegation may also be translated “accepts” or “welcomes.” Jesus wasn’t the victim of unwanted popularity. He welcomed the tax collectors and sinners, sat down with them, even enjoying a meal with them. One commentator explains that in that culture “To invite a man to a meal was an offer of peace, trust, brotherhood, and forgiveness; in short, sharing a table meant sharing life.”[6] If a man is known by the company he keeps, Jesus was known as a friend of sinners. Praise God, he was and still is!
But this was not how the religious right saw it. They perceived Jesus’s reception of sinners as agreement, condoning their sin rather than condemning, and so they grumbled. Was it warranted? By welcoming sinners was Jesus validating vice, promoting promiscuity, teaching transgression? Since our iniquities separate us from God[7] and the wages of sin is death,[8] we can be sure that the sinless Son of God was not condoning sin. The first sermon he preached and repeated was a call to repent and believe the gospel.[9] Jesus did not come to condone sin but to save sinners.
And it is here that we see the disconnect with the Pharisees. They did not see themselves as sinners but righteous in their works. They saw no need to repent, because repentance implies sin. They heard no good news in the gospel, because it’s only good news to sinners in need of a Savior. And so, in their self-righteousness, they were disgusted by all the sinners drawing near to the Savior of sinners.
And so, responding to their hardened hearts and unbelief, Jesus told three parables, one about a lost sheep, one about a lost coin, and one about a lost son. I want to focus today on the first two, both of which involve a search and rescue.
Loving Search
The first parable asks us to consider a shepherd of a hundred sheep, minus one. The one is lost. “What man of you,” Jesus asks, “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 . . . ?” (Luke 15:4). What would you do? What does the shepherd do? He goes “after the one that is lost,” Jesus says, “until he finds it” (Luke 15:4). What does this tell us about the shepherd?
The second parable is of a woman who owns ten silver coins, minus one. The one is lost but in the house. What would you do? I’ll tell you what my frugal wife would do: She would do the same as the woman, lighting a lamp, sweeping the house, seeking diligently for that one silver coin.
Of course, Jesus is telling us about something far more important than sheep and coins, isn’t he? He is describing the heart of God for lost sinners, a heart the grumbling Pharisees did not have. Wandering sheep do not find their way back to the flock. They become mutton. Lost coins don’t find their way back into a purse. They have no use until they are found.
While we should always exercise caution in reading parables and not read meaning into every detail, the point of both parables is simple: We are the one, and our heavenly Father, who chose us before the foundation of the world and lovingly predestined us, searches for us until he finds us. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” Isaiah says, “we have turned everyone to his own way” (Isa. 53:6). But God promised, “I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out” (Ezek. 34:11). He takes the initiative, because as J.C. Ryle puts it, “He is far more willing to save sinners than sinners are to be saved.”[10]
Redeeming Rescue
For this reason, God gave his only begotten son[11] who “came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). He seeks, he finds, he saves, according to his sovereign grace. We see the perfect picture of this in Jesus’s first parable when we read that when the shepherd finds the sheep, “he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing” (Luke 15:5). Likewise, God picks us up and carries us away from imminent danger, rejoicing in our rescue Matthew Henry notes, “those can never perish whom he carries on his shoulders.”[12]
In contrast, though the Pharisees were considered the shepherds of Israel, they had hearts of a predator. But Jesus, the chief shepherd of his sheep, living out what Ezekiel had prophesied, “I will seek the lost, and will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak” (Ezek. 34:16). So he would and so he did, “[pouring] out his soul to death . . . and [bearing] the sin of many” (Isa. 53:12). “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness,” the apostle Peter wrote to the church, “By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (1 Pet. 2:24-25).
Amazing grace—how sweet the sound—
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found—
Was blind, but now I see.[13]
And as God had mercy upon us, as he has saved us by his grace, so we too must have hearts for the lost. Jew and Gentile alike will spend eternity in hell apart from faith in Christ. It won’t be a party but weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth in eternal torment.[14] Let us not be smug in our ark of salvation. But for the grace of God, we could be headed for hell too. Let this truth break your heart for the lost and dying.
I am reminded of a conversation between the nineteenth Scottish Presbyterian ministers and friends Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M’Cheyne, in which M’Cheyne asked Bonar on what he’d been preaching. Bonar replied, “Well, I’ve been preaching on hell, the reality of it, the gravity of it, the coming judgment of God upon the wicked.” M’Cheyne paused and then asked in response, “Ah, yes, but did you preach it with tears?”[15] It’s one thing to think upon the reality and severity of hell, but it’s quite another to consider the souls headed there, even today.
Heavenly Joy
Of the numerous peculiar verses in the book of Hebrews, this is surely one of them: “let us . . . [look] to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2). I say “peculiar” because we wouldn’t typically pair joy with the Roman instrument of torture, shame, and death. But the writer of Hebrews is not describing Christ’s death upon the cross as joyful but what he accomplished through it and what awaited him, namely his resurrection, our redemption, his glory, and ours. Christ’s certain victory over sin and death, and its subsequent fruit, brought him joy. Should it surprise us then that heavenly applause erupts “over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:7, 10)?
But such a celebration is not for the heavenly realm alone. We are invited to joyfully join the angels. Just as the shepherd and the woman of Jesus’s parables called for their friends and neighbors to rejoice with him, so God calls us to join in celebrating when the lost are found. But don’t expect everyone to join in.
The grumbling Pharisees, the “ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (15:7), were too blinded by their self-righteousness to rejoice in the repentance of sinners. They could see the sins of others yet not their own. Rightly does the apostle Paul confront such arrogance, when he asks,
Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? (Rom. 2:3-4).
The Pharisees could see Jesus receiving sinners, but they could not see their need to repent. They could see sinners drawing near to Jesus, but they could not see God’s kindness, forbearance, and patience in it. They had no mercy in their hearts for the lost, because they could not see that they were lost too.
But if you like me are a recipient of God’s mercy, a sinner saved by God’s grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, you know that had God not sought you, you would never have been found. You know that it is all owing to God’s rich mercy and his great love that you have been received by Christ and brought into fellowship with him forever. And as the recipients of such amazing grace, we too can rejoice when we witness it in the lives of others.
Phil Ryken recounts the story from 2004 of a pastor in Toronto who pastored a church of Iranian immigrants. Because of the language barrier, he preached his sermons in Persian. One Sunday he noticed that a woman in the congregation was talking on her cell phone during the worship service. Dismissing it as a phone call of necessity or emergency, he didn’t think about it again until the next Sunday, when she did it again. Deciding he needed to respectfully intervene, he invited the woman to his office to discuss her behavior. What he learned in response was she was on the phone with her family in Iran, who wanted to learn more about how she became a Christian through the preaching of God’s Word. She said,
I bought a calling card, and I call my husband in Tehran so he can hear you preaching. He puts the call on the speakerphone so my mother and sister can hear too. They have been inviting other friends and family over, and for the past three months, they have been listening to you preach. More people come every week. I am not talking on the phone. I’m just holding it up so they can hear your message about Jesus.[16]
How do your respond to that?
The pastor decided to lean into it, inviting the woman to sit at the front of the congregation. He also focused his next sermon specifically on “the love of Jesus for his precious children” and concluded asking if anyone wanted to pray to receive Christ. Immediately, the woman with her cell phone in hand shouted, “My husband! My husband got saved! My mother and sister want to come to the Lord too!”[17] And so they did, and there was “joy in heaven . . . before the angels of God” (Luke 15:7, 10). Let us join them, that we too may hear the applause of heaven.
[1] Unless referenced otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version
(Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2001).
[2] Gen. 3:15
[3] Gen. 22:13
[4] Ex. 20:1
[5] Philip Graham Ryken, Luke, Vol. 2 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 114.
[6] Ibid., 113
[7] Isa. 59:2
[8] Rom. 6:23
[9] Mark 1:15
[10] J.C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on Luke, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2012), 132.
[11] John 3:16
[12] “Finding the Lost Coin,” Tabletalk, Vol. 47, No. 8 (August 2023): 32.
[13] https://www.opc.org/hymn.html?hymn_id=37
[14] Matt. 13:42, 50
[15] https://fpcjackson.org/resource-library/sermons/do-justice-love-mercy-walk-humbly/
[16] Philip Graham Ryken, Luke, Vol. 2 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 124.
[17] Ibid., 124-125.
Planter, Pastor, Preacher 