TEXT: Luke 15

SUBJECT: Luke #57: What Do You Think of Sinners?

The Russian novelist, Feodor Dostoyevski, said the degree of civilization can be seen in its prisoners. Are they real persons—made in the Image of God—and deserving our compassion and help? Or, are they devils to be ignored, hated, locked up and executed in bunches? A society can be judged by what it thinks of its prisoners.

In the same way, a Christian can be judged by what he thinks of sinners—I mean really bad sinners. Are they monsters to be hated and stayed away from? Or, are they, too, made in the Image of God and in need of our pity, prayers, and service?

This is the question our chapter is asking: What do you think of sinners? I don’t mean people who mess up now and then—we all do that! But I mean real sinners—husbands who have betrayed their wives; mothers who have aborted their babies; kids deep in the drug culture. What about loud-mouthed atheists, fanatical feminists, and flaming homosexuals? What do you think of them?

Our culture tells us to be tolerant of them. I agree, of course, we should be tolerant, but, that’s not what the culture means. By "tolerance" it means approval if not celebration. No one who believes the Bible and feels anything for his neighbor can encourage him in ways that must lead to destruction.

But, in not wanting to champion evil ways, it’s easy to fall into the opposite extreme: hating not just the sin, but also the sinner. And not feeling for his plight, but looking down on him as being worse than we are by nature and less deserving of God’s favor than we are.

The Scribes and Pharisees were this way. They looked down on publicans and sinners and resented the Lord Jesus Christ for having any concern for them. The Messiah—they thought—would come to congratulate the righteous, not to receive (or welcome) sinners.

Their expectation was wrong because their view of God was wrong. They thought the Lord was strict, unsympathetic, and eager to judge the wicked.

Had they never read their Bibles? The Scribes were Old Testament scholars, theologians, and professors of Church History. The Pharisees were mostly laymen, of course, but they claimed to love the Word of God and to know it well. Yet these lifelong students of the Word had distorted the features of God beyond recognition. What they had done over time was to create God in their own image. To make His heart as small and empty and black as their own.

In the three stories of our chapter, the Lord Jesus Christ compares His Father to the men who claimed to represent Him in the world. The comparison is not flattering—not to the Scribes and Pharisees—and not to us either, if we’re like them.

The goals of the sermon, therefore, are to help you see God as He really is and to make you more like Him than you are.

In the first story, God is compared to a shepherd. If a shepherd owned a hundred sheep—and lost one of them—what would he do?

Would he be content with the loss? Would he get mad at the stray? No he wouldn’t. What he would do is look for it! And not just look for it, but look for it until he found it.

And when he found the lost sheep, what would he do? Lecture it for getting lost? Yell at it? Beat it with his rod! No. He would be so happy to see it that he would put it on his shoulder, carry it back to the flock, invite his friends over and throw a welcome home party for the prodigal sheep.

It may sound exaggerated, but it isn’t. If you’ve ever lost a dog or a cat, you know what it feels like to find the stray pet. And shepherds were far more attached to their sheep than we are to our cats and dogs.

And—here’s the punchline:

In other words, God is happy when sinners repent. The dirtiest sinner who repents is more pleasing to God than ninety-nine good church members who never felt the need for repentance.

The Lord is happy when sinners repent. We often say this to the unconverted, but how often do we say it to ourselves? If God is happy when publicans and sinners repent, He must also be happy when His own children repent. If He throws a party for Mary Magdalene or the thief on the cross, He celebrates our repentance as well!

The second story is a lot different in its detail, but its message is the same. Here, we have a woman who has lost a silver coin. This is not a dime or a quarter she has lost but more like a $100 bill to us—or maybe $1000 bill. It is very precious to her.

What does she do? She doesn’t kick herself for being careless or blame the kids for stealing it. No, if the coin is lost, she’s got to find it.

This isn’t easy because, well, she has neglected her housework lately. Dust is an inch deep all over the place, and yet, the coin is so valuable, that she breaks out the old broom and sweeps until she comes up with it.

Finding it makes her so happy that she, too, throws a party to celebrate. The lost coin has been found!

The meaning here is the same as before:

If a housewife is glad to find her lost coin—if you’d be happy to find a forgotten bank account—then God is happy to find a lost sinner.

The third story is longer and better known than the first two. Part of it is like the others, but the punchline is very different. This is the story of the lost boy.

A rich farmer has two sons. The younger is tired of his dad’s discipline and demands his inheritance now. The father gives it to him, and soon, the young man runs off to a far country. There, he squanders his money on riotous living.

That’s bad, of course, but not too bad, because he can always get a job. But then, a famine hits the land, and thousands of men are thrown out of work. For every job opening there’s a long line of applicants. He looks and looks and looks but the only job he can find is slopping the pigs (remember, this was told to a Jewish audience, to whom pigs were not only gross and stinky, but also unclean in a religious way).

He takes the lousy job and, as he watches the pigs make pigs of themselves, he wishes someone would feed him as well. But no one will. The rich boy is worse off than a hog.

Until one day he recalls life at home and how that even the servants had plenty to eat. He resolves to go back, to confess his sins, and to pray the father to make him his slave. Even slavery is better than starvation.

When he’s a long way off, his father spots him and feels compassion for his broken son. Before the boy can even get the words out, the father has new clothes on his back, new shoes on his feet, a shiny ring on his finger, the cook slicing up the veal, and the musicians tuning up their fiddles for the party.

The lost son is found; the dead boy is alive. The family is overflowing with happiness!

…Except for one member: the older son. He knows the kind of man his father is—and he resents it bitterly. When he heard the music, he knew what it was for and he would have none of it!

The father went out to reason with his boy, but it did him no good. To his way of thinking, it was he who deserved the party and not his drunken, whoring brother!

But if the older brother fancied celebrations, why didn’t he go in? It’s because he didn’t like celebrations; what he liked was congratulations. He didn’t want his father’s favor; he wanted what was coming to him!

And so, what might have been the three happiest stories in the Bible end on a real downer. The lost sheep was found; the lost coin was found; the lost boy was found.

But the boy who was never lost, in the end, was lost.

Do you know why?

Because he doesn’t know what love is. He thinks it is something you earn; that his father ought to have loved him more than his brother because, well, he had always been a very good boy!

But that’s not what love is and it’s not how love works. The father loved the runaway son as much as the obedient one because—because he was his son! Parents don’t calibrate their love by the obedience of their kids! If my son is 50% obedient today I give him half my love; if he’s better tomorrow, I’ll love him more. No parent ever thought like that! We love our children because…we love our children.

This is how God is. We don’t earn His love; He loves sinners because He loves sinners. Deuteronomy 7:7-8 has it:

The sovereignty of God’s love means He loves because He loves. There is nothing in the saved to make Him love us, which means there is nothing in the lost to make Him not love them!

If we understood the nature of God’s love and how happy He is to see sinners repent, we would not be like the older brother—or the Scribes and Pharisees he stands for.

Instead of looking down on them, we’d be utterly amazed that God would love us. And, it wouldn’t be long until we started to reason: If God loves me—of all people—then why not the publican, why not the sinner, why not the criminal, why not the crack-head, why not panhandler, why not the rottenest, most despicable sinner in the world?

Why not?

What do you think of sinners? Are they devils to be shunned and hated? Or are they, too, bearers of the Divine Image and as likely to be saved as you are? If you think they’re devils, you’re like the Scribes, Pharisees—and the older brother. But, if you think they too are worth saving, then you’re like the shepherd, the housewife, the father, and the God they stand for.

Like our Lord Jesus Christ, we ought to befriend sinners and show them that God loves them as they are and wants them to repent and enjoy His fellowship forever.

What the hypocrites said in scorn, we say in praise,