“Wouldn’t you go?”

This sermon was preached for Capital Pres Fairfax on June 9, 2024  as a part of our series “Questions Jesus Asked.” Each week we explore a question Jesus asked in the course of his earthly ministry and consider what he might be asking us today through it. A recording of this sermon will be available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This manuscript includes extended meditations which didn’t make it to Sunday morning. 

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In case you missed last week or this is your first time joining us, we’ve just started a new sermon series exploring questions Jesus asked. Questions have power—the power to make you reflect, the power to reveal, the power to clarify, and even the power to connect. Last week, we focused on the relational nature of questions. Jesus, when he asks a question, is saying to the person or people across from him “You want to deal with this issue, but there’s no way to truly do that unless we deal with each other, so here’s my question.” And so he moves from the informational and ethereal to the real and relational. 

We also noted how rigorously committed Jesus is to reality. His questions help his conversation partners see the world as it really is. That’s important because we’ve all got blind spots, we’ve all got inconsistencies in what we believe, we’ve got irrationalities in the way we think. A good question can help expose that and set us right. 

One of my favorite examples of this comes from the movie “The Dark Knight.” Kids, it’s a bit old by now, so in case you don’t know it, it’s about Bat Man. There’s a scene about halfway through the movie where an accountant realizes Bruce Wayne’s business is funding all of Bat Man’s high tech equipment. He brings this information to Morgan Freeman, who’s the CEO of Wayne enterprises, and threatens to go public with the information unless they pay him tens of millions of dollars. Morgan Freeman’s character responds with one of the best lines in the movie: “Let me get this straight. You think that your client—one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world—is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands…and your plan is to blackmail this person?” Immediately the accountant shrinks in his seat, hands over the evidence, and nervously shuffles away. One question helped him see how bad of an idea that was. Jesus’ question often have this same kind of clarifying effect: he helps people see something they’ve missed or understand something they had wrong. 

So, questions are great and Jesus is great at asking them. Why does any of this matter for us? We as a church are in a season with lots of questions. In about four weeks, Capital Pres Fairfax will become our own PCA church—not just a second site of McLean Presbyterian Church, but our very own church with our own leadership and budget and culture. That change comes with a lot of questions. What’s the budget going to look like? Are we planning on staying here at Woodson? For how long? What about the ministries connected to McLean? What about mens and women’s groups, or the youth group? How will our worship music change? Can do more hymns? Or less hymns? 

All fair questions—and hopefully we can give you some answers in two weeks at our congregational meeting. But what if, this morning and this season of transition, God had a question for us? It’s a question Jesus asks in the passage Anna just read, and it’s a question at the very core of our church’s identity. It’s the reason our church was started and our prayer is, it will be the reason we continue. The question before us is “Wouldn’t you go?” Before we consider that question, let’s pray. 

If you’ve got a Bible on you, go ahead and open it back up to Luke 15. We’ve got three things to consider this morning as we look at our passage

1. 1. Who Jesus Asks
   2. Why Jesus Asks
   3. Where that leads us 

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)

 

Who Jesus asks  

Let’s first look at who Jesus asks, who is he talking to here? The passage shows us two different audiences in verses 1-2. 

The first people we’re introduced to are “tax collectors and sinners.” Maybe you’ve been in church for a while, and you know everything that’s bound up in the descriptions here, but for those who need a refresher or for those who are new to all this. Tax collectors were mainly Jewish men who purchased from Rome the right to collect various taxes, all at the expense of their fellow countrymen. Tax-collectors were hated for being unpatriotic, dishonest, greedy, you name it; and on top of all that their job made them religiously unclean. Social and religious outcasts getting rich at the expense of their neighbors—that’s the tax collectors. 

But we’ve also got these other folk, Tax collectors and “sinners.” You might think, “Patrick, I thought the Bible teaches all have sinned”? What’s this “and sinners” stuff? Good question. This “and sinners” stuff reflects the reality that the religious leaders, the pharisees and scribes, created an entire class of people they called sinner who were marked by immoral lives, questionable occupations, or even certain disabilities and diseases. Sinners: a class of people who were physically and morally unapproachable

And yet our passage tells us that these people come to Jesus, they draw near to him. Just take a minute to marvel at that with me. Here is Jesus—the most holy, most righteous individual ever to walk the earth; pure and perfect in every way—and yet, the most broken and messy people in society want to draw near to him. They don’t see him as unapproachable. We could sit here in verse 1 all morning with that thought but we got nine more verses to cover. 

So let’s keep going to verse 2, and we find a second group of people: Pharisees and scribes, religious leaders who are grumbling over Jesus associating with the tax collectors and sinners. In their view there’s two kinds of people in the world: there’s “us” and there’s “them,” insiders and outsiders, good people and bad people, us moral religious people and those gross enemies of God—and we do not engage with those people. 

It makes me wonder what our version of that is today—people groups, certain types, where we are tempted to believe that we should have nothing to do with them. Maybe it’s the students in the Greek system at your college. Maybe it’s people of a certain political persuasion or sexual orientation or tax bracket. Maybe it’s intellectual elites or secular scientists; or maybe it’s people from another religion. Is there a person or category of people in your mind where you think “That’s the outsider; they are beyond the bounds of God’s pursuit. They’re too far gone, too entrenched in their opposition to God. Do not engage.” 

Apparently Jesus didn’t get that memo; in fact, Jesus shows up to have dinner with tax collectors and Sinners. Sharing a meal was a more significant expression of your relational connection in the ancient near east than it is now. Jesus finds a seat at the table with these folk and the religious leaders lose their minds. That’s what leads to the questions that Jesus asks.

Why Jesus Asks 

Alright, we’ve got the “Who.” Let’s switch to the “Why.” Why does Jesus ask this question? Look again at the passage, we’ve actually got two questions that tell two stories. Read with me: “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 next “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?”

Two different examples—a sheep and a coin—and two different pictures of how you can be lost. How do sheep get lost? To put it bluntly: by being stupid. Getting lost is just what sheep do. Sheep don’t get lost because they we’re going to visit their family in the highlands and took a wrong turn. Usually they get lost because the get frightened and run the wrong way or they see some food and wander away from the shepherd. A bad decision, a lack of judgment, an impulsive indulgence and all of a sudden, the sheep is gone. 

How does a coin get lost? By slipping through the cracks, or falling through a hole in the pocket, or rolling off the table under the couch. The problem with coins is that they’re so small, they’re easy to lose track of, and they’re not easy to manage. How many of us before we ran out the door this morning worked through their checklist of “Phone, keys, wallet, a roll of quarters.” Anywhere other than the Aldi parking lot, for most of us, coins are “out of sight, out of mind.” 

What is Jesus getting at with these two pictures? Ultimately, even though he’s got two examples, he’s asking one question. And this is the main question we’re focusing on in our sermon today: Wouldn’t you go? 

Notice again who Jesus directs this question to—he’s asking the Pharisees and Scribes—but he’s doing this within earshot of the tax collectors and sinners. Jesus is doing a thing here where he’s explicitly talking to one group but implicitly talking to both. Kids, you know what kind of thing this is, right? Your parents say “You can have one cookie” and then you see your brother take a second cookie while your parents aren’t looking so you say “Hey Ricky, is that your second cookie?” You might be talking directly to your brother but you’re saying it so your parents can hear. 

That’s like what Jesus is doing here. Through this one question, Jesus is flipping the paradigm of these two groups. Jesus is saying the primary paradigm is not outsider and insider. It’s not even good and bad. It’s lost and found. One audience—the tax collectors and sinners—have lived their whole lives hearing that they are lost and they have no hope of being found. Maybe that resonates with you. Whether by wandering off like a sheep or by slipping through the cracks like a coin, maybe you feel the fear and the shame of being lost, and maybe you’ve lost all hope that you could be found. 

Friends, the first thing we learn from Jesus’ question this morning is that being lost is a real danger. It’s easy to forget how terrifying it is to be truly lost in this day and age when we’ve got google maps and AirTags and cell phone reception almost everywhere. Most of us will never be exposed to the anxiety of being completely and totally lost with dire consequences. But spiritually speaking, if you have not been reconciled to God through the work of Christ, that is the position you find yourself in. You can be the most professional, competent, successful person in the room and still all together lost—and at the risk of eternal lostness. Spiritual lostness is a real danger. 

The second thing Jesus teaches us here is that it’s not just the tax collectors and sinners who are lost. The other audience—the religious leaders—think to themselves “Surely we’re not lost! We could never be lost. Look at how pious we are!” But the very next story Jesus tells speaks of a son, an older brother who lives inside the father’s house and yet could not be more lost (Lk 15:25-32). You might be a deeply religious person; you may have grown up in a church or a temple or a mosque your whole life believing you are at peace with God. All the while you may be even more lost than those you call outsiders. In fact, you may prove yourself to be lost when you justify yourself, when you think like those Pharisees and Scribes “Of course I’m good with God, I’ve never forsaken him, I’m baptized, I’ve kept all his rules, I’ve never sinned like those people.” 

If you are relying on your own self-righteousness to win the comparison game, look again at Jesus’ question. Because the last thing it teaches us is the most important thing of all: Jesus has come to find the lost. More than about the lostness of sinners or the lostness of religious people, this passage teaches us about the heart of God. Earlier we said that Jesus’ questions help us see reality accurately. What part of reality is Jesus clarifying in this question? The immeasurable value of the lost. 

In the stories Jesus tells, the lost sheep matters. The lost coin matters. The shepherd doesn’t huddle up the ninety-nine sheep and ridicule the lost one; he doesn’t say “You ninety-nine are the real ones, that lost one can fend for himself.” The woman doesn’t say “Hey, nine coins is good enough; no point in exerting myself to find one more.” No! To Jesus, the lost are worth finding. 

I’ve got a pair of sunglasses here with me; I normally keep them on my head because if I put them literally anywhere else I’ll lose them. I go through a few pairs of sunglasses a year, and because I’m so bad with them, I intentionally buy cheap pairs. That way when I lose them I can shrug it off and not bother going back to search for them. There’s one pair of sunglasses I did go back for. It was about eight years ago. They were black sunglasses with neon green highlights and a pretty good tint to the lenses. I was eating at a Glory Days and took them off my head while I was eating, then left them on the table when I walked out the door. I guess it was cloudy when I left because I didn’t realize it until a few hours later, but when I did, I drove straight back to the restaurant and scoured the place. It’s not because they were particularly expensive, or even all that fashionable—just $15 gas station sunglasses like what I normally buy. The difference was where I bought them. They were the only physical object I bought while I was on a Spring break trip in Israel; they reminded me of sailing on the Sea of Galilee and walking down the streets of Jerusalem. They were valuable because I loved them. But ultimately, they still weren’t that valuable, and so after about ten minutes of searching and asking around, I gave up and drove home. 

Imagine it wasn’t just sunglasses, though. Imagine if it was your wallet you lost; how long would you search for that before you threw in the towel? Imagine if it was your pet. How hard would you search? Imagine if I got a call tomorrow morning from the school where my wife teaches and they said “Hey, have you seen Erin? She never came into work today, we’re getting nervous.” Would I say “Eh, I’ll give it twenty minutes” No! That is the most important, most precious person in the world to me! There are no lengths I wouldn’t go to find my wife if she were lost, no matter if I had to dedicate the rest of my life to it. 

That is how God feels about the lost. There are no lengths he has not gone to find you. Not just sweeping the house, not just searching the hills for a sheep; God came from heaven to earth. The Son of God Jesus Christ took on flesh to find his lost. He came from glory and bliss to homeless rags. And even that wasn’t far enough. The Bible tells us that you and I were so lost in our sins and our self-righteousness that we were “dead in our transgressions.” In order for Jesus to bring us home, he would have to go all the way to the point of death, even death on a cross. And even further! Jesus didn’t just faith physical death, he faced the full force of spiritual death and alienation from his Heavenly Father so that in his last breath he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 

Jesus became lost so that you and I might be found. And friends, see the beauty of the gospel in Jesus question: Wouldn’t you go? He asks the Pharisees and Scribes “Wouldn’t you go to these lengths? How could you not? Don’t you see how precious these people are? Because I would go. That’s why I’ve come. I’ve come for them, and I’ve come for you.” To him, it’s obvious: there is nothing more valuable in all the world than his beloved people. 

Where that leads us

So friends, where does that lead us? What does this mean for us here at Capital Pres Fairfax? 

First, if you are lost this morning: come and be found. Come home. You have a God in Jesus Christ who has gone to the ends of the earth searching for you. Today, right now, you can say “Here I am, Lord. Find me.” Come and embrace the amazing love of God which can free you from your sinful wandering or your religious hypocrisy. He lost his life so that you might find yours. I implore you: Get found by Jesus, lift your eyes and see the one who’s been searching for you. 

For the rest of us, for those who have been found by Jesus: Let’s be people who want to search for the lost. From our very start, from the moment we launch out as our own church in a month’s time, let’s mirror the heart of our Lord and follow in his footsteps. That’s the very reason we exist as a church. If you joined this church, if you’ve grown in your relationship with Christ or even encountered Christ for the first time through this church, that’s because five years ago our brothers and sisters at McLean Pres were confronted with the question “Wouldn’t you go?” And they answered with “Of course we’ll go, they’re worth it.” 

You have been worth the cost of starting a new church in a hospital conference room with no windows through a pandemic. You’re worth loading a trailer at 6:45am on a Sunday morning in freezing rain. It’s not been easy for us; we’ve endured a pandemic, multiple location shifts, significant financial investments, not to mention all the personal and relational burdens that come with building a church community. But you are worth it. 

And so is the new person who will join us for the first time next Sunday, and the families you’ll meet at Playdates in the Park, and the coworker you’ve invited to our outreach event tomorrow night, and the neighbor who’s just waiting for an invitation to come to church. There are thousands of people within a three mile radius of Woodson High School who are lost without Christ, either because they’ve wandered off like sheep or they’ve slipped through the cracks like a coin, or they’ve justified themselves like a Pharisee. Christ has put us right here with the question “Wouldn’t you go? Wouldn’t you be my hands and feet? Wouldn’t you help me find the people I love?” 

One last thought. The most repeated word in our passage this morning is joy. See the repeated and continual joy our savior has in finding the lost. I hope this morning you have felt the delight our God has in having found you, and I hope you experience that same joy as you joining his mission of seeking the lost. Let’s now go out in the joy of God’s blessing. “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.” (2 Cor 13:14)