Rejoicing with God

Good evening. It's good to see you all this evening. I am very excited about the text we're going to walk through tonight. It's really glorious. If you have your Bible, you can turn to Luke 15. We're going to be looking at verses 1 to 10, Luke chapter 15.

Let me go ahead and read our passage. Luke 15, verse 1. Now, all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near him to listen to him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, This man receives sinners and eats with them. So he told them this parable, saying, What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and Lost one of them does not leave the 99 in the open pasture and go after one which the one which is lost until he finds it.

When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, Rejoice with me, for I've found my sheep which was lost. I tell you that in the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance.

Or what woman, if she has 10 silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it. When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, Rejoice with me, for I've found the coin which I had lost.

In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Let me pose a question to you. What makes God rejoice? What brings God joy? There's a lot of discussion in the Christian life about joy. How do we get it?

How do we keep it? How do we persevere in it? Sermons preached about it. There's books written about it. The key to joy in the Christian life is going through the Bible and finding what makes God rejoice and learning to rejoice with him in that. If we know what makes God rejoice, then we can rejoice with him.

A couple examples of some things that make God rejoice. Jeremiah 9:24, God says, I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, justice, and righteousness on the earth, for I delight in these things, declares the Lord. Proverbs 11:20, the perverse in heart are an abomination to the Lord, but the blameless in their walk are his delight.

Psalm 104, 31, let the glory of the Lord endure forever. Let the Lord be glad in his works. All of those things are things that God can rejoice in. There's something that brings a peculiar rejoicing to God. There's something the Bible presents to us as a unique source of joy to God.

And that's what's described in Luke 15, the repentance and rescue of a lost sinner. God rejoices over broken sinners coming near to his son and our Passage in Luke opens with a group of desperate, needy people coming to Jesus and being rescued and found. In our text, Jesus invites us to share in God's joy in that.

That sounds pretty simple. There's a catch. There's something else at work in Luke 15 that will hinder sharing in that joy. And it's a deadly disease, and it's at work in all of us. It's dangerous. It's a disease that causes us to be blind to God's priorities and get angry at the very things that cause Him to rejoice.

We don't hear its name mentioned often, and that's because it wants to remain unnoticed. It's very good at disguising itself underneath a facade of religious activity. It's fixated on keeping up appearances. It focuses on the external rather than the internal. It goes by the name of self-righteousness. In many ways, it's personified in the Pharisees.

We see in Luke 15. Luke 18:9 offers us a very succinct definition of self-righteousness. Luke describes a group of people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed others with contempt. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus misses no opportunity to attack this sin. And throughout Luke's Gospel, we find this contrast between sinners who come to Jesus and experience the inward realities of God's forgiveness and new life, and the self-righteous who keep up an outward show of religious activity.

The sinners coming to Jesus don't have all the outward polish, they don't have the showiness, but they have that inward reality of God's forgiveness, and their lives are being transformed as they come to Jesus and repent. But the self-righteous are repulsed by that. Instead of rejoicing in that, there's disgust.

Are you a person who rejoices with God when sinners draw near to him, or are you a person infected with this disease of self-righteousness? This is what Luke 15:1 to 10 is addressing. In this text, Jesus shows us God's joy over finding lost sinners so that we will rejoice with him and draw near to him if we're lost.

That's where we're going in this text. Really, two points. In verse one, we see what drawing near to Jesus looks like. And in verse 2 to 10, we see responding rightly to those who draw near. How do we respond rightly to those who draw near? Let's start with what drawing near to Jesus looks like.

Look with me at verse 1. And just to give you a little bit of context, this passage is situated in a central section of Luke. And Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He's preaching in villages along the way. And in chapter 14, just before this, he's preaching to a crowd.

And he's just given one of the most severe calls to discipleship that we find in the Gospels. Luke 14, 26, Jesus says, If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

Now, that's not a seeker-friendly message. It's not a great way to get a lot of people to like you, but that's the truth. It's important to remember: Luke 15 is on the heels of that. And in Luke 15, verse 1, we find a group of people coming near to Jesus.

Look at verse 1. Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. So notice first, who is drawing near? All the tax collectors and sinners. Now, who are these people? Start with the tax collectors. These were people known for fraud. They were responsible to collect taxes in society, but they had a reputation for collecting more than was required and pocketing the difference.

They were so despised that the term tax collector came to be used as a sort of catch-all phrase to describe somebody who was wicked. These people were hated. And in many ways, understandably. Now, what about the sinners? This is a less specific term than tax collector, but it's not any less potent.

Probably whatever comes to your mind when you think the word sinner is probably accurate. Earlier in Luke chapter 7, we encounter this word sinner again in a situation. We're told about a certain woman in a city who was a sinner coming to Jesus when he was in the house of Simon the Pharisee.

She comes right up to Jesus. She's broken. She's weeping. And the response from Simon is very telling about the nature of what it means to be a sinner. If this man were a prophet talking about Jesus, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, that she is a sinner.

So she was known. For living a very immoral life, a very ungodly life, and a life that Luke captures in the word sinner. Just one word. Obviously, there's overlaps between the category of tax collector and sinner. They're both sinners. And these groups are considered really the trash of first-century Jewish society.

Many rabbis would consider them unclean. You couldn't go and teach them the Old Testament because they were so unclean, you couldn't even associate with them. But Luke 15 is interesting. These people knew that. They were desperate. They were flocking to Jesus to hear his teaching. Let's look now at why they're drawing near to Jesus.

The context of Luke 15 shows that Jesus understands these people as people who want out of their lives. They've seen their sinfulness and they want out. And they know that Jesus has something to offer them. And they want to hear what he has to say. They've heard chapter 14, they've heard the cost of discipleship, but they're seeking Christ, and he's welcoming them.

That's why he came. He came to seek and to save the lost. The picture Luke paints is desperate, bankrupt. People coming to Christ and being welcomed, seeking relief for the sickness of sin. But something happens that complicates this beautiful picture in verse 1. Verse 1 could have kind of stood by itself, but there's verse 2.

And everything else in chapter 15 is triggered by verse 2. What happens there? The focus of the text is going to shift away from what it looks like to draw near to Jesus to responding rightly to those who draw nearer. And in verse 2, we see how to not respond to those who draw near to Jesus.

Luke 15, verse 2. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, This man receives sinners and eats with them. Now, the Pharisees and scribes were pretty familiar with, you know, if you've grown up in the church, you've grown up hearing about the Pharisees. These were the religious people of the day.

They were respected. To their credit, they knew the Old Testament. They knew Israel's history. They knew Israel's history of unfaithfulness. And they were very careful about obeying the Torah, the Old Testament, Mosaic law. But something Jesus has done has aggravated them. And the key verb in verse 2.

Grumble. Look at their charge. This man receives sinners and eats with them. So they see what's happening. Jesus is welcoming these people. He's eating with them. He's teaching them. He's going after them. And this is just galling to the Pharisees and the scribes because they'd come to believe that a prophet or the Messiah would never be found with these kind of people.

God helped the strong. God helped those who were devoted to their box checking. God helped those who got all of the external traditions right down to the letter. But for the Pharisees, in all the bustling about whether you should carry your bed on your Sabbath or how many herbs you should tithe, the substance had been left behind.

The reality of sin was downplayed. The heart of worship that God required in the Old Testament had been forgotten. And the vastness of God's forgiveness towards sinners, something that's all through the Old Testament, had been replaced by an empty self-righteousness. They'd reached a place where they trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed others with contempt.

It's not just the Pharisees that have a problem with this. We all have a problem with self-righteousness. It's deep in our hearts. And it's kind of hard for us to picture and really get into the mind of the Pharisees to see what would have been, why did they respond this way?

What was it in them that would respond this way to Jesus welcoming these people? And I've pieced together a crude fictional illustration to kind of help us with this. So follow along with me here. Suppose you're living a comfortable middle-class life in inner-city Houston. You've got your family, you have a nice home, and you're looking for a church, a good church, a biblical church.

And you hear about it. There's a group of pastors down the street. They planted a new church. And it's super close to home. And the senior pastor is from the Master Seminary. And it's showing up on the TMAI Church Finder app. And you know a family there, and they say the teaching is great.

You have a great discipleship program. So you take your family and you go there, and you know, you're expecting to find people mostly like you. But instead, to your surprise, you find that 90% of the people attending are ex-convicts, people from the Red Light District, or former drug dealers.

What would be your response? Would you feel unsettled? I would. But why? Why would we feel unsettled about that? There's something in the human heart. There's a sinful tendency towards self-righteousness in us. I'm not as bad as that person. I couldn't do what he did. I could never commit that sin if I was him.

We know theology, we can speak of radical depravity, we quote Romans 3:23, but there's something in us that wants to view ourselves as fundamentally good people, or at least not as bad as the person next to me. But the mission of Jesus is not to help people who think they're good, but to help people who know they're bad inside, who know they're very bad.

Luke 5:31, Jesus says, It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. If you're at a place in your life where you think that doesn't apply to you, that's a dangerous place.

You could be very sick with this disease of self-righteousness. So the mission of God has always been the rescue of lost sinners. There's a great hymn with all. Blind, the vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus, a pardon receives. So, the cure for self-righteousness that Jesus will prescribe us in this passage is a bigger view of God and his saving activity in Christ.

And that feeling of discomfort in seeing sinners draw near to Christ, Jesus will spend the rest of our text, verses 3 through 10, correcting that. And he's going to show us what a proper response is when we see sinners drawing near to him. And that response is to rejoice.

So we are looking at how to respond rightly to those who draw near to Jesus. Verse 2 showed us how not to respond, and verses 3 to 10 show us how to respond. Look with me at verse 3. So he told them this parable, saying, I'll stop there.

What comes after this is three parables: the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal son. And we're only looking at the first two tonight. The parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin are not two separate parables. Notice, Luke says he told them this parable.

It doesn't say these parables, it's singular. That's important. There's one point that. Jesus is making with these two parables. And Jesus is attacking the charge from the Pharisees in verse 2 that it's improper for him to welcome sinners and tax collectors. He's exploding the idea that we should not rejoice over sinners experiencing God's forgiveness.

And these two parables portray the joy of God in rescuing sinners. And it's a very real, tangible joy. It's important to recognize this because sometimes we can have a picture of God who's kind of this distant, dispassionate deity, and every once in a while he kind of throws out some forgiveness to some sinner kind of way out there.

That's not the biblical God. Jesus explodes that idea here. He shows us that God is a God who rejoices in finding the lost. So this is the central point of verses 3 to 10. Let's look now at the parable of the lost sheep, verses 4 to 7. Verse 4, Jesus paints a simple picture.

It's a picture of a shepherd. He's got his little flock of 100 sheep in the wilderness. But at some point he looks out and he notices that he's got 99 sheep. There's a sheep missing. Somebody's not there. Now that's not good. Maybe it's been lost. Maybe it's been eaten.

So he goes after it. Notice here, the response of the man is not indifference. He doesn't say, well, I've got the other 99, so I'm okay. No, it's the opposite. He pursues the lost sheep. And something to notice in verse 4 is that Jesus frames this as a question, a rhetorical question.

Who wouldn't pursue a sheep they lost? Something that's valuable that's been lost, who wouldn't search for it? We get to verse 5, the shepherd is pursuing the sheep and he finds it. Verse 5, when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. So he finds the sheep, and joy rushes through him, and he picks it up, he throws it over his shoulders, and he starts hiking home.

And he gets home, and the rejoicing doesn't stop. He gets together his friends, his neighbors, and he throws a party, and he says, Rejoice with me, for I've found my sheep which was lost. So he doesn't just get a little excited. He invites everybody to share in the joy of finding what was lost.

Jesus gives us the interpretation of this in verse 7. I tell you that in the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance. Repentance. So what Jesus is saying here is very straightforward. When one of these tax collectors and sinners comes near to Christ in verse 1, heaven rejoices more than over those who are already in the fold.

And remember, Jesus is telling this to the Pharisees, and the sting of the parable in a sense is heaven rejoices over this. Why don't you? And Jesus has very simply and effectively made his point here. What's interesting is he doubles down, he gives us another perspective on this same reality with the parable of the lost coin.

Look now at verse 8. In verse 8, we find a woman with 10 coins, but something's gone wrong, similar to the other parable. She lost one. What does she do? She doesn't say, well, I still have the other nine. I'm okay. The opposite. She lights a lamp. She starts sweeping the house.

She searches and turns the place upside down until she finds the coin. And again, notice, verse 8 is phrased as a question. Or, what woman, if she has 10 silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?

The obvious answer being yes. Of course, anybody would do that. And she finds the coin, and like the shepherd, she throws a party. And there's the same invitation, almost verbatim: rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost. Something was lost, and it's found.

And the woman invites everyone to share in her joy. Notice again, Jesus very easily interprets the parable for us in verse 10. In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. So when one sinner repents, the angels of God rejoice in the same way.

Now, the structure of these parables is really simple. Something's lost, it's sought after and found, and that finding brings a profound, tangible rejoicing. The thing lost portrays the sinner who's estranged from God. He's wandered away like a sheep. He's lost. He's in danger. Notice the individuality, too. It's one out of a hundred sheep, one out of ten, that one lost sinner doesn't escape God's notice.

And that should be encouraging to us. The searching and the finding of the lost thing is a portrayal of the saving activity of God toward the lost. And the parable of the lost coin especially emphasizes this. The woman lights a lamp. She sweeps the house. She searches carefully until she finds it.

Something else not to miss in verse 7 and 10 is that repentance is included in this image of being found. In verse 7, we find the phrase, one sinner who repents. The same in verse 10. The imagery of the sheep and the coin being found captures the saving activity of God and the repentance of the lost sinner, those two things meeting.

Repentance here is a radical change of mind, producing a change in orientation toward the sins that a person used to love. And it compels somebody to move away from the things that held them in bondage and to draw near to Christ, like we see in verse 1. This type of repentance draws near to Christ.

It trusts in Christ, submits to Christ, listens to and follows the word of Christ, and surrenders to the Lordship of Christ. It's comprehensive, it's total. This is not half-hearted, it's not lacking. And God rescues those who draw near to him in repentance. And that brings us to the last element of both of these parables.

That finding brings a profound response of rejoicing from God. God delights in rescuing sinners. It brings a special kind of rejoicing to God. He goes after sinners of all kinds and all stripes. Nothing can get away from him. And this saving activity of God is concentrated and expressed in the person and work of Christ.

This was the mission of Christ, to go after the lost, those who were sick and need a physician, those who were sin sick. And there is joy in heaven over one sinner who was rescued and repents. But the Pharisees looked at the sinners being found and coming to Jesus, and there was disgust.

There was outrage. Those are those people. It's them. In some ways, not unlike the emotions that we might struggle with if we walked into that fictional church from earlier. The saving activity of God in Christ in drawing sinners to Himself should always produce a response of responsibility. Rejoicing.

When it doesn't, that's a check-engine light in your life. Something's not quite right. So we've seen what drawing near looks like in verse 1. We've seen what responding rightly to those who draw near to Christ looks like in verses 3 to 10. We need to wrap up our time by diagnosing that check engine light of self-righteousness.

What causes us to respond with a discomfort? There's at least two causes for that check engine light. Number one, you might be a Christian who is sick. You have that disease of self-righteousness in your life, like the Pharisees of verse 2. The truth of the gospel is kind of moved back to a back shelf of your spiritual life.

You've become caught up in the peripheral busyness of religious activity, and you've forgotten the rescuing reality of God's forgiveness. And those truths that caused your heart to soar at one point kind of don't really move you anymore. As the disease of self-righteousness progresses, it starts to poison relationships.

Other symptoms start showing up. Like unforgiveness, Brother Tom Askell shared on that this morning, bitterness, resentment, unrepentance. More important than that, the attitude of the Pharisees in verse 2 begins to poison your relationship with God. And if you want to drive God out of your life, harbor self-righteousness.

In its terminal stage, it produces a self-deception that's hard to penetrate. And the response of the Pharisees and the scribes in verse 2 illustrates that. And it doesn't look quite so strange, perhaps, now. What is the answer to this self-righteousness? It's the answer that Jesus gives in the parables.

Learn to rejoice with God in the things that He rejoices in. Ask God to revive your joy in His rescuing, saving activity and in His finding of you at one point in your life. David prayed in Psalm 51:12, Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain me with a willing spirit.

Then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will be converted to you. It's when we least grasp the reality of our own conversion. That we're most susceptible to this deadly sin of self-righteousness. And we fail to rejoice with God and His saving work in the gospel. The reality of God's rescue of sinners is something that should always be fresh and exciting to us.

It's fundamental to Christianity. This is what ignited the modern missions movement. A Christianity devoid of the ongoing joy and remembrance of God's saving work toward us in Christ is just a shadow of the reality. Ask God to awaken that joy in your heart, He can do it, and He delights to do it.

Draw near to Him. Second reason that check engine light of self-righteousness might be on. The second reason is: you may not be a Christian. Perhaps you haven't gotten through verse one. Perhaps you don't understand the reality of sin. You haven't drawn near to Christ. You're still dead in sins.

You're still that lost, wandering sheep. It's been said well that there's two types of people in the world: there are those who are dead in sin and those who are dead to sin. There are those who are on a trajectory away from God. Into eternal destruction under God's wrath through unforgiven sin.

And there are those who have been rescued and made alive in Christ and found. Which one are you? Have you experienced verse 7? Are you that lost sheep that's been found and rescued? Or are you still wandering? In our cultural context, maybe you've been in and out of the church all your life, but maybe Christ is a stranger to you.

He's somebody you kind of you hear about Christ, but you don't know Christ. It's not enough to just hang around people who are Christians. You must draw near to Christ in verse 1. And there is rescue and pardon available through Christ toward you. Trust in his work. If you don't know how to do that, ask God to show you in the Bible.

Start here in Luke 15 and talk to somebody. Share about this. Confess. Ask for help. I know there are people this evening that would love to talk to you about Christ and his saving work. And the invitation of God to you is the same as it was 2,000 years ago.

Repent and Draw near to Christ. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked man forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts. And let him return to the Lord, and he will pardon him. That's the mercy of God toward you if you are lost.

And if you draw near to Christ, you will experience that joy of being brought into the fold, like the shepherd bringing home that lost sheep and rejoicing. And for those of us who are part of the 99, we'll rejoice with you, the joy of God in rescuing lost sinners.

So we would do well to heed Jesus' invitation to rejoice with God in the rescuing of lost sinners and to draw near to him if you don't know him. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the work of your Son and his mission to seek and to save that which is lost.

And it's something that we should always remember. Lord, let it be fresh and exciting and novel to us that Christ. Would come and rescue people estranged from you and in bondage to sin. Lord, I pray you to revive our joy in your rescuing, saving activity in Christ. Father, that we would join in that mission of Christ in continuing that and sharing the gospel with those around us and in rejoicing with you in your work.

In Jesus' name, amen. Have a good evening, friends.