How God Feels About Us

HOW GOD FEELS ABOUT US Luke 15:1-10 Theme of the Month Living and Sharing the Good News

Rev. Dr. Jeffrey Sharp

Lead Pastor, English Congregation Vancouver Chinese Baptist Church, Vancouver, British Columbia

Sunday Sermon for 25 April 2010

Scripture Passage Luke 15:1-10

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. 2 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

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Then Jesus told them this parable: 4 “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? 5 And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders 6 and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ 7 I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

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“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ 10 In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

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Ken Davis is a Christian comedian. He tells an interesting story in his book, I Don’t Remember Dropping the Skunk, But I Do Remember Trying To Breathe. He writes that one morning, not long after Diane and he were married, he saw her wedding ring lying on the bathroom sink. He thought it would be great fun to make her think it was lost, so he hid the ring. That evening, Diane asked him if he had seen her ring. He wasn’t ready for the joke to be over yet, so he said no. Late at night, he woke up to the sound of uncontrollable sobbing. “What’s wrong?” he mumbled, still half asleep.

“Nothing,” she replied. Now he was wide awake. How was it possible to be crying uncontrollably in the middle of the night over nothing? After a great deal of probing, Diane finally blurted out, “I’ve lost my wedding ring.”

“What a relief !” Ken thought. This was something he could solve immediately. “I have your ring,” he confessed, thinking she would hug him in relief and he could go back to sleep. The hug never came.

“What?” she growled.

“I took your ring as a joke,” Ken said. “I know just where it is, so you can go to sleep.” “It was dark,” Ken Davis writes, “so I didn’t see her fist coming—but I did feel it land. In twenty years of marriage, that was the only time she ever hit me. It was also the last time I ever took her wedding ring.”

Great story! It reminds me of an item that was in a newspaper sometime back. A new bride accidentally flushed her $1,800 diamond wedding ring down the toilet. Her husband, who was still making payments on the ring, wasn’t going to let the one-carat diamond get away without a fight. He spent the night digging up the yard and tearing up the plumbing searching for the ring.

The wife spent the night at her sister’s house because, in her words, “He was really upset and I didn’t want to be around him.” By morning the frustrated groom felt the ring was no longer in the plumbing in his house, so he called the water department. The city sent out its “lost diamond crew” to look for the tiny, valuable rock. After installing a trap at a downstream manhole, they flushed the pipe by sending a high pressure stream of water down the sewer pipe. Then one of the crew crawled down into the manhole and fished the diamond ring out of the sewage. You can bet that that couple was happy to get the lost ring back.

I guess most of us at least temporarily have lost something valuable to us and can remember how we felt when we found it.

Do you see a pattern here? Lost, search, found, rejoicing. This isn’t just the pattern in this story, but it is also the pattern in this whole 15th chapter of Luke’s Gospel. In this chapter Jesus is responding to criticism from the Jewish religious leaders about the company he is keeping (Luke 15:1-2).

For you see, Jesus was a radical. He chastised “good” people for being more concerned about their outward religious impression than the depth of their relationship and walk with God. He angrily denounced the revered Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders as “blind guides” and HOWGODFEELSABOUTUS 2

“hypocrites” and refused to play by their pious rules. At the same time, he kept company with the improper people, the marginalized and despised—the sinners, so much so that was rebuked as “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Luke 7:34) In a society built on legalism, Jesus preached, “Don’t judge one another.” In a community where people prided themselves on their holiness, he warned: “Don’t show off.” In a world of hate and war, and where people liked to draw lines excluding other people, he said, “Love your enemies.”

Jesus told the well-off to invite the poor and disabled to their social functions. He told those who trusted in their possessions for their security to be ready to give it away. He told leaders to serve, rather than be served. Instead of promoting himself, building on his fame as a teacher and a challenger of the status quo and trying to get a great following, he thinned the adoring, growing crowds with hard sayings and exacting terms of discipleship. Yes, Jesus was a radical and he caught flak for it.

So here in this chapter he tells stories to show what he is about and why he is a friend of sinners.

He tells three stories each with the same pattern.

Stories are important. People tell stories to provide meaning and understanding for life and existence. Without stories, life is just a bundle of facts, dates and faces. When asked who we are, we tell our stories. Stories are also important to God. In fact, the great Jewish storyteller, Elie Wiesel suggests, that perhaps one of the reasons God created people was because God loves stories. Stories put us in touch with God and ourselves and our world.

And it clear, not just from this chapter but throughout his life and ministry, Jesus loved to tell stories. Stories that challenge, stories that enlighten, stories that make us smile or cry, stories that provoke and disturb, and stories that inspire and give us hope.

In this chapter we see Jesus the story-teller at his very best. One of the characteristics of Jesus’ teachings is that he often took some of the most familiar situations in human life and used them to teach us something about God. In today’s Scripture passage, we have two of the three stories in this chapter. In verses 3-7 we have the story of the lost sheep and in verses 8-10 we have the story of the lost coin. And it is on that second story that I want to touch on this morning. In it we have a picture of a woman who lost not a ring but a valuable coin. Now, it might be difficult for us to relate to her situation. After all, our coins are worth so little. It is hard for us to imagine anyone going to such lengths to find a single coin. But this wasn’t just any coin.

One scholar has offered an interesting perspective on this story. Remember that Jesus begins the story by saying, “Suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?” “What’s the significance of the number ten?” he asks. It is suggested that these ten silver coins Jesus referred to were valuable because of the sentiment attached to them. Yes, the silver coin referred to her is a drachma, worth about one day’s wages, so she originally had ten days worth of wages here, but there seems to be more in play that that. One Jewish tradition was that when a man took a bride, he would give her a HOWGODFEELSABOUTUS 3

ribbon on which would be strung ten coins. She would wear this token of love on her head even as women do in the Middle East today. Like a wedding band these coins represented the marital relationship. Often on each piece of silver the name of the husband would be engraved. If a woman, for some reason were unfaithful to her husband, one of the coins would be taken out leaving a gap to show that she had disgraced her marriage vows. Now, if this is the background here, we can see why this woman was so frantically searching for the lost coin. It wasn’t as though she only lost a few dollars; her reputation and marriage were at stake.

And so she turns her house upside down looking for the coin. And fortunately she did find the coin. And when she found it, she called together her friends and neighbors and said, “Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.” Then Jesus adds the moral to the story, “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Do you hear that? And what this passage is asking us is: “Do you really believe what Jesus is saying? That there is joy in the presence of the angels of God (a Jewish way of saying in the presence of God) over one sinner who repents.” Do you believe that? Jesus must have believed it, because he made the same essential point three times in this chapter. First, in the parable of the lost sheep, then in the parable of the lost coin and finally in the Parable of the Lost Son which we know as the parable of the prodigal son. In each story, Jesus repeated this theme. Something is lost, sought after, found and in the finding there is rejoicing. And Jesus is saying this is what God is like. God rejoices over the sinner who is found, who comes home. Do you believe that? Do you believe that God rejoices every time a sinner repents? Is found” Finds his/her way back to God? For us to believe that there is rejoicing in heaven when a sinner repents is to believe, first of all, that sin is serious business. That alone is a stumbling block for many of us; an offense for us.

We don’t really take sin seriously. In fact, we don’t like the word “sin.” Talk about mistakes, failures, errors, slips, indiscretions, faux pas, but please, please don’t talk about sin. It is an arcane word, it is an uncomfortable word, it is a non-PC word. The whole idea of sin is disappearing from our culture. People no longer commit adultery, instead they have an affair. Corporate executives do not steal; they commit fraud or engage in “creative accounting”.

We’re like a legal client I heard about.

While working as a court-appointed attorney, Emory Potter was assigned a client who had been accused of criminal trespass. The lawyer probed his client with some general questions of background. He asked if he had any previous arrests or convictions. The man ashamedly said, “Yes, sir. I’ve got quite a few.” Then the attorney tried to find out if he had committed any serious crimes and asked, “Any felonies?” The man indignantly replied, “No sir! I specialize in misdemeanors!” That sounds like many of us. We know in our minds (or at least in our gut) that we are sinners, but we specialize in misdemeanors not in felonies—in small offenses and transgressions not in large ones. We excuse ourselves in the words of the title of a book I saw: Yes, Lord, I Have Sinned, But I Have Several Excellent Excuses. We blame other people, we blame our circumstances or past events, we excuse ourselves by blaming evil spirits—”The Devil made me

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do it!” In our minds, ours are excusable mistakes. And, after all, everybody sins. And because everybody does, it isn’t something serious.

British actor Peter Ustinov said he once dreamed he had been elected Pope. In his dream he saw smoke rising from the chimney announcing to the crowds below in St. Peter’s square that a new Pope had been chosen. He heard people saying he needed to go out on to the balcony at once and wave to the crowds, and that now that he was Pope he must choose a name. Under pressure he came up with a name. “Not Guilty the First!” he cried. The bishops were dismayed. “Don’t you mean Innocent” they asked. “I’m not Innocent,” Ustinov replied. “I’m Not Guilty.” That’s us. We’re not innocent; we are just not guilty. We’re not perfect, but our sins are really not that serious in our estimation. They’re misdemeanors—not felonies.

So we have redefined “sin”; as a society, and often in the church, we have redefined something uncomfortable, so that we don’t feel so bad about ourselves or feel so guilty. At least that is true for many people. Yes, there may be some very evil, wicked people out there. They may be sinners. But not us, not really. We’ll try harder; but no need to go to extremes. We are like the Pharisee in one of Jesus’ stories over in Luke 18 who thanked God he wasn’t like the sinful tax collector. His sins, the Pharisee’s pride and prejudice, judgementalism and self-righteousness, fell within a range of acceptability. Sin, if there is sin, is murder, rape, terrorism, genocide. But certainly not things like gossip, pride, envy, ingratitude, bitterness, impatience, resentment, jealousy, callousness, distorted priorities, anger, ambition, and lust. Lighten up.

And yet, according to Jesus, there really is no such thing as a misdemeanor. To those who prided themselves on never committing adultery, Jesus said if you have looked on a woman with lust, or a better translation for our modern day, if you look at a woman or a man, with the intention of arousing passion and lust that would lead to adultery or sex outside of marriage (think pornography) if you had the chance, then you have already committed adultery in your heart. To those who prided themselves that they had never committed violence, Jesus said that anyone who had ever said, “You fool,” was in danger of hell.

Sin, Jesus makes clear, is fundamentally an attitude of the heart. Just because you were never provoked enough to actually strike out at another human being doesn’t mean that you are innocent. Just because you have never been put in a situation where it became easy to cheat on your spouse doesn’t mean your heart is pure. Sin is serious business. And it crouches in every heart eager and waiting to spring forward to devour homes and to devour lives and to devour careers.

While sin may be word that doesn’t shock us or make us uncomfortable, the word “cancer” certainly does. It’s a dreaded word, a word the often involves a sense of despair and sometimes even hopelessness. Another term for cancer is malignancy. Medically, the word “malignant” describes a tumor of potentially unlimited growth that expands locally into adjoining tissue by invasion and systematically metastasizing into other areas of the body. Left alone, a malignancy tends to infiltrate and metastasize throughout the whole body and will eventually cause death. So it is no wonder that “cancer” and “malignancy” are such dreaded words.

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Sin is a spiritual and moral cancer. It has destructive and malignant, evil, cruel power. And left unchecked, it can spread throughout our entire inner being and contaminate every area of our lives. Even worse, is that it will often “metastasize” from us into the lives of the people around us.

Our attitudes, words, and actions, tend to have an effect on those around us (Ephesians 4:29). To tolerate those sins in our spiritual lives is as dangerous as to tolerate cancer in our bodies.

And bad as it is that sin affects us and those around us, the more important issue is how our sin affects God. Someone has described sin as “cosmic treason.” It is rebellion against God’s authority and sovereignty. So when I gossip, I am really rebelling against God. When I harbor resentful thoughts toward someone instead of forgiving them, I am rebelling against God. It is living with our own desires and own purposes at the center of our lives rather than those of God. Sin is not so much about breaking rules, as it is about breaking God’s heart. Sin is an offense against the very nature and character of God. The apostle John wrote, “Sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). All sin, even that sin that seems minor in our eyes, is lawlessness. It is a rejection of God’s moral will in favor of fulfilling our own desires. Sin is sin. Even those things that we tolerate in our lives are serious in God’s eyes. Our religious pride, our critical attitudes, our unkind speech about others, our impatience and anger, resentment, frustration and self-pity, even our anxiety (Philippians 4:6); all of these are serious in the sight of God and all of them are an offense against God. Now if what I have said is true, it looks pretty dark. And it is, except that there is some good news, really good news, and that good news is grace. Grace is God doing for us what we can’t do for ourselves. It is God making it possible for us to escape the destructive, malignant power of sin.

Yes, sin is serious business. That is the first thing you would have to believe if you believe there is rejoicing in heaven when a sinner comes home. In the second place, you would have to believe that people really can repent from their sin. If people really can’t repent from their sins, there can be no rejoicing. And unfortunately, there is a great deal of skepticism nowadays that people really can repent.

Norman Vincent Peale once told about addressing a Methodist conference in Atlanta, Georgia along with a well-known preacher and a much-loved local pastor. In his message Peale said that he believed that Jesus Christ could come into a life and change it, no matter how hopeless it seemed. After the service, when he and the other guest preachers were gathered in the minister’s office, they were told that a man wanted to see them—a somewhat disreputable-looking man— unshaven, unwashed, poorly dressed.

When the man came in, he was reeking of alcohol, but his mind was full of the message he had just heard. “Do you really believe that Jesus can help me?” he asked. “Without a doubt,” Peale replied. Then the man asked if they would pray with him. So the four ministers prayed with the man. When he went out, the well-known preacher said, “If that man changes, we’ll all be surprised, won’t we?” There it was, a flicker of doubt that change is possible for some people.

And it came from a minister!

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Six months later, Peale said he was sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, when he saw a man coming toward him, leading two attractive and well-behaved little girls by the hand.

The man was immaculately dressed.

At first Peale didn’t know who he was, but as he came closer, he saw that he was the same man he had met back in Atlanta. There was a smile on the man’s face, and he was humming “Amazing Grace” as he held out his hand in greeting. Peale said it was one of the most emotional and unforgettable encounters of his life.

People can change. It doesn’t happen easily. Most people who try fail. In fact, anyone who has ever studied Twelve-step programs and other attempts to transform human behavior will tell you that people almost never really change unless God is involved somehow. God can change the human heart. He has done it over and over again. And many of you could stand up and testify to that.

That is grace, scandalous, jaw-dropping, amazing grace. John Newton, the author of that hymn “Amazing Grace” which we will sing a little later in the service, had his life turned around by God’s grace—A slave trader who had become a servant of Jesus Christ. At the end of his life, Newton said to a friend, “My memory is nearly gone; but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great savior.”

To believe that there is rejoicing in heaven over the sinner who comes home is to believe that sin is serious business and that repentance is possible. Finally, it is to believe that God really does forgive the repentant sinner.

God really does forgive. You see, many people live joyless lives because even though they have come to Christ, they don’t really believe God has forgiven them. They don’t really take God seriously. They don’t realize how much God really loves to forgive. Forgiveness is what God is all about.

I love what Thomas Merton says: “Quit keeping score altogether and surrender yourself with all your sinfulness to God who sees neither the score nor the scorekeeper but only his child redeemed by Christ.” The apostle Paul tells us that for our sakes, Jesus who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). That is why, if we are in Christ, if we have joined our self to him in love and obedience, we are a new creation, everything old has passed away; everything has become new (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Now I want to be clear about something. I said just a while ago that forgiveness is what God is all about. This doesn’t mean that we presume on the grace of God. To presume on God’s grace is to take the attitude that it’s God’s business to forgive, so I can do whatever I want and whenever I come to God it is his job to forgive me. Paul wrote that God has forgiven us our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace (Ephesians 1:7). But forgiveness doesn’t mean overlooking or tolerating our sin. God never does that. Forgiveness rests on three things—God’s grace and our confession and our repentance. Confession means that I agree with God that I have sinned, that I haven’t always sought to know or do the will of God in my life. To confess means to say the same

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thing—God says that I am a sinner, that I’ve blown it, that I am guilty. And I agree. Repentance is to change, to align my life and will with that of God. Confession without repentance is empty.

It is cheap grace and cheap grace isn’t saving grace.

To be forgiven is to sesek to live forgiven. It is not easy, it can be a struggle. It means that we come face to face with our brokenness and weakness; the fact that in our own strength and will we can’t live the Christian life that God calls us to. But God doesn’t leave us to flounder or to live on our own.

Mike Yaconelli was cofounder of Youth Specialties. In one of his books he tells about the time when, dejected and demoralized, he made a five day retreat to L’Arche, a religious community in Toronto for the mentally and physically handicapped. He shares how liberating his experience of forgiveness and a new beginning was.

Yaconelli tells his story: Finally I accepted my brokenness…. I knew I was broken. I knew I was a sinner. I knew I continually disappointed God, but I could never accept that part of me. It was a part of me that embarrassed me. I continually felt the need to apologize, to run from my weaknesses, to deny who I was and concentrate on who I should be. I was broken, yes, but I was continually trying to never be broken again—or at least get to the place where I was very seldom broken…. …it became very clear to me that I had totally misunderstood the Christian faith. I came to see that it was in my brokenness, in my powerlessness, in my weakness that Jesus was made strong. It was in the acceptance of my lack of faith that God could give me faith.

When we recognize that we are sinners and we come to God in all honesty and in our brokenness and ask for God’s forgiveness, we are reminded that God is faithful and just and can forgive us of all our sins and we start over on a new journey. And it is Jesus who walks with us on that journey and it is Jesus who can make us strong. And if we keep our relationship with God fresh, if we renew our commitment to God every day, if we stay close to the church, if we spend some time in prayer and bible study and service, we find that God’s love transforms us and enables us to be and do what we can’t be and do on our own.

There is a story about a widow during the First World War who lost her only son and her husband. She was especially bitter because her neighbor, who had five sons, lost none of them.

One night while this woman’s grief was so terribly severe, she had a dream. An angel stood before her and said, “You might have your son back again for ten minutes. What ten minutes would you choose? Would you have him back as a little baby, a dirty-faced little boy, a schoolboy just starting to school, a student just completing high school, or as the young soldier who marched off so bravely to war?”

The mother thought a few minutes and then, in her dream, told the angel she would choose none of those times. “Let me have him back,” she said, “when as a little boy, in a moment of anger, he doubled up his fists and shook them at me and said, ‘I hate you! I hate you!’” Continuing to address the angel, she said: “In a little while his anger subsided and he came back to me, his dirty HOWGODFEELSABOUTUS 8

little face stained with tears, and put his arms around me. ‘Momma, I’m sorry I was so naughty. I promise never to be bad again and I love you with all my heart.’ Let me have him back then,” the mother sobbed, “I never loved him more than at that moment when he changed his attitude and came back to me.”

Jesus said that this is how God feels about each of us when we change our attitude and come back to him. Now God loves us whether or not we repent. But we don’t experience his love and his acceptance and his forgiveness until we change our attitude and come back to him.

Now what about your life? Where are you with God? Do you know that Sin is serious business?

Something that can sap the strength and meaning out of your life? Something that keeps you from becoming what God has created you to be and redeemed you in Christ to be?

For many of us, our whole view of what sin is and its seriousness needs to be reoriented. Sin is serious business. Like cancer it eats away at our inner being and affects those around us and especially affects our relationship with God But the bad news isn’t the last word. The Good News is that Christ came to redeem sinners. That Christ came to set us free from this spiritual cancer that threatens us and will eventually kill us if we reject the cure Jesus offers.

Sin is serious business. God will help us conquer our sins. Even more important, there is forgiveness—total, complete, unlimited forgiveness—available to all who request it. All are invited to experience God’s loving, life-transforming embrace. That’s why even the angels rejoice whenever one who has been lost is found.

Jesus realized this, and in this chapter, he strings together stories to show vividly how people are lost, and how they are found and how when people are found, find themselves in the embrace of God’s love and forgiveness offered in Christ, and there is rejoicing—in heaven yes, but also in our own lives and in the lives of those around us.

What about you? Where do you go from here? On your own way, charting your own course through life, allowing the cancer of sin to take over your soul or into the loving, caring, guiding embrace of God?

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Reflection Questions 1. What reactions, thoughts, questions do you have about today’s scripture passage?

2. Do you agree that our culture and even the church doesn’t take sin seriously? Why do you think this is the case? Do you agree that even in the church we don’t like to talk about “sin”?

3. If you lost something very valuable to you, how would you feel, and what actions would you take?

4. When was the last time you honestly confessed to God your sins and asked for forgiveness?

5. Do you agree that people can repent of their sin? That people can be changed?

Can you think or share an example?

6. Have you experienced God’s forgiveness? Would you say that your life is “joy-full” or joyless”?

7. What questions do you have about this sermon? This topic?

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