Lost & Found                                                Luke 15:8-10

Today I wanted to take a break from Mark’s Gospel and as I was looking through scriptures.

I came across this parable. This just might be Jesus shortest parable taking up just three sentences.

Our verse 8 says, “Suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one.” Many times this is taught as God having many followers but there are those who don’t believe therefore they are lost. The question this poses is, what does God do when someone turns away from him? Does God turn his back? Does God say, “Well, nine out of ten’s not bad.”

One of the reasons Jesus came to us was to explain the feelings of God and the relationship he has with his creation and the relationship he wants with each of us. Jesus explains all of this when he describes what the woman does when she loses the coin.

Jesus says in verse 8, “Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search …until she finds it?” This explains God’s feelings. God loves each of his creations so much, God wants us with him so much, he is not willing to just let us fall through the cracks.

This verse explains God’s relationship with all his creation. How many of us have lost something? I’ve lost my reading glasses, gloves, lots of things; and usually if I can’t find it rather quickly I just go buy another pair of glasses or gloves. Jen will ask me “Didn’t you used to have…?” and my answer usually is “Oh, yeah, I guess, I must have lost it.” When one of God’s creations gets lost God doesn’t say “Oh well, I’ve got others,” or “I’ll send the Holy Spirit to bring someone else to faith.” There are never so many people on earth that God loses track and doesn’t remember we were born. God never forgets you.

What Jesus says here also explains the relationship God wants with you and what he’s willing to do to have it. This woman wanted her coin back so much that she extended a great amount of effort to get it back. God wants a personal relationship with you so much he sent Jesus to the cross so that relationship is possible. God wants a personal relationship with you so much that he sends his Holy Spirit to lead you to his Word and to faith. The Holy Spirit works with every person on earth; yes, differently with different people but with everyone. It’s sad that so many ignore him or choose to look the other way.

And now in verse 9, when the woman finds the lost coin Jesus says “…she calls her friends and neighbors together and says ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’” When the lost come to God,       repent and accept Christ, God rejoices over the saved soul. And God doesn’t just give a fist bump and say, “Way to go,” God calls all of heaven together to celebrate, to cheer and to give praise. Verse 10, “…there is rejoicing in the presence in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

The next parable Jesus tells the crowd after this one is the Parable of the Lost Son and again he explains how God and heaven rejoice over a repentant sinner. In that parable when the son returns, his father who is representing God in the story says, “We had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and now is found.” (Luke 15:32)

So, now as is my habit, I started to look to see if this parable could be looked at in another way. As I researched I found a sermon by Reverend Val Black from 2019. In it he posed the questions; why is Jesus specific about the character being a woman, and why specifically ten coins?

Reverend Black explained that at the time a potential groom would negotiate a price for his bride with her father. From the time of an agreement until the wedding the future bride would wear a veil in public. The groom would give her ten coins to symbolize his commitment and their relationship. These coins were very important to her and would be sewn into her veil and losing one of these coins would be catastrophic; it could label her as unreliable or even unfaithful. This is where Reverend Black stopped but I kept thinking on this.

Revelation 19:7, “Let us be glad and give glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready.” If we remember that the Bible refers to Jesus as a bridegroom and to us as his bride, then we can see this parable differently.

This woman is nameless and we have seen before that when someone is nameless in the Bible they can therefore represent each of us. The coins are described as silver; not copper, not bronze. Silver, which represents purity and great value.

With all this in mind we can now see this scene shows us that as humans’ life can present us with many distractions and we can lose that which is pure and of great value; Jesus. As humans even when we are introduced to Jesus we can let life interfere or cover and hide part of him so we don’t see all of God. We can lose who Jesus is in our lives. If we haven’t come to Jesus in faith, we can remain lost.

All of us have a choice; when things get hard and life is difficult we can try to get by; or like this  woman we can look for the pure and the valuable. This woman searched and found her missing coin .We can be open, study, pray, attend church, read the Bible; in essence we can search. And we can find Christ and salvation.

For those who have come to Christ but let life come between them and Jesus we can do the same things. We can pray and attend services, we can read the Bible, and we can find Jesus and put him back at the center of our lives.

And looking at verse 9 again, “…she calls her friends and neighbors together and says ‘Rejoice with me. I have found my lost coin.’” When someone comes to Christ and is saved we should all come into fellowship with them and really rejoice and celebrate for their soul has been saved and they will spend eternity in heaven and not hell. Sometimes we can be “Great, I’m happy for you.” We should be excited because the greatest thing that can ever happen to them has happened, they accepted Christ.

If someone we know has let their faith wain but comes back to their faith we should embrace them and celebrate them. Now, no they never lost their salvation but now the Holy Spirit can work in their lives. They can put Jesus at the center of their life and God can use them to plant a seed of faith in others.

This is a short parable, but like the coins in this story the parable has two sides. On one side we see how God feels about us. That God loves each of us so much he will never be content with those who come to him while dismissing those who fall away. We see that God will go to great lengths to bring us back to him, lengths that include his son dying on a Roman cross.

On the flip side, these few lines tell us how we all have a choice to search out Christ or to let him remain lost to us. We can see life and its demands can hide from us the purity of Christ and the immense value of Christ to our lives.

And in both scenarios we see rejoicing, both here on earth and in heaven. The greatest thing that can happen to any of us is our salvation and redemption by God. On earth we should rejoice and celebrate with those who accept Christ and become our new brothers and sisters; we should also rejoice and celebrate with those who recommit to placing Jesus at the center of their lives. And we should know that in heaven all the saints who have gone before us and all of God’s angels rejoice and sing for each and every redeemed sinner.

Amen