Luke 15:1-10:

REPENTANCE IS BEING FOUND BY JESUS

Prayer: Lord Jesus: O be my Counselor, my Pattern and my Guide; and through this desert land still keep me by Your side. Let my feet not run astray, nor rove, nor seek the crooked way. I love Your Shepherd’s voice, Your watchful eyes shall keep my wandering soul among Your many sheep. You feed Your flock, You call our names, be pleased to bear me as Your lamb. Amen! (Isaac Watts, ELH #289 v. 3-4)

St. Luke 15:1-10 (v. 5-6). “And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when He comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ ”
Lord, this is Your Word and these are Your words. Sanctify us by the truth; Your Word is truth. By Your Word of truth, Lord, find us when we’re lost. Amen.

Dear fellow redeemed in Christ, for whom our repentance is His joy: Grace and peace come to you from God the Father and Jesus our Lord. Amen.

The Pharisees and scribes grumbled against Jesus because “this Man receives sinners and eats with them” – because He welcomed sinners. Their point is that if Jesus is truly the Christ, sent from God, then He would never welcome sinners into His presence. He would only want holy people around Him and He would send obvious sinners packing.

But Jesus reveals in these parables of Luke 15 that God has a way for sinners to be in His presence, to be welcomed by Him: by repentance.

Repentance can be a bit of a scary word. To us, repentance feels sad or dreary. It’s focusing on your sins – the bad things that you thought, said, or did, and the good things that you failed to do. Repenting seems like reliving your sins, something you don’t want to do. But it’s really the Old Adam, your sinful flesh, that thinks this way. The sinful nature doesn’t want to repent, doesn’t want to hear about repentance, flees from it.

But in Luke 15, Jesus pictures what repentance actually is. He tells three parables, three picture-stories – the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost (Prodigal) Son – that picture what repentance is. It’s being found by Jesus. It’s not sad or scary, it’s joyful. That’s what Jesus shows here. In this gospel lesson, we hear the first two of these parables.

Jesus starts with a shepherd who has a hundred sheep and says, “If he loses one of them, doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”

With the words “the one which is lost,” Jesus is picturing our sin. This includes all the ways we stray from Him like lost sheep, how we get all tangled up, off on our own, doing our own thing. This is when you make light of sin, you listen to the world and the devil saying it’s no big deal, lighten up. If you picture how the lost sheep gets its flesh torn and dirty, this pictures how in your sinning you don’t just hurt others but you hurt yourself, and you make yourself unclean – not only in God’s sight, but in your conscience – that your conscience is unclean and has no rest. Imagine the wolves being drawn to the little sheep’s cries, this is like the devil eager to devour us; he’s the accuser, he makes your sin a bigger deal and puts you in doubt that God could love you, and you never hear the end of it. Like the lost sheep you’re just stuck, caught and captured by sin and Satan.

What can the lost sheep do to extricate itself from its trouble? Nothing. All it can do is cry out. All we can do is cry out because of our sins, be sad over what our sins have done, see how it’s hurt others and ourselves.

The little sheep suddenly feels the shepherd picking it up, and “he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.” Oh, the familiar shepherd’s voice that says nothing but “safety,” and “security,” and “love.” But strangely he doesn’t scold the sheep. Jesus is showing how unlike us God is. He just rejoices.

Now, what the sheep didn’t see is this part: that what the shepherd had done was to “leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it.” You can picture the great effort the shepherd goes to, how many times he called out, what dangers he braved, how all his thought was the sheep’s life and safety, how late the hour when he finally found the sheep. Jesus is showing us God’s heart for each soul.

Martin Luther says: “I, the lost sheep, which has strayed, I am anxious and fearful, and would gladly be good and have a gracious God and peace of conscience, but here I am told that He is as anxious for me as I am for Him! I am anxious and in pain about how I shall come to Him, but He is in anxiety and worry and desires nothing else than to bring me to Himself. Behold, if we could thus portray His heart, and press it into our own heart, that He has such a gushing desire, anxiety, and longing for us, then we could not dread or fear Him, but would joyfully run up to Him and abide with Him alone, and hear no other doctrine. For wherever a different doctrine comes, it will certainly accomplish nothing, except only to hunt us down and torment us, so that we can find neither rest nor peace. Therefore Christ says, Matthew 11:28-29, ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,’ ” etc.
In what the shepherd does – off stage, as it were, unseen by the sheep – Jesus is displaying all that God does to save and bring us into His embrace:

• First is all He did through the prophets and in His promises; then how Jesus came down and fulfilled it all, wore Himself out for our salvation, spent Himself in His passion and death, laid down His life for the sheep and took it up again when He rose from the dead.

• As our living Shepherd, ascended to heaven, it’s what He does day by day to bring us back. He is still sparing no effort. Working through the Word is His shepherding work. He’s still the one doing it, even if we His sheep don’t see it visibly. His means for “finding” His sheep, is actually repentance; as Jesus said, His church’s mission is “that repentance and remission of sins be preached” (Lk 24:47).

In our sinning and straying from Jesus’ side, we become the “one which is lost.” We lose our way. You may use God’s grace as an excuse to sin or make light of it. You may separate your life as a Christian from your life in the world in your vocations. You may be fearful about the world. Because of being sinned against, you may view yourself as damaged goods, and lose the ability to trust and to see others as neighbors God wills you to love.

The way you become the one not which is lost but – past tense – “was lost,” for He – Christ your Shepherd – “has found” you, is by repentance.

Repentance is not just feeling sorry for your sins. As we Lutherans confess, repentance consists of two parts: The first part is contrition, or being sorry for your sins. That’s the work of God’s Law, to show you your sins so that you say to God: “I have sinned against You. I’m sorry.” But the second part of repentance is faith, repentance always includes faith: hearing the Gospel that God forgives all your sins and gives you a clean conscience – and you believe Him. You believe that Jesus’ blood cleanses you from all sin.

That’s repentance. It isn’t something you do. It’s done to you. Look at the second parable: Jesus pictures a woman who has ten silver coins – each one worth a full day’s wage – and says, “if she loses one coin, she lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and searches carefully until she finds it.”

Like the sheep couldn’t do anything to save itself, the lost coin is even a better picture of this: it did nothing but sit on the floor under the dust. The woman with her sweeping and bending down and crouching over and looking for it, did all the work. So repentance – the work of the Law to make us sorry for our sin, and the Gospel to bring forgiveness and give us faith – is all God’s work.

All we do is receive – and look what we receive! We receive joy!

Both these parables end with this picture of supreme joy. The shepherd calls his friends and neighbors together for a celebration; the woman, the same. The shepherd says: “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” She says, “Rejoice with me for I have found the piece which I lost!”

So repentance isn’t drudgery. It’s joy! That’s what Jesus says. He says to all the angels and saints (His friends and neighbors), “Rejoice with Me!” – about each forgiven sinner! Repentance is being found by Jesus. It’s being like the sheep placed on Jesus’ shoulders, taking a joy ride home. It’s being picked up out of the grime like the coin, and having the dirt wiped off, being shined up and treated as a precious treasure. That’s what you are to Him. A precious treasure and a something to hold close to His heart.

That’s what repentance is: not something to be avoided, but to revel in it. In that light, I’m announcing today that as a church we’ll schedule times for private confession and absolution. It isn’t a Roman Catholic practice, it’s Christian, it’s Lutheran. In fact, only the Lutheran Church has the right teaching and practice of private confession. You can do this any time, of course; but scheduling it gives it the importance and priority that God wants it to have among us. We should know now, that it’s not drudgery or for hanging your head. The main thing – and our emphasis especially as Lutherans – is the absolution, the forgiveness that Christ Himself personally bestows through the pastor. It’s for God to give you joy!

At the end of each parable Jesus says what we are to know about this forgiveness – that when you receive the absolution in private or in the church service, there is great “joy in heaven over one sinner who repents,” and even “joy in the presence of the angels of God.”

We need to hear this: that as you are sorry for your sins and believe God’s forgiveness, heaven rejoices. God rejoices. He rejoices over you.

This gives you confidence in life, lasting confidence. It gives purpose. This enables you to live with joy, being given a clear conscience. It enables you to not envy, to fight discontentment, to take joy in your callings, to fight fear and worry, to not live just for yourself, to not separate your faith from your life in the world. Fighting we shall be victorious – fighting the devil, fighting fear, fighting discouragement, fighting sin, with His help, but also confident for we know He casts our sins into the depths of the ocean, and that you can cast all your anxiety on Him, for He cares for you.

Hear the hymn of joy that God, the angels and the saints are singing over you. Join in! Rejoice with Him, in heart and voice and life! Amen!