Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Lost and Found (Matthew 18:10-14)
Date: January 28, 2024
I lost a sock in the wash the other day. I finally found it Wednesday night. The first thing I exclaimed when I did, though, was, “Oh great, now this will mess up my illustration for Sunday.” For a full two weeks there, though, if you were to go and open my sock drawer, you would have found one sock neatly folded and lying on top of the rest of the rolled pairs underneath it. I’ve lost socks before, but they usually turned up faster than this one. As it turns out, it got stuck in the arm of my light jacket. Since the last time I wore and washed it, though, it got cold and it just sat in our coat closet with the sock sitting in its sleeve until I put it on Wednesday and made my happy discovery. I’ll confess, though, as much as that one, lone sock lying on the top of the pile bothered me every single time I opened my sock drawer, I didn’t invest much time searching for its sole mate. It was just a sock after all. If I didn’t ever find the match, I would have eventually thrown it away (at which point, of course, I would have immediately discovered the other one). I have other pairs. And, when those wear out, I’ll just buy a new pack. I actually look forward to doing that every few years. There aren’t very many things that feel better than a brand-new pair of socks.
My guess is that you’ve lost something fairly inconsequential like a sock before. And while maybe you have the kind of OCD personality that went crazy looking for whatever it was, you probably just let it go and moved on. I don’t know, perhaps you are wearing mismatched socks right now because you’ve experienced this very thing twice and just went with it. But I suspect you’ve also lost something that carried a bit more significance as well. And my further guess is that you weren’t quite so relaxed at that loss. Maybe you lost your wallet or a credit card. Perhaps it was a piece of jewelry like a wedding ring. You could have lost your phone and saw your whole life vanish before your eyes. It could have been something you borrowed from someone else and had to return it. When Micah was preparing for the Christmas play last month, Wes sent his costume home with us. Included with the costume was a bright yellow bowtie. Sometime between when he tried on the costume one night and when we took him to rehearsal the next day, the bowtie disappeared. As near as I can tell, it vanished into thin air. We tore the house apart looking for that thing. We finally ordered like three more on Amazon in hopes that one of them would work and get here fast enough to matter. We never did find it.
As a general rule, the more precious something is to us, the more resources we will leverage to get it back if we lose it. For a sock, you just kind of let it go. For something that belongs to someone else, you put some real effort into getting it back. For a priceless family heirloom, you move heaven and earth to find it again. This morning, as we continue in our new series, Leverage, journeying through Jesus’ thoughts on what life in God’s kingdom looks like in Matthew 18, we are going to talk about just how much God values us.
This morning we are in the second part of our series, Leverage. The whole idea for this series is that we serve a God who specializes in using what He has for our benefit. He consistently takes all of His abilities and resources as the God of the universe, and leverages them to make our lives better, to make us better at life. The primary example of this, of course, is His willingness to sacrifice His only Son on our behalf on the cross. Well, because of this character trait that is so foundational to who God is, if we are at all interested in a relationship with Him, He expects us to follow suit. In Matthew 18, prompted by a question from the disciples about who is the greatest person in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus casts this kingdom vision for us in some really important and powerful ways.
Last week we started with Jesus’ laying out the what for us. He cast this vision for following God’s pattern of leveraging what He has for us in our own lives. Or, as we put it then, the greatest people are the ones most committed to making those around them great. This week, we are going to see Jesus set the why before us. And, true to form with all of the whys associated with doing life in God’s kingdom, our call to this ethic of putting others first is not rooted in a command, but a relationship. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way back to Matthew 18 with me, and let’s see what Jesus has to say next.
Remember that what Jesus was saying here was prompted by the disciples’ question of greatness in the kingdom of heaven. In His response to them, Jesus called one of the little children who was nearby to stand right in the middle of the group. This whole conversation seems to have taken place, not during one of the times when Jesus was surrounded by a huge crowd, but in a more private time. The fact that there was a little child near enough for Jesus to call over to use as an illustration suggests that our common mental image of Jesus walking around with just His twelve disciples following Him probably isn’t correct. It was a larger group than that, and apparently included some families. We know that at least Peter was married, and possibly others of them were as well. Given that Jews prioritized having big families, it could be that this child belonged to one of the disciples. You can imagine Jesus’ lovingly putting His hands on the child’s shoulders—like a father might with his own children—as He talked with the group.
After hitting the group with some pretty hard truth that we saw last week, Jesus softened things up just a bit as He continued. Look at this with me starting in v. 10: “See to it that you don’t despise one of these little ones, because I tell you that in heaven their angels continually view the face of my Father in heaven.” Now, if the last thing Jesus said about the importance of leveraging our resources to advance the people around us, but especially those not as far along in their journeys of faith as we are, didn’t get your attention, this definitely should. These folks have angels assigned to them who have constant face time with God. Okay, but what does that mean?
Well, this is a very commonly used verse to give credence to the idea that everyone has a guardian angel whose job it is to watch over them all the time. That’s certainly a nice thought. The trouble is, there isn’t anything else in the Scriptures that gives any kind of additional weight to this idea. The writer of Hebrews describes angels as “ministering spirits sent out to serve those who are going to inherit salvation,” but that’s about it. What we seem to be able to say is that God assigns angels to serve us in some capacity, but we don’t know exactly what that capacity is. It’s dangerous to build a theological idea on the foundation of a single verse. What exactly Jesus means here, then, isn’t clear, but the idea that we each have a “guardian angel” is probably not one we can support—at least the way the culture around us so often presents it. The idea that God has compassion and concern for those who are still growing in their faith and relationship with Him, on the other hand, is one we can hang onto.
That was v. 10. The next thing Jesus says is almost certainly not found in what some of your Bibles label as v. 11. In fact, if your Bible is like mine, v. 11 isn’t even there. If you don’t see v. 11 in the text, you can probably find a reference to it in the chicken scratch at the bottom of the page. It says, “for the Son of Man has come to save the lost.” What on earth is this? Why is this verse left out of the text?
This is actually something we see in a few different places in the various New Testament documents. There’s lots we could say about this, but I don’t want to go into that particular patch of weeds this morning. That being said, it’s right here in the text in front of us so we need to talk about it for at least a second. What’s going on here is this. We don’t have any of the original documents that guys like Matthew here actually wrote. Those “autographs” as they are called, all originally written in Greek, are long lost to history. Instead, what we have are copies of copies of copies. Now, a critic here could try to make an argument that this means we can’t really trust anything we see in our Bibles to be what the original authors actually wrote. Not so fast. We may have copies of copies, but we have a pretty good idea how those copies were made. We also have lots and lots of different copies from different places and different times. And of all these different copies, there is a remarkably small amount of deviation from copy to copy given the historical span they cover. And, none of this deviation affects any significant doctrine, or material speaking directly to essential Christian beliefs.
Well, using a process that is carefully guided by a few different rules that we can talk about another time, scholars have assembled what they are actually very confident is what the original authors actually wrote for each different New Testament document. The preservation process of the Old Testament is a bit different, but we’ll have to talk about that more another time. In nearly all the cases where our copies differ from one another, the variation is on something like the placement of a comma. That’s not nothing, of course, but there are a few instances—like this one—where there’s a bit more than a comma or a single word about which scholars aren’t totally sure. They still have a pretty high degree of confidence in what the original text said because of what the oldest and earliest copies say, but they aren’t 100% sure. So, in these cases, they’ll either put the questionable verse in brackets, or they’ll put the whole thing down in the footnotes. This just means that they’re pretty sure the original author—Matthew in this case—didn’t write that, but because some of the later and generally reliable manuscripts include it, they don’t want to leave it out of the text entirely.
Again, though, for the things we aren’t sure about here in vv. 10-11, we are sure about what matters most. And that is Jesus’ bigger point. God is concerned about us. Starting in v. 12, Jesus tells a short parable that makes this idea a whole lot clearer and stronger for us. It also gets us pointed to where we are going this morning. Listen to what Jesus says here: “What do you think? If someone has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, won’t he leave the ninety-nine on the hillside and go and search for the stray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over that sheep more than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. In the same way, it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones perish.”
So, what is Jesus doing here? Well, He’s talking to a bunch of people who were either shepherds themselves or who knew shepherds and how they operated. Keeping sheep was a pretty common thing in first century Judea. It’s still pretty common in that part of the world. As common as shepherding was in the first century as far as a profession goes, shepherds almost never kept their own sheep. Shepherds were like day laborer construction workers or perhaps fast food employees. It was still a noble profession because pretty much every profession has the opportunity to glorify God when done well, but it wasn’t a very highly celebrated…or compensated…profession. Poor guys did it because they couldn’t find more lucrative work elsewhere. This means that shepherds were keeping someone else’s sheep. They were responsible for those sheep. If one got lost, it wasn’t something they could afford to say, “Well, whatever, I’ll get more on the next breeding cycle.” They had to go find that sheep. It was precious to them.
Because of this, when this one sheep gets lost, they go and find it. They go look everywhere. They cover the mountain. They go to the next mountain. They’ll search the whole range in order to find this one sheep. Never mind the fact that they have 99 others. They’re safe back where they belong. This one that has wandered off is missing, and so it is the one that gets all the attention until it is found. Every single sheep matters. A lot. When one is in danger or lost for some reason, getting it back is worth all the effort the shepherd can give to it.
But did you notice how Jesus phrases this whole thing? It’s all in the form of a question. He says, “Wouldn’t a shepherd go and do this?” He phrased it that way on purpose. He was trying to elicit a response. The expected response to Jesus’ question is, “Yes, the shepherd would go and do that.” Every single person there listening to Him knew that was the right answer because if they were in that position, they’d do the same. When Micah’s bowtie went missing, we searched everywhere for it. For days. Now, that’s probably not the best illustration since we ultimately didn’t find it, but you know what I’m saying. When something gets lost that matters, you go and search for it. And when you find it, you throw a little party. The party may not consist of much more than your doing a little happy dance, but you’re really excited about finding what was lost.
What Jesus wants us to understand here is that this is what God is like. God is the shepherd in this story. We are the sheep. When we get lost for some reason, He goes and finds us. And the thing is, sheep don’t get lost by accident. They get lost because they wander off from their shepherd and the rest of the flock. There’s probably a sermon in there somewhere, but I’ll just leave the point where it is for now. When we wander off from the Shepherd and the flock and find ourselves lost, He puts everything He has into finding us. He puts everything He has into finding you. He leverages all of His resources and abilities to seek you out in order to bring you back. And if He succeeds in that effort, He throws a little party. That’s what Jesus was getting at there in v. 14. God doesn’t want to lose anybody. Everybody is worth finding to Him. Everybody is worth saving. Everybody is worth all the effort He can put toward it. That’s simply who He is. God leverages all of His resources for you.
Now, Jesus doesn’t make this next point explicit here, but it sure is implied. If God is this way, and if we are going to do life in His kingdom, then we have to be this way too. Let me give you two reasons for that. First and foremost, we have to be this way because God calls us to it. Leveraging what we have for the sake of those around us lies right at the heart of Jesus’ command to love one another. This is because Jesus didn’t just tell us to love one another, did He? He didn’t just give us that general command and then leave us to figure out exactly what it meant. He was far more specific than that. He told us to love one another as He loved us. And He gave that command—the one and only command we are expected to follow if we are going to live in a covenant relationship with God in Christ—just after He washed the disciples’ feet, and just before He let Himself be nailed to a cross to pay the price for our sins. In other words, this command to be intentionally committed to seeing those around us become more fully who God designed them to be, a commitment that necessarily includes leveraging our resources for their sake in the effort, was sandwiched right in between the two most powerful examples of Jesus’ doing just that. He leveraged everything He had including His own life for our benefit. God leverages all of His resources for you. So, when He told us to love one another as He loved us, what He meant is clear. We are to follow suit.
Here’s the second reason this mindset is so fundamental for followers of Jesus to have down. We reflect the character of whatever is primary in our lives. We can say whatever we want about what we value most. Our lifestyle tells the real truth. You know this is true because I suspect you’ve seen this happen before in the life of someone around you. This is especially true if you have had or been around kids growing up through their teenage years. Depending on what phase they were in and which individual or group they were following at the moment, they looked totally different from one phase to the next. Their clothes changed, their interests changed, their friends changed, their attitude changed, all on the basis of whatever was primary for them in a given moment. And adults are not immune from this either.
Given that, if all of what we have been talking about this morning is central to the character of God, if it is really true that God leverages all of His resources for you (and that is indisputably true), then if God is really primary in our lives, this character is going to be reflected in us. You can tell when a person is following Jesus closely and well because she becomes so others-focused. I don’t mean that in an unhealthy way that might stem from a deep-seated insecurity. Rather, this is in the healthiest way imaginable. She takes obvious delight in serving others…just like the God she serves. If we are not active in leveraging our resources for the sake of those around us, that’s an indication that at least in that moment, God is not primary in our lives. There may be any number of other things filling that role in the moment, but it’s not God. God leverages all of His resources for you. If we are following Him, we’ll be doing the same thing for the people around us.
So then, if all of this is the case, there’s one thing I want you to know, and there’s one thing I want you to do. First the thing to know: God leverages all of His resources for you. I want you to leave today being absolutely confident on that point. You are of inestimable value to Him. Any thought you’ve ever entertained to the contrary is simply not true. It’s a lie. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. Remember, sheep get lost because they wander off. It’s their own fault they’re lost. The Shepherd doesn’t care. He loves them too much to leave them lost, so He leverages all of His resources to find them. God leverages all of His resources for you.
Now the thing to do: The Shepherd goes and finds the lost sheep no matter who it is. If you aren’t the lost sheep right now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any lost sheep. There are plenty of other lost sheep. If God leverages all of His resources for you, He also leverages them for the other sheep who are lost. If you have been found, then your role now is to help in His effort to find the other lost sheep. Much of the work He does in finding lost sheep happens through the lives of the found sheep. Just like God leveraged all of His resources for you, then you need to be ready and willing to leverage all of your resources for those around you who are lost.
The apostle Paul put it like this in his second letter to the Corinthian church: “Therefore, since we know the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade people. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your consciences. We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you an opportunity to be proud of us, so that you may have a reply for those who take pride in outward appearance rather than in the heart. For if we are out of our mind, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ compels us, since we have reached this conclusion, that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for the one who died for them and was raised.”
If you have been found, you now live for Him. And living for Him means joining in His effort to leverage all of His resources for those who are still lost. God leverages all of His resources for you. You can—you must—do the same for the one anothers around you. Not just you, though. This is the call for all of us who follow Jesus. This is the call on the church. We are to be for our community in ways that are powerful, profound, and practical, bringing the love of God—the love that leverages everything it has for others—to bear so that they may taste and see the life that is truly life. We do this because our God does. God leverages all of His resources for you. Let’s be like that.