Delight Yourself in the Lord
The Ultimate Joy in Life
Luke 15:1-10
Tonight we'll bring this current sermon series to an end. I've found it quite eye-opening to try to understand what it means to "Delight Yourself in the Lord". I'm afraid that I represent a lot of Christians in that I've spent a lot of time serving the Lord and trying to be like Christ, but never really thought too much about enjoying the process.
Most of us are a whole lot better at following rules and doing our chores than we are enjoying our experience with God and letting His joy flow through us. But as we've learned, the ultimate pleasure in life is found in our relationship with Him.
It all begins when we come into His presence through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ because in His presence, there is fullness of joy. He is the ultimate treasure in life. And every other good thing we enjoy flows from that relationship.
The way we love others and bless their lives, the way we use and enjoy our wealth and finances, our marriage, and even God's Word, God's design in and through all of those, is that we would be a blessing to others, bring glory to Him, and find satisfaction and joy through them ourselves.
Now, tonight I want to finish up with what I'll call "The Ultimate Joy in Life". Just as our relationship with God is the Ultimate Pleasure in Life, and just as knowing Jesus is the Ultimate Treasure in life, and Worship is the ultimate experience in life, and love is the ultimate gift in life, and the ultimate wealth in life is finding it is more blessed to give that to receive, and marriage is the ultimate relationship in life and the Bible is the ultimate resource in life, there is one primary thing that God has given to us that brings the ultimate joy in life and that is evangelism.
Listen to what we read in
Luke 15:1-10
If we took the time to read the rest of the chapter, we would hear Jesus tell the familiar story of the prodigal son, and there we would see the joy of the father when the son finally comes home.
So through these three parables, we are given a glimpse of the joy heaven experiences when something lost is found. If you've ever wondered what makes heaven happy, then here is the answer.
This is the joy of heaven, the joy of God, the joy of angels, the joy of the redeemed in glory, and it should be our joy.
When reading this passage, one is immediately struck by the contrast between Jesus and the religious leaders of Israel. Jesus rejoiced in the salvation of the lost while the religious leaders of Israel couldn't have cared less.
Notice, verses 1-2
They "complained", or to translate that in a more modern way, "they grumbled". They did not approve.
So while heaven greatly rejoices when a sinner is saved, when a lost soul is found and recovered and restored, those who do not know Christ grumble and complain.
Perhaps we need to evaluate our own response to evangelism because if you want to share the joy of heaven, then the ultimate joy of your life as a disciple of Christ will be found in the salvation of the lost.
So as we look at this text, you can examine your own life and test yourself and ask the question: "Am I closer to the attitude of Jesus or am I closer to the attitude of the Pharisees and the scribes".
That really is the question here. The Pharisees and the scribes, who were the religious leaders of Israel, found no joy in the salvation of the lost. In fact, they weren't even interested in the lost. They felt no burden or compulsion to even approach the lost, let alone see them converted.
But in contrast to that, , we see the heart of God through Jesus Christ demonstrating the priority of heaven in saving the lost.
Now, in all three of these parables, Jesus reports there is great rejoicing in heaven when one person turns from their sins and puts their faith in Jesus Christ.
We may be impressed when we build buildings or present cantatas or watch the children at Christmas, but while those things may enjoy God's blessing, they are not the things that brings heaven happiness.
Jesus never said there was joy in the presence of angels because you paid off your note or had a record-setting Sunday School attendance. He did say, however, not once, not twice, but three times there is great joy in heaven when one person turns to God and receives His forgiveness.
If salvation is that important to God and causes that much joy in heaven, then I think it reasonable for heavenly-minded people to find the same joy in the same experience. So let's take a look at these parables and see if we can discover why heaven gets so happy when a person turns to Christ.
First, look at what Jesus said about
1. The Lost Lamb
In all three of these parables, there was something lost that was found. In the first parable, a little lamb is lost and the Shepherd leaves the others to go out and find the individual lamb. It’s obvious we are like the lost lamb and Jesus is the Shepherd. We are one who is lost, but God loves us individually.
Why did Jesus use sheep as the illustration in the parable. Think about it like this:
In the parable, God is the Shepherd, and the lost lamb represents us. In Isaiah 53:6, the Bible says, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him [Jesus] the iniquity of us all.”
It is characteristic of sheep that they wander away from the fold. And I would submit to you that the saddest thing in the world is to be lost and separated from God.
And notice, that is the word Jesus uses to describe the sheep. It is lost. Now He's uses a physical image to describe a spiritual condition. Without Christ, people are spiritually lost and a lost soul is the most tragic condition in life.
You can lose your mind, you can lose your health, you can lose you wealth, but none of those is as tragic as being lost from God. And that is the condition of every person born into the world, Without Christ we are lost.
That’s the bad news. But the parable also contains some good news. We are lost, but Jesus searches for us individually in order to save us.
In the story Jesus tells, the shepherd had 100 sheep and he knew had 100 sheep. And one day, he discovers one of them is missing. So he leaves the other 99 sheep and sets off to find the single lost lamb.
Now remember, Jesus is telling us about God. The principle here is that God is more concerned with the individuals than He is groups. God deals with us as individuals, not as groups. He may save crowds, but He does it individually. Salvation requires a personal encounter with the Shepherd.
A lot of folks would think the shepherd is foolish to leave the 99 sheep in order to search for one lamb.
After all, you have to factor in some attrition, or depreciation, what’s the big deal if one is lost? You still have the 99–it’s only a 1% loss! But with God, every individual matters.
In fact, if the shepherd had 10,000 sheep and one was lost, I believe he would have left the 9,999 and gone after the one. Why? Because it is the character of our God to love the individual and to seek the lost.
In fact, if you were the only person on earth who was lost and needed a Savior, Jesus would have still come to earth and died on a cross for your sins. That’s why Jesus came to earth. By the way, one day the last person who shall be saved will be saved and they will be saved because God went looking for them.
In Luke 19:10 Jesus said, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” It is the nature of God to seek the lost. In the other religions of the world, man is seeking and searching for God, but in the Christian faith it is the God of the Universe who comes seeking and searching for you!
Notice what happened when the shepherd found the lost lamb. He didn’t scold the lamb or take a whip and drive the lamb back to the flock. Instead, the shepherd picked up the lamb and carried him on his shoulder all the way back home.
That tells us salvation is something Jesus does for us–not something we do for Him. He does it all. He carries us home. And if you're lost, let the shepherd pick you up today and carry you home.
Now, let’s look at the second parable. It is the story of
2. The Lost Coin
In this second parable, it’s not a lamb that has wandered off on its own; it’s a coin that has been accidentally lost.
And while we learn from the first that God loves us individually and intentionally seeks the one lost sheep, from the second we learn that God will do whatever it takes to find you.
In this parable, the woman had ten coins and one of them was lost. The word Jesus used was for a coin that didn’t have much monetary value at the time. However, most scholars believe this coin was part of a headdress brides wore. Jewish brides often wore a headdress of ten coins strung across their foreheads. So the coin had great sentimental value because it was part of her wedding vows. That’s why she literally turned her house upside down to find it.
And if you've ever lost something that had great sentimental value, regardless of the monetary value, you can understand her distress. It might have been your grandpa's pocket knife or something similar, and when that happens, you have this pressure and anxiety that fills your heart because it's lost.
That is where this woman finds herself. So, in order to find this lost coin, she does two important things. First, she lights a lamp and second she sweeps up the dirt on her floor.
Now don't miss the spiritual significance of those two things. In the story, we are the lost coin and Jesus is the woman searching to find us. There is an important application we can make from these two details of light and sweeping.
First, brings light to lostness. The first thing the woman did was light a lamp to help here see clearly. Most of you have heard the old joke about the man looking for some lost money under the street light at night. A policeman started helping him look. After a few moments the policeman asked the man, “Exactly where did you lose the money?”
The man replied, “Oh I lost it half way down the block.” The policeman said, “Then why are you searching here?” The man said, “Because the light is so much better!”
It helps to have light when you are looking for something. Before Jesus finds us, we are lost in the darkness of sin. Jesus came into this world to provide the light of truth. In John 8:12 Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Jesus lives to give us light.
In the Bible there is a connection between light and truth. God gives every person a measure of light, or truth about Himself–even if they don’t have a Bible. They can look at creation and understand Someone superior and intelligent designed it all. They can look within and understand that every person is born with a sense of right and wrong–and understand there must be a moral absolute in the Universe. Everybody has some light.
If you walk toward the light, God gives you more and more light about Jesus. If you walk away from the light, the Bible says in Romans 1 that your understanding becomes darkened.
In addition to living to give us light, Jesus died to sweep out our dirt.
The lost coin was somewhere on the floor, and the best way to find it was to take a broom and sweep up all the dirt. In the process of cleaning every square inch of the floor, the woman found the coin.
There’s a great lesson here as well. In addition to giving you light, Jesus desires to cleanse your life of all the dirt and filth accumulated there. He died on the cross so your sins could be forgiven. We read in I John 1:7, “And the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”
I believe the old hymn that says, “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.”
I don’t understand how the blood of Jesus can cleanse a sinful heart any more than I can understand how a brown cow can eat green grass and give white milk! I just know the Bible says there is cleansing power in the blood of Jesus. Before you can be found, you need the light of the Lord and the cleansing power of the Lord.
We don't have time to look at the third parable in detail, but in it we see
3. A Lost Son
And in this son, we see someone who deliberately left his father. The sheep was lost by carelessness, the coin was lost by accident, but the son was lost by choice.
He made deliberate, willful decisions to leave home and go out in the world to be happy. But remember, being lost is the saddest and most tragic experience in life.
And perhaps because the closing story applies the lostness to a human, the consequences become even more tragic. It's bad to lose one sheep out of a hundred, and it's sad to lose one coin out of ten, but to lose one of your two boys is devastating.
And notice, it is not by accident that as the percentage of what was lost increases, from 1 in 100 to 1 in 2, so does the degree of rejoicing become more personal.
With the lost sheep, all of heaven rejoices. With the coin, the angels rejoice, but with the boy, no spiritual application is made because it is obvious. It is the Father Himself who rejoices!
So in closing, let's think about what Jesus tells us about
4. The Joy of Salvation
In particular, take note of
verses 7, 10 and 32
In his book, Just Like Jesus, Max Lucado wrote: “Let one child consent to be dressed in righteousness and begin the journey home and heaven pours the punch, strings the streamers, and throws the confetti...when a soul is saved, the heart of Jesus becomes the night sky on the Fourth of July, radiant with explosions of cheer.” (Just Like Jesus, by Max Lucado, p. 143)
Let me share with you why heaven rejoices over a single person who repents. If the saddest experience of life is to be spiritually lost, then the happiest experience of life is to be found and rescued by God.
And personally, I just think we ought to be a little more excited about our own salvation. You cannot lose your salvation, but sadly, many people have lost the joy of their salvation.
We read in I Peter 1:8-9, “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”
Do you have a sense of this inexpressible and glorious joy? When Jesus is in your heart, there will be this sense of joy. In London, you can always tell if the Queen is in residence at Buckingham Palace because a certain flag flies over the palace whenever she is there. Even so, joy is the flag flying over the castle of our hearts announcing that the King is in residence there today.
As we've already seen earlier in this study, in John 15:11 Jesus said, “I have spoken these things unto you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy should be complete.”
It’s more than just a Vacation Bible School song, but if you have Jesus in your heart then you should be able to sing, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart!” If you have Jesus’ joy in your heart, you should notify your face!
And by the way, we need to learn to celebrate what heaven celebrates!
What is it in life that really gets you excited? What would give you the greatest joy that you could imagine? What would it take for you to grin and jump around and dance a jig and shout, “Yee hah!?”
I wonder if anything could move some of you to that kind of joy. Some of you are so straight-laced, a stick of dynamite couldn’t move you! But what would it take to really get your fired up?
For some it would be winning the lottery, or getting a hole-in-one, or hearing the doctor say the words, “cancer free.” It might be different for different people.
But for those of us who claim to love Jesus, I submit to you we should celebrate what heaven celebrates. If heaven can celebrate and angels, who don't even understand what's going on can celebrate and Our Heavenly Father Himself rejoices when one sinner repents, there really ought to be joy in the church when someone is saved!
We get so excited about other things in life–a win for our team, a promotion at work, graduation from school–I think our greatest celebration should be reserved for the time when someone comes into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.
In fact, you might ask yourself the question: "How important is evangelism in my life? Does it really make any difference to me that people are lost? Do I ever go out searching for them? Does it make me happier than anything else to see someone saved?"
That's exactly the point of Luke 15. It's a very convicting chapter. Jesus is teaching us that God is like a shepherd who goes searching for one little lost lamb, and when He finds him, God celebrates!
God is like the woman who turns her house upside down to find the one lost coin–and when God finds that lost person, there is a party. God is like a loving Father who grieves when a son walks away, but when the son returns, there is celebration.
By the way, did you notice what Jesus said in verse 32? Celebrating the salvation of the lost son is the right thing to do! Some translations say it like this: “We HAD to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”
Our God is personally interested in every lost lamb, every lost coin, and every wayward son. He is interested in the coworkers at your job, the students in the classroom, the classmates at your school and the drunkard on the street. He wants every lost person to be found.
Maybe we don't celebrate like heaven does because we've forgotten just how lost we were when God found us.
Years ago there was an Englishman named John who was a slave trader. He owned and operated a ship that sailed to Africa to collect a human cargo of African people to be bought and sold as slaves back in England. He was a wicked man with a cruel, evil personality. He oversaw the death of many slaves with never a second thought–those who knew him considered him to be beyond hope of redemption.
But someone gave him a book entitled "The Imitation of Christ" He refused to read it, but not long afterwards, he was caught in a terrible storm at sea and his ship was sinking. Desperate for deliverance, He cried out to God. He said, “God have mercy on us!”
The ship and crew survived the storm–and John was a changed man. He started reading that book as well as the Bible. God had been searching for this wicked slave trader and on March 10, 1748, God found him and rescued him from a life of sin.
He sold his ship and gave up the slave trade. He became involved in the anti-slavery movement in England and in year of his death, 1807, the English Parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire.
Here was a wicked, depraved slave trader who was radically changed by Jesus Christ. What did John have to say about his salvation? Everyone in this room has read his words many times. His name was John Newton and he wrote these words:
“Amazing grace how sweet the sound; that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost; but now I’m found; was blind, but now I see!”
Have you ever admitted you were a “wretch” before Jesus found you? Do you realize how miserable and depraved you were before you repented and accepted God’s love? You’ll never truly celebrate and appreciate God’s grace until you realize how terrible it is to be lost.
If you are lost today, you can be found. God is seeking and searching for you. He loves you so much that Jesus came and died on the cross for your sins. Will you repent? To repent simply means to change your mind and to change your behavior. Change your mind about Jesus and Who He is and what He can do for you.
Accept His grace, mercy, and forgiveness. Change your behavior and start living as He wants you to live. And when you turn to Him, all of heaven will rejoice, there will be joy in the presence of angels, God Himself will embrace you, and the church will celebrate! Amen?
Let's pray.
