The Heart of God Towards Sinners

Luke 15.1-7

Introduction

Three parables about God’s seeking love for sinners and their reconciliation with God.

Why Jesus Told These Three Parables    v1-2

-To correct the wrong understanding of God, repentance, and wrong attitude to sinners of the Scribes and Pharisees.

-To show the Scribes and Pharisees the purpose of his ministry and how they failed in theirs.

The Parable and the Summary  v3-7  

-How would the Scribes and Pharisees treat their animals?

-Finding the lost sheep and bringing it home with joy.

-The joy over a lost sinner should surpass the joy of a lost sheep.

-God values sinners more than sheep and rejoices over repentant sinners.

Conclusion

We fall short by isolating ourselves from sinners and by our lack of seeking the salvation of sinners.

SERMON NOTES

The Heart of God Toward Sinners                 Luke 15.1-7

The three parables of Luke 15 are well known and especially the parable of the prodigal son. Jesus told these three parables to teach the Scribes and Pharisees about God’s seeking love for sinners and the reconciliation of sinners to God. He also told these three parables to the Scribes and Pharisees to explain to them why he ate with tax collectors and sinners.

I would like to go through Luke 15 with you over the next few weeks so we too can rejoice in our God for His seeking love for sinners. If you are here as a sinner this morning I pray that you will see God’s seeking heart for you. And if you are here this morning as a saint, which is a sinner saved by God’s grace, I pray that you will come to love your God in greater measure as you see His character in these parables.

The first two verses of Luke 15 help us to understand why Jesus told these three parables so let’s start with these two verses. [Read v1-2]

The crowds were drawing near Jesus to hear him speak. The common people were pressing in to hear what Jesus had to say because he was approachable and had a genuine love for the common people. Luke specifically mentions that this crowd was made up of tax collectors and sinners.

Tax-collectors were hated by the Jewish people for betraying them by supporting the Romans and getting rich on the backs of their own people. Tax collectors were despised by the Scribes and Pharisees. Sinners were the common people whom the Scribes and Pharisees did not consider pure before God.

There were also Scribes and Pharisees in the crowd. Scribes were men who diligently studied the Law of God and interpreted the Law for the people. They were also called lawyers because the settled disputes for people according to the Law. Ezra was a Scribe. After the Babylonian captivity important Rabbis became more focused on interpreting the Law and defining how the commandments were to be kept. In this way they added many commands to the Law which went beyond God’s intention for Law. This was done in order to prevent the people from disobeying the Law of God. Scribes were experts in these interpretations. Pharisees were a group of men who gained prominence and political power during the Maccabean period. They were determined to keep the Law of God and its many detailed commandments and to remain ritually pure before God at any cost. So you had a Law that became more and more detailed in its requirements and a group of men who were willing to submit to it and believed they were more righteous than others, and acceptable to God for their strict behavior.

These Scribes and Pharisees were grumbling about Jesus because he allowed sinners to listen to his teaching and he also ate with them. To be near sinners and especially to eat with them were activities, according to the Scribes and Pharisees, that would make Jesus unclean and unworthy before God. The behavior of Jesus also showed acceptance and recognition of sinners. Jesus knew that the attitude of the Pharisees to sinners was not God’s attitude to sinners and wanted the Scribes and Pharisees to understand that, so he told them these three parables.

Now for you to understand a little better how the Pharisees understood God’s view of sinners and God’s heart toward sinners I would like to read to you from Barclay’s commentary on Luke 15.1-2. “It was an offence to the Scribes and Pharisees that Jesus companied and associated with men and women who, by the orthodox, were labeled as sinners. The Pharisees gave to people who did not keep the law a general classification. They were called The People of the Land. There was a complete barrier between the Pharisees and The People of the Land. To marry a daughter to one of them was like exposing her, bound and helpless, to a lion. The Pharisaic regulation laid it down, ‘When a man is one of the People of the Land, entrust no money to him, take no testimony from him, trust him with no secret, do not appoint him guardian of an orphan, do not make him the custodian of charitable funds, do not accompany him on a journey’. A Pharisee was forbidden to be the guest of any such man, or to have him as his guest. He was even forbidden, so far as it was possible, to have any business dealings with him, or to buy anything from him or sell anything to him. It was the deliberate Pharisaic aim to avoid every contact with The People of the Land, the people who did not observe the petty details of the law. Obviously, they would be shocked to the core at the way in which Jesus companied with people who were not only rank outsiders, but sinners, contact with whom would necessarily defile. We will understand these parables more fully if we remember that the strict Jew said, not ‘There is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents,’ but ‘There is joy in heaven over one sinner who is obliterated before God’. They looked sadistically forward not to the saving but to the destruction of the sinner.”

It is also important to know how the Scribes and Pharisees understood acceptance by God. The Scribes and Pharisees did call sinners to repent and to turn from their sin. Their call to repentance meant that the sinner should begin and continue to keep all the details of the Law. Only then God would accept them. To the Scribes and Pharisees God’s acceptance was the reward of repentance and obedience to the Law as they defined keeping the Law. Jesus came to teach something different. Jesus taught that God’s acceptance came at the moment of repentance as a free gift of God’s love and grace. God’s acceptance was not something earned but something given by God to the person willing to turn toward Him. Jesus knew that only God could give the power to live a new life acceptable to Him. Jesus taught that God receives repentant sinners and then changes them into saints. The Pharisees taught that a repentant sinner must change first and keep the Law in order to be accepted by God.

Finally, the Rabbis agreed that God accepted repentant sinners but the idea of God seeking out sinners would severally shock them. Jesus is trying to teach these Scribes and Pharisees that God loves sinners, seeks sinners, and leads sinners to repentance and gives them new life, rejoicing over them. To the Pharisees Jesus was a heretic who was stirring up the crowds and was teaching a false view of God. Jesus was also wrongly accepting sinners before they ever changed. In teaching these parables, Jesus wanted to give the Scribes and Pharisees a right understanding about God and repentance and the heart of God. So he told them the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son.

Jesus must have been both angry and hurt at the cold loveless religion of the Scribes and Pharisees who did not know or care to know the heart of God for lost sinners. The Scribes and Pharisees were so caught up in their self-righteousness that they lost contact with God. Instead they religiously and legalistically served the Law of God. Without fellowship with the heart of God, their own hearts grew cold to the lost.

Each of these three parables has a particular emphasis on God’s saving process. The parable of the lost sheep emphasizes the lost condition of the sinner. The parable of the lost coin emphasizes God’s diligent search of the sinner. And the parable of the lost son emphasizes the restoration to fellowship with God of the sinner. In the first two parables the Pharisees are addressed directly in the summary of the parable. In the last parable the Pharisees are part of the story as the older brother.

Now lets spend a few minutes looking at the parable of the lost sheep and we will continue with this parable next time. Jesus begins the parable with a question to the Scribes and Pharisees. “Would they not, if they had a flock of 100 sheep and discovered that one of them was missing, go out and seek that lost sheep?” Jesus appeals to their sense of value and responsibility of ownership. In that agrarian culture it would be unheard of for the shepherd not to go out and look for his lost sheep. That would be hard hearted and cruel. Even if the shepherd was only able to bring back proof of the sheep’s death, he would have fulfilled his duty and shown that he valued the sheep by going out to look for it.

In the OT and also in John 10, we find a contrast between the good shepherd who lays his life down for the sheep and the hired hand who does not care for the sheep and runs away from danger and hardship. In this parable Jesus is emphasizing the value, love and responsible care of the shepherd for his sheep. Would not the Pharisees respond in this way for one of their animals? How much more is a man valued in the sight of God.

The shepherd would certainly leave the care of the 99 in responsible hands so there is no abandonment of the sheep that are left behind. He goes out (present tense) and continues to look for the lost sheep until he finds it. I read that a lost sheep eventually lies down and gives up and will not try to find its way back so unless the shepherd goes out to find the lost sheep, that sheep will not return to the flock.

When the shepherd finds the lost sheep, he ties up its front and back legs and carries it home on his shoulders. The long search and all the effort of the search is swallowed up in the joy of having found the lost sheep. The shepherd carries the lost sheep home rejoicing.

The celebration of joy in finding the lost sheep continues when he arrives home. The shepherd calls together his friends and neighbors saying to them “rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost”. These friends and neighbors would be fully sympathetic with the joy of this shepherd and gladly celebrate with him because what was lost has been found. If there is so much rejoicing over a lost sheep that was found, how much more rejoicing should take place over a sinner that repents.

In verse 7, when Jesus says “Just so” he is saying to the Scribes and Pharisees that God is like the owner of 100 sheep who has lost one and goes out and looks for the lost sheep until he finds it, and then rejoices in the find and calls others to rejoice with him. Jesus is telling the Pharisees that God is not like the Pharisees make God out to be, a God who wants nothing to do with sinners, who rejects sinners, and who rejoices in the destruction of sinners. The God of heaven actively seeks lost sinners in order to bring them back to Himself, and God and all of heaven rejoice over a lost sinner who repents and returns to God.

Jesus also is explaining to them the purpose of his own ministry in teaching and eating with tax collectors and sinners. As God’s shepherd, Jesus is seeking and saving that which is lost (Luke 19.10). The self-righteous isolation of the Pharisees is not a reflection of the heart of God.

Let me close this morning with a look at our own lives in the light of this parable. We can easily thank God that we are not like the Pharisees in our understanding of God and our attitude to sinners. We believe that God loves and seeks sinners and does not delight in their destruction. We are not like the Pharisees in our understanding of God but we do fall short in seeking the lost with the seeking love of God for sinners. We do not isolate ourselves from sinners because of self-righteousness but we do isolate ourselves from sinners out of fear, an unwillingness to inconvenience ourselves, and a lack of desire to see sinners come to Christ. There are many in Welland who are lost and someone needs to go out and find them and bring them back home.

There are a number of other things to say about this parable and we will begin next time with this parable and then move on to the parable of the lost coin.