Of course I need scarcely remind you that in the immediate
application of the parable in Luke's Gospel, the ninety-and-nine
were the respectable people who thought the publicans and harlots
altogether too dirty to touch, and regarded it as very doubtful
conduct on the part of this young Rabbi from Nazareth to be mixed up
with persons whom no one with a proper regard for whited sepulchres
would have anything to do with. To them He answers, in effect--I am
a shepherd; that is my vindication. Of course a shepherd goes after
and cares for the lost sheep. He does not ask about its worth, or
anything else. He simply follows the lost because it is lost. It may
be a poor little creature after all, but it is lost, and that is
enough. And so He vindicates Himself to the ninety-and-nine: 'You do
not need Me, you are found. I take you on your own estimation of
yourselves, and tell you that My mission is to the wanderers.'
I do not suppose, however, that any of us have need to be reminded
that upon a closer and deeper examination of the facts of the case,
every hoof of the ninety-and-nine belonged to a stray sheep too; and
that in the wider application of the parable _all_ men are
wanderers. Remembering, then, this universal application, I would
point out two or three things about the condition of these strayed
sheep, which include the whole race. The ninety-and-nine may shadow
for us a number of beings, in unfallen worlds, immensely greater
than even the multitudes of wandering souls that have lived here
through weary ages of sin and tears, but that does not concern us
now.
The first thought I gather from the parable is that all men are
Christ's sheep. That sounds a strange thing to say. What? all these
men and women who, having run away from Him, are plunged in sin,
like sheep mired in a black bog, the scoundrels and the profligates,
the scum and the outcasts of great cities; people with narrow
foreheads, and blighted, blasted lives, the despair of our modern
civilisation--are they all His? And in those great wide-lying
heathen lands where men know nothing of His name and of His love,
are they all His too? Let Him answer, 'Other sheep I have'--though
they look like goats to-day--'which are not of this fold, them also
must I bring, and they shall hear My voice.' All men are Christ's,
because He has been the Agent of divine creation, and the grand
words of the hundredth Psalm are true about Him. 'It is He that hath
made us, and we are His. We are His people and the sheep of His
pasture.' They are His, because His sacrifice has bought them for
His. Erring, straying, lost, they still belong to the Shepherd.
Notice next, the picture of the sheep as wandering. The word is,
literally, 'which _goeth_ astray,' not 'which is gone astray.'
It pictures the process of wandering, not the result as accomplished.
We see the sheep, poor, silly creature, not going anywhere in
particular, only there is a sweet tuft of grass here, and it crops
that; and here is a bit of ground where there is soft walking, and it
goes there; and so, step by step, not meaning anything, not knowing
where it is going, or that it _is_ going anywhere; it goes, and
goes, and goes, and at last it finds out that it is away from its
beat on the hillside--for sheep keep to one bit of hillside generally,
as any shepherd will tell you--and then it begins to bleat, and most
helpless of creatures, fluttering and excited, rushes about amongst
the thorns and brambles, or gets mired in some quag or other, and it
will never find its way back of itself until some one comes for it.
'So,' says Christ to us, 'there are a great many of you who do not
mean to go wrong; you are not going anywhere in particular, you do
not start on your course with any intentions either way, of doing
right or wrong, of keeping near God, or going away from Him, but you
simply go where the grass is sweetest, or the walking easiest. But
look at the end of it; where you have got to. You have got away from
Him.'
Now, if you take that series of parables in Luke xv., and note the
metaphors there, you will see three different sides given of the
process by which men's hearts stray away from God. There is the
sheep that wanders. That is partly conscious, and voluntary, but in
a large measure simply yielding to inclination and temptation. Then
there is the coin that trundles away under some piece of furniture,
and is lost--that is a picture of the manner in which a man, without
volition, almost mechanically sometimes, slides into sins and
disappears as it were, and gets covered over with the dust of evil.
And then there is the worst of all, the lad that had full knowledge
of what he was doing. 'I am going into a far-off country; I cannot
stand this any longer--all restraint and no liberty, and no power of
doing what I like with my own; and always obliged to obey and be
dependent on my father for my pocket-money! Give me what belongs to
me, for good and all, and let me go!' That is the picture of the
worst kind of wandering, when a man knows what he is about, and
looks at the merciful restraint of the law of God, and says: 'No! I
had rather be far away; and my own master, and not always be
"cribbed, cabined, and confined" with these limitations.'
The straying of the half-conscious sheep may seem more innocent, but
it carries the poor creature away from the shepherd as completely as
if it had been wholly intelligent and voluntary. Let us learn the
lesson. In a world like this, if a man does not know very clearly
where he is going, he is sure to go wrong. If you do not exercise a
distinct determination to do God's will, and to follow in His
footsteps who has set us an example; and if your main purpose is to
get succulent grass to eat and soft places to walk in, you are
certain before long to wander tragically from all that is right and
noble and pure. It is no excuse for you to say: 'I never meant it';
'I did not intend any harm, I only followed my own inclinations.'
'More mischief is wrought'--to the man himself, as well as to other
people--'from want of thought than is wrought by' an evil will. And
the sheep has strayed as effectually, though, when it set out on its
journey, it never thought of straying. Young men and women beginning
life, remember! and take this lesson.
But then there is another point that I must touch for a moment. In
the Revised Version you will find a very tiny alteration in the
words of my text, which, yet, makes a large difference in the sense.
The last clause of my text, as it stands in our Bible, is, 'And
seeketh that which is _gone_ astray'; the Revised Version more
correctly reads, 'And seeketh that which _is going_ astray.'
Now, look at the difference in these two renderings. In the former
the process is represented as finished, in the correct rendering it
is represented as going on. And that is what I would press on you,
the awful, solemn, necessarily progressive character of our
wanderings from God. A man never gets to the end of the distance
that separates between him and the Father, if his face is turned
away from God. Every moment the separation is increasing. Two lines
start from each other at the acutest angle and diverge more the
further they are produced, until at last the one may be away up by
the side of God's throne, and the other away down in the deepest
depths of hell. So accordingly my text carries with solemn pathos,
in a syllable, the tremendous lesson: 'The sheep is not gone, but
_going_ astray.' Ah! there are some of my hearers who are daily
and hourly increasing the distance between themselves and their
merciful Father.
Now the last thing here in this picture is the contrast between the
description given of the wandering sheep in our text, and that in
St. Luke. Here it is represented as wandering, there it is
represented as lost. That is very beautiful and has a meaning often
not noticed by hasty readers. Who is it that has lost it? We talk
about the lost soul and the lost man, as if it were the man that had
lost _himself_, and that is true, and a dreadful truth it is.
But that is not the truth that is taught in this parable, and meant
by us to be gathered from it. Who is it that has lost it? He to whom
it belonged.
That is to say, wherever a heart gets ensnared and entangled with
the love of the treasures and pleasures of this life, and so departs
in allegiance and confidence and friendship from the living God,
there God the Father regards Himself as the poorer by the loss of
one of His children, by the loss of one of His sheep. He does not
care to possess you by the hold of mere creation and supremacy and
rule. He desires you to love Him, and then He deems that He has you.
And if you do not love Him, He deems that He has lost you. There is
something in the divine heart that goes out after His lost property.
We touch here upon deep things that we cannot speak of intelligently;
only remember this, that what looks like self-regard in man is the
purest love in God, and that there is nothing in the whole revelation
which Christianity makes of the character of God more wonderful than
this, that He judges that He has lost His child when His child has
forgotten to love Him.
II. So much, then, for one of the great pictures in this text. I can
spare but a sentence or two for the other--the picture of the
Seeker.
I said that in the one form of the parable it was more distinctly
the Father, and in the other more distinctly the Son, who is
represented as seeking the sheep. But these two do still coincide in
substance, inasmuch as God's chief way of seeking us poor wandering
sheep is through the work of His dear Son Jesus, and the coming of
Christ is the Father's searching for His sheep in the 'cloudy and
dark day.'
According to my text God leaves the ninety-and-nine and goes into
the mountains where the wanderer is, and seeks him. And this,
couched in veiled form, is the great mystery of the divine love, the
incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord. Here is the
answer by anticipation to the sarcasm that is often levelled at
evangelical Christianity: 'You must think a good deal of human
nature, and must have a very arrogant notion of the inhabitant of
this little speck that floats in the great sea of the heavens, if
you suppose that with all these millions of orbs he is so important
that the divine Nature came down upon this little tiny molehill, and
took his nature and died.'
'Yes!' says Christ, 'not because man was so great, not because man
was so valuable in comparison with the rest of creation--he was but
one amongst ninety-nine unfallen and unsinful--but because he was so
wretched, because he was so small, because he had gone so far away
from God; _therefore_, the seeking love came after him, and
would draw him to itself.' That, I think, is answer enough to the
cavil.
And then, there is a difference between these two versions of the
Parable in respect to their representation of the end of the seeking.
The one says 'seeks until He finds.' Oh! the patient, incredible
inexhaustibleness of the divine love. God's long-suffering, if I may
take such a metaphor, like a sleuth-hound, will follow the object
of its search through all its windings and doublings, until it comes
up to it. So that great seeking Shepherd follows us through all the
devious courses of our wayward, wandering footsteps doubling back
upon themselves, until He finds us. Though the sheep may increase its
distance, the Shepherd follows. The further away we get the more
tender His appeal; the more we stop our ears the louder the voice
with which He calls. You cannot wear out Jesus Christ, you cannot
exhaust the resources of His bounteousness, of His tenderness.
However we may have been going wrong, however far we may have
been wandering, however vehemently we may be increasing, at every
moment, our distance from Him, He is coming after us, serene, loving,
long-suffering, and will not be put away.
Dear friend! would you only believe that a loving, living Person is
really seeking you, seeking you by my poor words now, seeking you by
many a providence, seeking you by His Gospel, by His Spirit; and
will never be satisfied till He has found you in your finding Him
and turning your soul to Him!
But, I beseech you, do not forget the solemn lesson drawn from the
other form of the parable which is given in my text: _If so be
that He find it_. There is a possibility of failure. What an
awful power you have of burying yourself in the sepulchre, as it
were, of your own self-will, and hiding yourself in the darkness of
your own unbelief! You can frustrate the seeking love of God. Some
of you have done so--some of you have done so all your lives. Some
of you, perhaps at this moment, are trying to do so, and consciously
endeavouring to steel your hearts against some softening that may
have been creeping over them whilst I have been speaking. Are you
yielding to His seeking love, or wandering further and further from
Him? He has come to find you. Let Him not seek in vain, but let the
Good Shepherd draw you to Himself, where, lifted on the Cross, He
'giveth His life for the sheep.' He will restore your soul and carry
you back on His strong shoulder, or in His bosom near His loving
heart, to the green pastures and the safe fold. There will be joy in
His heart, more than over those who have never wandered; and there
will be joy in the heart of the returning wanderer, such as they who
had not strayed and learned the misery could never know, for, as the
profound Jewish saying has it, 'In the place where the penitents
stand, the perfectly righteous cannot stand.'