'If so be that he find it.'--MATT. xviii. 13.
'Until he find it.'--LUKE xv. 4.
Like other teachers, Jesus seems to have had favourite points of
view and utterances which came naturally to His lips. There are
several instances in the gospels of His repeating the same sayings
in entirely different connections and with different applications.
One of these habitual points of view seems to have been the thought
of men as wandering sheep, and of Himself as the Shepherd. The
metaphor has become so familiar that we need a moment's reflection
to grasp the mingled tenderness, sadness, and majesty of it. He
thought habitually of all humanity as a flock of lost sheep, and of
Himself as high above them, unparticipant of their evil, and having
one errand--to bring them back.
And not only does He frequently refer to this symbol, but we have
the two editions, from which my texts are respectively taken, of the
Parable of the Lost Sheep. I say two editions, because it seems to
me a great deal more probable that Jesus should have repeated
Himself than that either of the Evangelists should have ventured to
take this gem and set it in an alien setting. The two versions
differ slightly in some unimportant expressions, and Matthew's is
the more condensed of the two. But the most important variation is
the one which is brought to light by the two fragments which I have
ventured to isolate as texts. '_If_ He find' implies the
possible failure of the Shepherd's search; '_till_ He find'
implies His unwearied persistence in the teeth of all failure. And,
taken in conjunction, they suggest some very blessed and solemn
considerations, which I pray for strength to lay upon your minds and
hearts now.
I. But first let me say a word or two upon the more general thought
brought out in both these clauses--of the Shepherd's search.
Now, beautiful and heart-touching as that picture is, of the
Shepherd away amongst the barren mountains searching minutely in
every ravine and thicket, it wants a little explanation in order to
be brought into correspondence with the fact which it expresses. For
His search for His lost property is not in ignorance of where it is,
and His finding of it is not His discovery of His sheep, but its
discovery of its Shepherd. We have to remember wherein consists the
loss before we can understand wherein consists the search.
Now, if we ask ourselves that question first, we get a flood of
light on the whole matter. The great hundredth Psalm, according to
its true rendering, says, 'It is He that hath made us, _and we are
His_; ... we are ... the sheep of His pasture.' But God's true
possession of man is not simply the possession inherent in the act
of creation. For there is only one way in which spirit can own
spirit, or heart can possess heart, and that is through the
voluntary yielding and love of the one to the other. So Jesus
Christ, who, in all His seeking after us men, is the voice and hand
of Almighty Love, does not count that He has found a man until the
man has learned to love Him. For He loses us when we are alienated
from Him, when we cease to trust Him, when we refuse to obey Him,
when we will not yield to Him, but put Him far away from us.
Therefore the search which, as being Christ's is God's in Christ, is
for our love, our trust, our obedience; and in reality it consists
of all the energies by which Jesus Christ, as God's embodiment and
representative, seeks to woo and win you and me back to Himself,
that He may truly possess us.
If the Shepherd's seeking is but a tender metaphor for the whole
aggregate of the ways by which the love that is divine and human in
Jesus Christ moves round about our closed hearts, as water may feel
round some hermetically sealed vessel, seeking for an entrance, then
surely the first and chiefest of them, which makes its appeal to each
of us as directly as to any man that ever lived, is that great mystery
that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, left the ninety-and-nine
that were safe on the high pastures of the mountains of God, and came
down among us, out into the wilderness, 'to seek and to save that
which was lost.'
And, brother, that method of winning--I was going to say, of
_earning_--our love comes straight in its appeal to every
single soul on the face of the earth. Do not say that thou wert not
in Christ's heart and mind when He willed to be born and willed to
die. Thou, and thou, and thou, and every single unit of humanity
were there clear before Him in their individuality; and He died for
thee, and for me, and for _every_ man. And, in one aspect, that
is more than to say that He died for _all_ men. There was a
specific intention in regard to each of us in the mission of Jesus
Christ; and when He went to the Cross the Shepherd was not giving
His life for a confused flock of which He knew not the units, but
for sheep the face of each of whom He knows, and each of whom He
loves. There was His first seeking; there is His chief seeking.
There is the seeking which ought to appeal to every soul of man, and
which, ever since you were children, has been making its appeal to
you. Has it done so in vain? Dear friend, let not your heart still
be hard.
He seeks us by every record of that mighty love that died for us,
even when it is being spoken as poorly, and with as many limitations
and imperfections, as I am speaking it now. 'As though God did
beseech you by us, pray you in Christ's stead.' It is not arrogance,
God forbid! it is simple truth when I say, Never mind about me; but
my word, in so far as it is true and tender, is Christ's word to
you. And here, in our midst, that unseen Form is passing along these
pews and speaking to these hearts, and the Shepherd is seeking His
sheep.
He seeks each of us by the inner voices and emotions in our hearts
and minds, by those strange whisperings which sometimes we hear, by
the suddenly upstarting convictions of duty and truth which sometimes,
without manifest occasion, flash across our hearts. These voices are
Christ's voice, for, in a far deeper sense than most men superficially
believe, 'He is the true Light that lighteth every man coming into
the world.'
He is seeking us by our unrest, by our yearnings after we know not
what, by our dim dissatisfaction which insists upon making itself
felt in the midst of joys and delights, and which the world fails to
satisfy as much as it fails to interpret. There is a cry in every
heart, little as the bearer of the heart translates it into its true
meaning--a cry after God, even the living God. And by all your
unrests, your disappointments, your hopes unfulfilled, your hopes
fulfilled and blasted in the fulfilment, your desires that perish
unfruited; by all the mystic movements of the spirit that yearns for
something beyond the material and the visible, Jesus Christ is
seeking His sheep.
He seeks us by the discipline of life, for I believe that Christ is
the active Providence of God, and that the hands that were pierced
on the Cross do move the wheels of the history of the world, and
mould the destinies of individual spirits.
The deepest meaning of all life is that we should be won to seek Him
who in it all is seeking us, and led to venture our hopes, and fling
the anchor of our faith beyond the bounds of the visible, that it
may fasten in the Eternal, even in Christ Himself, 'the same
yesterday and to-day and for ever' when earth and its training are
done with. Brethren, it is a blessed thing to live, when we
interpret life's smallnesses aright as the voice of the Master, who,
by them all--our sadness and our gladness, the unrest of our hearts
and the yearnings and longings of our spirits, by the ministry of
His word, by the record of His sufferings--is echoing the invitation
of the Cross itself, 'Come unto Me, all ye ... and I will give you
rest!' So much for the Shepherd's search.
II. And now, in the second place, a word as to the possible
thwarting of the search.
'If so be that He find.' That is an awful _if_, when we think
of what lies below it. The thing seems an absurdity when it is
spoken, and yet it is a grim fact in many a life--viz. that Christ's
effort can fail and be thwarted. Not that His search is perfunctory
or careless, but that we shroud ourselves in darkness through which
that love can find no way. It is we, not He, that are at fault when
He fails to find that which He seeks. There is nothing more certain
than that God, and Christ the image of God, desire the rescue of
every man, woman, and child of the human race. Let no teaching blur
that sunlight fact. There is nothing more certain than that Jesus
Christ has done, and is doing, all that He can do to secure that
purpose. If He could make every man love Him, and so find every man,
be sure that He would do it. But He cannot. For here is the central
mystery of creation, which if we could solve there would be few
knots that would resist our fingers, that a finite will like yours
or mine can lift itself up against God, and that, having the
capacity, it has the desire. He says, 'Come!' We say, 'I will not.'
That door of the heart opens from within, and He never breaks it
open. He stands at the door and knocks. And then the same solemn
_if_ comes--'If any man opens, I will come in'; if any man
keeps it shut, and holds on to prevent its being opened, I will stop
out.
Brethren, I seek to press upon you now the one plain truth, that if
you are not saved men and women, there is no person in heaven or
earth or hell that has any blame in the matter but yourself alone.
God appeals to us, and says, 'What more _could_ have been done
to My vineyard that I have not done unto it?' His hands are clean,
and the infinite love of Christ is free from all blame, and all the
blame lies at our own doors.
I must not dwell upon the various reasons which lead so many men
among us--as, alas! the utmost charity cannot but see that there
are--to turn away from Christ's appeals, and to be unwilling to
'have this Man' either 'to reign over' them or to save them. There
are many such, I am sure, in my audience now; and I would fain, if I
could, draw them to that Lord in whom alone they have life, and
rest, and holiness, and heaven.
One great reason is because you do not believe that you need Him.
There is an awful inadequacy in most men's conceptions--and still
more in their feelings--as to their sin. Oh dear friends, if you
would only submit your consciences for one meditative half-hour to
the light of God's highest law, I think you would find out something
more than many of you know, as to what you are and what your sin is.
Many of us do not much believe that we are in any danger. I have
seen a sheep comfortably cropping the short grass on a down over the
sea, with one foot out in the air, and a precipice of five hundred
feet below it, and at the bottom the crawling water. It did not know
that there was any danger of going over. That is like some of us. If
you believed what is true--that 'sin when it is finished, bringeth
forth death,' and understood what 'death' meant, you would feel the
mercy of the Shepherd seeking you. Some of us think we are in the
flock when we are not. Some of us do not like submission. Some of us
have no inclination for the sweet pastures that He provides, and
would rather stay where we are, and have the fare that is going
there.
We do not need to _do_ anything to put Him away. I have no
doubt that some of us, as soon as my voice ceases, will plunge again
into worldly talk and thoughts before they are down the chapel
steps, and so blot out, as well as they can, any vagrant and
superficial impression that may have been made. Dear brethren, it is
a very easy matter to turn away from the Shepherd's voice. 'I
called, and ye refused. I stretched out My hands, and _no man
regarded_.' That is all! That is what you do, and that is enough.