PARABLES OF LOST SHEEP, LOST COIN AND LOST SON

2010 ANNUAL LECTURESHIP OF NIGERIAN CHRISTIAN BIBLE COLLEGE, NCBC, UKPOM, ABAK, AKWA IBOM STATE HELD ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 2010

SPEAKER: EVANGELIST HILARY JOHNSON CHUKWUMA
CHUKWURAH

EXORDIUM:
It is indeed an honour to stand before you tonight to make a presentation on three outstanding parables of Jesus Christ. These parables are located in Luke chapter 15 verse one through verses thirty-two. These parables occupy a whole discourse, considering the fact that it took Jesus a complete chapter to relate.
Parables have been described as earthly stories with heavenly meanings. Parables were perfect media for Jesus to convey significant messages across to mankind. They were windows through which people could see through to the inner houses of their intended meanings. Jesus had told Nicodemus that if he could not understand earthly statements, he would not be able to appreciate the heavenly when related to him (John 3:12).
Jesus used parables to a great advantage. It was Chinua Achebe in his famous Things Fall Apart who wrote that parables are oil with which elderly people eat words.
Luke 15:1-32 is one passage of scripture that is loaded with parables – all speaking of one thing; pointing to one direction – God’s concern for His creatures. It contains three parables:
1. Parable of the Lost Sheep.
2. Parable of the Lost Coin
3. Parable of the Lost Son.
We can, therefore, say that Jesus moved from concerns with material to spiritual; from objects of less value to object of greater value. It bespeaks His mission to earth, which was to “Seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10) accentuating the greatest love statement ever uttered: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son” (John 3:6).
CONCEPTUALIZING PARABLES
George Fyler Townsend in the preface to his translation of Aesop's Fables, defined "parable" as "The designed use of language purposely intended to convey a hidden and secret meaning other than that contained in the words themselves, and which may bear a special reference to the hearer or reader."
A parable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human characters. It is a type of analogy.
The word "parable" comes from the Greek "παραβολή" (parabolē), the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative, generally referring to something that might naturally occur, by which spiritual and moral matters might be conveyed.
A parable is a short tale that illustrates universal truth, one of the simplest of narratives. It sketches a setting, describes an action, and shows the results. It often involves a character facing a moral dilemma, or making a questionable decision and then suffering the consequences. As with a fable, a parable generally relates a single, simple, consistent action without extraneous detail or distracting circumstances.
JESUS USES OF PARABLES
As a Master-Teacher, Jesus sure knew how to communicate. He employed the use of images and concepts, which drove home lessons He wanted His audience to take home with, ponder over and internalize. One powerful medium which He utilized greatly was parables. He used parables to teach Kingdom principles. This much He had made plain in Mark 4:30 when He stated, “… To what shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what parable shall we picture it?”
Like the rabbis of His time, Jesus used simple word-pictures, called parables, to help people understand who God is and what His Kingdom or Reign is like. Jesus used images and characters taken from everyday life to create a miniature play or drama to illustrate His message. This was Jesus most common way of teaching. His stories appealed to the young and old; poor and rich; to the learned and unlearned as well. Over a third of the Gospels by Matthew, Mark, and Luke contain parables told by Jesus.
Jesus loved to use illustrations to reach the heart of his listeners through their imaginations. These word-pictures challenged the mind to discover anew what and who God is like and moved the heart to make a response to God's love and truth. Like a skillful artist, Jesus painted evocative pictures with short and simple words.
CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF THE THREE PARABLES
The opening montage of Luke 15 gives us insight into why Jesus told these three parables. It was a case of “tax collectors and sinners” against “Pharisees and the Sadducees.” The later were grumbling against the former. It was a situation in which the righteous complained against the unrighteous.
To show God’s uncanny concern for the lost, Jesus told the story of the Lost Sheep. The 99 sheep in the pen were not in danger of being devoured by predators but the lost was – Jesus through His first parable was appealing to the reasoning of the righteous, saying in essence – The lost need repentance but the righteous do not. They also convey to the hearers and readers (in our own case) how the lost should be treated.
SYNOPSIS OF THE THREE PARABLES
The Lost Sheep
The Lost Sheep just wandered away. Perhaps, something caught his attention. He went to look at that article of interest and on and on it wandered farther and farther away from its shepherd. Obviously, there were predators outside the sheepfold who were waiting anxiously for any straying sheep because their dinner would not be complete without a sheep. We are warned in I Peter 5:8 that there is a predator roaring like a lion seeking whom he may devour. In other words, the strayed sheep was in danger of being devoured by both its enemy and the enemy of the shepherd.
What would a good shepherd do? Forget about the lost sheep and go on living as if nothing of significance has happened? Or should he leave the ninety-nine secure sheep in the sheepfold to go in search of the lost one until it is rescued? Good reasoning dictates that the later is the better option.
Jesus, obviously wanted this parable to serve as the launch pad for the last two: Lost Coin and Lost Son.


The Lost COIN
The housewife who lost a coin faced something of an economic disaster, since the value of the coin would be equivalent to her husband's daily wage. What would she say to her husband when he returned home from work? They were poor and would suffer greatly because of the loss. Her grief and anxiety turned to joy when she found the Lost Coin.
NOTE:
If men in Jesus’ audience could identify with a shepherd who lost his shepherd considering that most of them were by occupation shepherds, women in Jesus’ audience could identify with their fellow woman who lost a day’s wage, it would also not be difficult for fathers to identify with a father who lost his son to the alluring life outside the “family love and care” in search of meaning in the “wild world” of sin and prodigality. Of a truth, we are each faced with “dazzling sights and tempting sounds” which should ordinarily assault our spiritual and moral sensibilities (II Peter 2:7-8) but are unfortunately attractive to a larger percentage of our people.
The Lost SON
The third parable is about a man who had two sons. The younger son asked his father for money. The son wanted to receive immediately the money that he would receive after the father’s death. Then the son went away into a far country. He wasted his money in bad habits and wrong behaviour.
The lost sheep just wandered away. The lost coin is like the careless sinner. He does not know that he is lost. But the Lost Son decided to go away. He meant to do it. At last, everything went wrong for this son. He had no more money to buy food. He went back to his father. He wanted to be like a servant to his father. But the father was watching for his Lost Son. The father had always hoped that his Lost Son would come back. The father saw his Lost Son approach. So, the father ran to meet his son. He organized a great party because of the return of his Lost Son.
THE LOST SON: THE CLIMAX OF THE THREE PARABLES
Jesus in Matthew 6:26 had asked rhetorically, “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more valuable than they?”
In Luke 13:10-17, when a ruler of a synagogue had complained over Jesus’ healing of a woman in whom a “spirit of infirmity” had laid claim on asked, “Does not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or donkey from the stall, and lead it away to water it? So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound – think of it – for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond, on the Sabbath?” (Vs. 15-16, NKJV).
What do these signify? Obviously God was more interested in humans that He is of birds of the air, donkeys, oxen, coins, et cetera. This explains why the Parable of the Lost Son is the Climax of the three parables. The previous two parables were to lay the ground work upon which to build the superstructures of the Parable of the Lost Son.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son has been called, the “Pearle and Crown of all Parable” and “Evangelium in Evangelio” meaning, “The Gospel within the Gospel”
This parable focuses on man’s generation, his degeneration and regeneration. It is a graphic description of man’s downward journey and his upward journey back to God. In the parables of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin Jesus was concerned with conversion of sinners but in the Parable of the Lost Son He became concerned with restoration of fellowship.
The major theme of this parable seems not to be so much the conversion of the sinner, as in the previous two parables of Luke 15, but rather the restoration of a believer into fellowship with the Father. The main difference being that the owner went out to look for what was lost in the first two (Luke 15:1-10), whereas in this story the father waited and watched eagerly for his son's return. We see a progression between the three parables from the relationship of one in a hundred (Luke 15:1-7), to one in ten (Luke 15:8-10), to one in one (Luke 15:11-32); demonstrating God’s love for each individual and His personal attentiveness towards all humanity.
From Lost State To Recovered State
The story bothered around two sons: one was the assuming but the other was unassuming; one was self-serving but the other was concerned with the father’s concerns. In Matthew 21:28-31 Jesus told another parable of two sons: one disobeyed and repented but the other pledged allegiance but never acted on his pledges.
In Luke’s account of the Lost Son, we see a son applying for assertion of his fundamental right of independence: his right to the inheritance, which the father readily obliged. In this we see that we all have our rights to inheritance and that God does not in any way interfere with our personal decisions to live our lives the way we want as He had created each person as a free moral agent.
Having received his own share of the inheritance, “he went into a far country” where he was not able to manage his new found freedom and ended up squandering his resources on loose living with people of easy virtues. That decision led to disaster. Obviously, decisional disaster attracts moral and spiritual disasters, thereby paving way for natural and eternal disasters. We are all accountable to ourselves and to God for the choices we make. When we make the choices we make, we should be ready to face the consequences.
What the Prodigal Son had refused to do for His own father, the harsh realities of his own circumstance forced him to do for a stranger who dehumanized him by making him take care of animals which his culture forbade (Luke 15:15-16; cf. Lev. 11:7-8). Even these unclean animals seemed to be better off than he was at this point. This is a picture of the state of the lost sinner or a rebellious Christian who has returned to a life of slavery to sin (2 Peter 2:19-21). It is a picture of what sin really does in a person’s life, when they reject the Father’s will (Hebrews 12:1, Acts 8:23).
Sin always promises more than it gives, takes you further than you wanted to go, and leaves you worse off than you were before. Sin promises freedom but brings slavery (Romans 6:21).
HOPE IN THE HORIZON
Luke 15:17 is like an oasis in this desert of anguish and despair. Bible says, “But when he came to himself (to his senses)….” It brought the cheering news that the Lost Son had begun to reflect on his condition and realized that even his father's servants had it better than him. His painful circumstances helped him to see his father in a new light and brought him hope (Psalm 147:11, Isaiah 40:30-31, Romans 8:24-25, 1 Timothy 4:10).
This is reflective of the sinner when he/she discovers the destitute condition of his/her life because of sin. It is a realization that apart from God there is no hope (Ephesians 2:12, 2 Timothy 2:25-26). This is when a repentant sinner “comes to his senses” and longs to return to the state of fellowship with God which was lost when Adam sinned (Genesis 3:8).
The son devised a plan of action. Though at a quick glance it may seem that he may not be truly repentant, but rather motivated by his hunger, a more thorough study of the text gives new insights. He is willing to give up his rights as his father’s son and take on the position of his servant. Regardless of the motivation it demonstrates a true humility and true repentance, not based on what he said but was willing to do and eventually acted upon (Acts 26:20). He realized he had no right to claim a blessing upon return to his father’s household, nor did he have anything to offer, except a life of service, in repentance of his previous actions.
Self-realization is the first step to restoration because self-discovery leads to self-recovery and Self-realization would always lead to self actualization. He became man enough to go back to his father. He proved that he was a “child” when he requested for his own share of the estate but by his repentance he had showed that he had come of age.
The rest, as they say, is history: he went back to his father and rather get rebuked, he got a warn embrace. Rather than receive rejection, he received a grand reception meet for a royalty that had gone on an expedition! This is indeed ironical – how could the father be so unconditional in his demonstration of love and forgiveness? Surprisingly, however, that is the way our Heavenly Father is!!! It is called GRACE – Unmerited favour – God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.
THE SPIRITUAL PRODIGALITY OF THE OBEDIENT “HOME” SON
The father dealt with two lost sons – one lost to sin and spiritual slavery, the other lost to his self-serving and righteousness.
It is instructive to state that the man’s two sons were lost to different aspects of prodigalities. The original Prodigal Son was lost because of what he did while the good home boy was equally lost because of what he had failed to do, thus providing a fresh insight into James 4:17 ”…to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.”
While the Prodigal Son represented “Tax collectors and sinners” in Luke 15:1 the good home boy son represented “Pharisees and Sadducees” who could not share with Jesus the joy of the return of the prodigals. They had bad attitudes, forgetting that Jesus was sent not for the righteous but for the unrighteous since it was only the sick who were in need of physician not the healthy (Mark 2:16-17).
The older brother’s focus was on himself and as a result there was no joy in his brother’s arrival home. He was too self-consumed with issues of justice and equity that he failed to see the value in the fact that his brother had repented and returned. He had a right to be angry and to feel the way he felt but he went too far. He had an attitude problem.
It is a tragedy to have sound moral, social and spiritual characters but posses wrong attitudes towards others. This was the attitude of the Pharisees and Sadducees who have been described as those who were “Far-to-see” and those who are “Sad-to-see.”
However, after correcting the false impressions that had formed in the mind of his good-home-boy son, the father reaffirmed his position and commended his obedience, telling him that what he had was all his (Luke 15:31). For every one who serves God and has not indulged in any act of prodigality, spiritual or moral rascality, this is a promise to claim.
In Luke 15:32 the father prevailed on his “good son” to join every member of the family in rolling out drums for celebration. We should celebrate because angels and the Host of Heaven are celebrating the return of the prodigals (Luke 15:7, 10)!
APPLICATIONS FOR PARENTS AND CONGREGATIONS
Obviously, every parable has its moral lessons and applications for us who are alive in the land of the living today. I like to make applications for individuals, parents and congregations.
INDIVIDUALS
For every prodigal son or daughter who is wallowing in one form of prodigality or another, God is saying, “It is time to come home!” Do not allow yourself to pass through the “School of Hard Knocks” as the Prodigal king in II Chronicles 33:10-13 and Prodigal Son of Luke 15:11-32 did. Now is the acceptable time and today is the day of salvation (II Corinthians 6:1-2; Hebrews 3:7-8).
Your Heavenly Father is anxiously and sleeplessly waiting to welcome you home, embrace you and celebration your spiritual regeneration.
PARENTS
The present-day story of the Prodigal Son is one of the most heart-wrenching experiences for a Christian parent. Helplessness can turn to hopelessness and hopelessness can turn to despair. Often, the more a parent tries to return a child to Christ, the more the child runs away from his Christian roots. The “prodigal experience” (the emotionally-charged relationship between a Christian parent and a rebellious child) is a universal challenge to Christian faith. We can all identify with this situation. What needs to be done for our children have been done yet they decide to go away.
The story of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke is familiar to all of us. In part, it’s the story of a rebellious son who rejects his father’s upbringing. Prideful and strong, the son heads-off to a far-away land, leads a wild life of adventure, and squanders everything of value (literally and spiritually). Not until he’s confronted with failure and despair, does he return home, repentant and willing to do anything to win back his father’s favour.
To parents who are going through experiences with prodigal children (sons or daughters), you must take courage in the fact that your prodigals will return. Do what the father in the story did: keep praying, keep looking out for the return of your prodigals. There is hope that he or she will one day return to his/her senses and return to you.
Sometimes, our prodigals try to prove to us that one’s sound spiritual and moral upbringings are not insurance against prodigalities (Prov. 22:16; cf. II Chron. 33:3; II Kings 18:5-7). These can happen until they hit rock-bottom and learn from the “School of Hard Knocks.” Do not fight with your prodigal. Leave hi/her to his/her choices but do not stop to pray for your prodigal. Pray that your prodigal would encounter a life-threatening but life-changing experience that would bring them on their knees and hunger for reconciliation with their God (II Chron. 33:11-13; Luke 15:14-17).
CONGREGATIONS AND CONGREGATIONAL LEADERSHIP
The crux of Jesus’ Parable of the Lost Son was how God responded to His own Prodigals (in which case, all of us) and how we should respond to our own prodigals.
The “Now, Now”; “Fast Food” and “Wait-and-Take” mentalities are largely responsible for prodigalities and rascality amongst God’s people in any era. A prodigal is a wasteful person. There are people who waste their moralities by “sowing wild oaths” and those who waste their spiritual heritage by seeking for help where none is to be found.
The Father’s response to the son’s return should teach us how to respond to those who are disfellowship from the Fold. No conditionalities. No panel was set up to investigate their true repentance. No mourners Bench was set aside to ascertain the genuineness of his repentance. All that the father needed was the return of the son and his acknowledgement of his folly.
COMMUNITY CONCERN
As the community of the saved, this parable gives us a glimpse of the heart of a true shepherd, and the joy of a community reunited with its lost members. Shepherds not only had to watch over their sheep by day and by night; they also had to protect them from wolves and lions who preyed upon them, and from dangerous terrain and storms. Shepherds often had large flocks, sometimes numbering in the hundreds or thousands. It was common to inspect and count the sheep at the end of the day. You can imagine the surprise and grief of the shepherd who discovers that one of his sheep is missing! Does he wait until the next day to go looking for it? Or does he ask a neighboring shepherd if he might has seen the stray sheep? No, he goes immediately in search of this lost sheep. Delay for even one night could mean disaster leading to death. Sheep by nature are very social creatures. An isolated sheep can quickly become bewildered, disoriented, and even neurotic. Easy prey for wolves and lions; of false prophets and false teachers! Let Galatians 6:1-2 be our guide.
COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION AND CELEBRATION
Both the shepherd and the housewife "search until what they have lost is found". The father of the prodigal waited until his son returned. Their persistence paid off. They instinctively shared their joy with the whole community. The restoration of the prodigal son ended with a festive party celebrated by the whole community. What was new in Jesus' teaching was the insistence that sinners must be sought out and not merely mourned for. God does not rejoice in the loss of anyone, but desires that all be saved and restored to fellowship with Him. That is why the whole community of heaven rejoices when one sinner is found and restored to fellowship with God.
APPEAL
Let us leave off the attitudes of keeping our returned prodigals at arms-length, suspecting their motives and not believing that their return is for any good. Let us stop making them feel like “strangers” that they are not; giving them sense of rejection, telling them that they are not really welcomed. Rather, let us as the father of the prodigal call for spiritual celebrations, go to our wardrobes to get the best robes, rings on their fingers, sandals on their feet and adorned them with these precious items. Let us kill the fattened calves and celebrate because the “dead” have come back to life and the “lost have been found!”
Thank you!
Evangelist Hilary Johnson Chukwuma Chukwurah
Minister, CAMPUS/TOWNSHIP CHURCH OF CHRIST,
14, Agbugwu Lane, off, University Market Road, P. O. Box
v 351, Nsukka - 410002, Enugu State, Nigeria.
PHONE: 234-08039596919.
E-MAIL: hilaryjohnsonc@yahoo.com;
hilaryjohnsonc@gmail.com