The Wide Path Dropout Mama
The Wide Path Dropout Mama
The Lost Sheep & The Lost Coin - Luke 15 Parables - Part 2
Here is Part 2 in our deep dive into Luke chapter 15 as we are letting Jesus define what repentance means in His own words using these parables. In this episode we learn who Jesus was responding to with these parables and why. We also learn that Jesus describes repentance as allowing yourself to be found and brought back home, WOW!! Join me, Ginny, as we get into the middle eastern context and culture of the first 2 parables in Luke 15.
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Hi, my name's Jenny. I'm a wife, a mom, an entrepreneur and, most importantly, a disciple of Yeshua Jesus. I've been a Christian for over a decade, having studied the Bible for at least that long or better. Until about three years ago, I thought I knew Jesus pretty well. Then my world was rocked. I started studying the Bible from its Middle Eastern context and culture, and what I found has completely changed my and my family's lives forever. Join me as I share all that I've learned about our Jewish Messiah and listen to my conversations with other moms on their own journey with Jesus as we discuss the practical ways that we walk out our faith in our everyday lives. This is a conversation for the Christian mom who wants more.
Speaker 1:This is the Wide Path Dropout Mama podcast. Hey everybody, welcome back to part two in our deep dive in Luke chapter 15, where we are letting Jesus define what repentance is, as we take a very close look at the three parables found in Luke chapter 15. On the last episode, we found out what the Greek and the Hebrew word and meaning for repentance was, and we also found out that sometimes it's not so much the literal definition of a word but it's the context and the culture that's going to define a word and in this case, repentance in Luke, chapter 15, as Jesus is going to teach us is going to be one of those cases where culture is going to define what it means. We also learned about rabbis in Jesus's day and what it was like for a person to look for a rabbi and to try to find a rabbi, that they wanted to sit under their teaching. And we discovered that a rabbi's perspective, or their interpretation of the scriptures and how they would teach the scriptures, was what is called their yoke. So when Jesus was saying in Matthew 11, 28, when he said, come to me all you who are burdened and heavy laden, and I will give you rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light, take my yoke upon you. He was saying take my interpretation of the scriptures upon you, because my interpretation is easy and it's light. And so as we deep dive into these three parables in Luke 15, we are going to be sitting under Jesus's yoke and we are going to be allowing him to teach us what he means when he's talking about repentance.
Speaker 1:But I wanted to clarify that repentance is not just something that we let him do for us. It definitely is something that we play a part in. We do have times where we are the ones who repent. We get up and we decide that we are going to go back to the Lord, we're going to go back to the good way of living. We are tired of being disobedient and we decide to turn and change our minds and go back to him. Go back to him.
Speaker 1:But the kind of repentance that I think Jesus was talking about in this chapter is the kind of repentance where we have found ourselves lost and we have hit rock bottom. We maybe have stumbled, we may have fallen into old patterns, dark patterns again, and we are so full of shame that we can't even look up at him, much less muster up the courage to repent and try to go back. That's the kind of repentance I think Jesus is talking about here, and so when we're talking about repentance and so when we're talking about repentance, I don't want you to assume that I believe that that is what repentance is completely, because I think that repentance is not one or the other, it's both, and there's different situations, and I think there's some times that we find ourselves in such a dark place that we don't have the strength to repent. And that's when Jesus comes in and he repents us, he brings us back, he leads us back to his good way so that we might walk in it again, and so that's kind of where I want to pick back up, and so that's kind of where I want to pick back up. I also mentioned that Jesus was traveling with his disciples to the cross, and so when you understand that these were some of the last conversations that they were having together, you can assume that the things he's sharing with them were really important. He's sharing with them were really important, and so his perspective of repentance. I believe that he really wants them to understand what he's getting to here.
Speaker 1:And also he is talking to the Pharisees. The Pharisees at that time were called the shepherds of Israel, and they were called that because they were the keepers of the Torah, they were the teachers of God's law and technically, because they were the teachers of God's law, they were responsible for the people of Israel. They were the ones who were responsible for helping lead these sinners back to the Lord. But that's not what they were doing. They were taking God's law and they were twisting it, they were adding things onto it, they were making it burdensome for the people. They were not helping find the lost sheep and leading them back to repentance, they were actually making them. They were making it so hard and almost impossible for these people to find their way back. And so that's what Jesus is addressing when he's talking to these Pharisees through these three parables.
Speaker 1:And as we go through these three parables, it's kind of like a crescendo. They're leading up to this climax at the end where we get to the parable of the prodigal son. That's where it's all going to come and kind of explode in this amazing story that, when you hear it from its Middle Eastern context and culture, it is completely life changing and it will fundamentally change the way that you see the Father and the way that you see Jesus and how extravagant his forgiveness and his love for us is. And so let's pick up kind of where we left off last time. And so let's pick up kind of where we left off last time. We're going to take a look at what Jesus was doing with these sinners and why he began to address the Pharisees through these three parables.
Speaker 1:Ok, let's begin by reading Luke, chapter 15, verses 1 through 3. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to him and the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying this man receives sinners and eats with them. So he told them this parable. Okay, so first let's take a look at the word receives. Usually, the typical word used for receives in Greek would be dekomai, which means a willingness to sit and talk with someone, but in this particular verse there's a special prefix added to it, which changes it to pro-dekomai, which means to welcome into fellowship, which means to welcome into fellowship. So this tells us that Jesus wasn't just talking with and preaching to these sinners. He was actually fellowshipping with them and having a meal with them. And in Jesus's culture, when you had a meal with someone, that was a high honor. It meant that not only were you willing to be associated with them, but you were actually accepting them on a profound level.
Speaker 1:So now I want to turn our attention over to the Pharisees and, like I was saying before, this time in history the Pharisees were called the shepherds of Israel. Now, why were they called that? They were called that because, as teachers of God's word and of the Torah, they were technically responsible for caring for God's people through teaching them God's good instructions. And in Romans, chapter 2, verse 4, paul says that it's the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. And it was God's heart for Israel's leaders to be merciful and compassionate. And this is what this was Jesus's heart. That's why he stayed so frustrated with the Pharisees, because not only were the Pharisees not trying to reach the lost sheep, they were alienating themselves from them and they were twisting God's law. They were adding to God's law and they were beating their own people down with it, and they were putting their heavy versions of God's word onto the people.
Speaker 1:Take a look at what God says in Hosea 6.6. He says For what I desire is mercy, not sacrifices, knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. And Jesus actually quotes that in Matthew 9.13, where again Jesus is eating with sinners and he's confronted by the Pharisees. And this is what he says to them Matthew 9, 13. As for you, go and learn what this means. I want compassion rather than animal sacrifices, for I didn't come to call the righteous, but sinners. So this is the context of this parable teaching You've got the Pharisees upset at Jesus for associating with sinners, and then you've got Jesus, who's basically broken hearted because the very ones who are supposed to be caring for God's sheep are the ones who are breaking them down. And this leads us into the first parable of the hundred sheep.
Speaker 1:But before we dive into this specific parable, I'm going to go ahead and spoil this for you. I'm going to go ahead and give you how Jesus is defining repentance. He is defining repentance by allowing yourself to be found and brought back home. How gorgeous is that? How beautiful is that? Take a minute and just let that sink in for a second. Jesus himself is defining repentance as allowing yourself to be found and brought back home. That's very different from how we've always learned what repentance is in our Western American culture.
Speaker 1:Think about it like this when I think about repentance, I kind of think about somebody standing in the street with a sign saying repent, for Jesus is coming soon. Repent, you're going to. You know, do you want to go to heaven or do you want to go to hell? And every time I've seen that when I was younger, I would look at that and it felt very demanding, it felt very confrontational, it felt kind of accusatory. But the more I look at it, the closer I get to the Lord, and the more that I have read His word, the more I'm seeing it as it's another pattern of him intersecting and interrupting your life and coming to you and trying to pull you to himself. It's not so much somebody accusing you or demanding that you need to repent. Think of it as Jesus literally interrupting your day to try to get your attention and bring you back to himself. And think about your own examples in your own life where he has completely interrupted you. He is completely just taken over. He's come in and he's inserted himself to woo you back to himself and, like I mentioned before about it's the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. I bet that each one of us that are listening now have so many different stories of how the Lord has done the same thing for you. I know that I have so many stories of how the Lord has literally repented me. He has approached me, he has, he's been so kind and so good that it just woos me back to him that I allow myself to be found by him and for him to take me back home, for him to lead me back on his path of righteousness.
Speaker 1:And as we go into these three parables, that is how I want you to see what he's trying to explain and the cool thing about each of these different examples is the first one is about an animal. It's a sheep. It's about the animal. He cannot talk, he's not necessarily able to change his mind, but at the same time there is a little bit of room for you. You could kind of say well, you know, maybe the sheep could go back, because maybe he does love his shepherd and he wants to go back to a shepherd. So there's a little bit of room for there to be some doubt that that could be the meaning that he's trying to explain.
Speaker 1:But when you go to the next parable and it's a parable about a coin well, a coin isn't an inanimate object. A coin is not able to repent itself. It's not able to change its mind and go back home. The woman in the parable has made it a point to do everything she could to go find that coin and she did not stop until she found it. It and that's what Jesus is saying repentance is like. It's like a woman who lost a coin and she lights a lamp and she sweeps the house until she finds it. He's saying I am that woman, I am going to. If you are lost, I'm coming after you and there's really nothing that you can do about it, but you can. You can allow yourself to be found and brought back home, but the coin doesn't really have a choice, does it? And I think that's what he's trying to get to. And so when you look at that, you've got two examples, both very different, but each one he's trying to say I am coming for you and I'm going to bring you back home. I am coming for you and I'm going to bring you back home. I am going to lead you to repentance.
Speaker 1:And then, when you get to the parable of the prodigal son, that is a whole other just finding the words to describe to you how amazing that story is, how what they are not saying in between those lines is so loud and so extravagant. It'll rock you, you. And that's going to be an episode all on its own because it's very it's. There's a lot to it. There's a lot going on about the culture and about certain processes and the son and then the other son and the father. There's so much going on and I'm going to break all of that down and I will tell you that when I do that and you hear about this story from the Middle Eastern context and culture and everything that's going on in there. You will never be the same. I promise you that, and I hope that that will lead you on your own journey to dig more into that and to find out more about who that Jesus is and find out more about how that's what he does with his children that he loves. It is absolutely mind blowing and life changing.
Speaker 1:But for now, let's get back and do the deep dive on this first parable about the hundred sheep. Okay, luke 15, verse four. Suppose one of you has 100 sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the 99 in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? Okay, I'm going to stop there. Now, here you've got a shepherd and he loses one of his sheep. It doesn't say that the sheep wandered off, it says that the shepherd loses them. So that's important to note there. That's kind of a comparison to the Pharisees losing a sheep. Right, they're supposed to be the shepherds of Israel. And now they've lost the sheep, he says does he not leave the 99 in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? So he's telling the Pharisee you're supposed to go find this sheep, and not only have you not done that, I've now had to step in and do this job for you. So not only am I having to do your job, but you're now complaining to me about it.
Speaker 1:So let's take a look at the actual shepherd in this story. So once he realizes that one of his sheep has gone astray, he now has to secure the 99 sheep. He has to find a place where he can leave them securely, where they won't be out in the open. He's probably going to drop them in a cave and he probably has a helper that's going to stay behind. But now the shepherd has to go after this lost sheep. And this isn't just a simple task. This could take up to a day or a two day journey just going to find this lost sheep. And this is not just like your flat pasture land that we are tending this flock in. This is rough terrain. You would have rocky hills. So the shepherds he knows that he's about to have to spend a good amount of time traveling. He's going to have to go over rough terrain to get this lost sheep and bring it back home. And here's the other thing he doesn't know if the sheep is still alive, and the shepherd himself probably doesn't own this flock, he's probably a hired hand and so he's going to have to be responsible for bringing back the news of the sheep being lost, if it is in fact dead and not just lost. So all of these things are on the shepherd's mind as he's going back to get it.
Speaker 1:Now, when he does go and find the sheep, let's pick up in verse five. And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. So he is joyful because he's found the sheep. It's still alive. But what does he have to do now? He has to pick this sheep up it could be 50 to 100 pounds and hoist it onto his shoulders, and now he has to climb back through that rough terrain with an extra 50 to 100 pounds.
Speaker 1:But it says that he does this joyfully, and this is Jesus's heart. When he goes and finds one of his lost sheep, he joyfully brings it back. Isn't that so beautiful, oh, my goodness. Okay, let's pick up at verse. Let's pick up at the rest of verse five. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says rejoice with me, I have found my lost sheep. I tell you that in the same way, there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who do not need to repent. And that's kind of showing Jesus's sense of humor, because all of us know there's no righteous person that doesn't need to repent. We all need to repent, sometimes on a daily basis. For me sometimes it's on a minute by minute basis. But look at how beautiful that is. He's beginning this story of him defining what repentance is, by sharing a story of a helpless animal. It's a helpless sheep. This sheep likely doesn't even know that he's wandered off. He probably didn't even realize it by the time the good shepherd got to him and Jesus is joyfully putting him on his shoulders and carrying him back safely with the others. That is just so precious. The sheep was not so much responsible for his repentance, but the shepherd was.
Speaker 1:He's going to go into this next parable where we are now going to be looking at a coin. So a coin is not a living animal where it could possibly return on its own. This is an inanimate object. It has no capability of changing its mind and returning back to its owner. So let's take a look at this next parable Luke, chapter 15, verse 8.
Speaker 1:Or suppose a woman has 10 silver coins and loses one, does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says rejoice with me, I have found my lost coin. In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Okay, so there is a lot going on in this short little parable that you wouldn't know. So back in Jesus's time, if a woman, a woman would keep her coins in a sack and she would tie it, would be a piece of cloth, she would put all of her coins in it and she would tie up that cloth and she would carry it. Would be a piece of cloth, she would put all of her coins in it and she would tie up that cloth and she would carry it around with her. And she likely was around her house and probably cleaning, cooking, doing all the normal things that you would do in your home as a woman in that day. And when she's realized that she's lost this coin Now, when she realizes that she's lost this coin, she's probably really upset with herself because she knows that she lost it.
Speaker 1:So she's probably beating herself up for not tying this cloth tight enough and not allowing for this coin to slip out. And here's the thing where Jesus was in Galilee, near the sea, these homes were built. It was kind of dark and the materials that they use the stone that they used to build these homes were dark, so you would have to light a lamp in order to see better in the house so you could look for the coin and the way that the floors were built. There would be all kinds of cracks and things that the coin could have slipped into. So there's a lot of different variables that are making it hard for her to find the coin.
Speaker 1:But she finally finds it right and then she puts it back with the rest and then she calls her friends in the community which would have been her women friends in the community and she throws a little party and rejoices over finding this lost coin, because she's really upset with herself. She thought that she lost it and that would have been. You know that would have been hard to explain to her husband, like how did you lose this coin in your own home and why weren't you more responsible with it? Why didn't you tie your cloth up tight enough. Why didn't you put it somewhere else? There's all these factors and she would have been really beating herself up over the fact that she lost that coin. But now that she's found it, she can rejoice.
Speaker 1:And the fact that Jesus is alluding to repentance being like this lost coin tells you that there is no way on earth that this coin would have been able to repent itself. That coin was lost and the woman who Jesus is represented by, this woman here, that woman lit her lamp, she swept through that house and she did everything she could to find that lost coin and restore it back to her coin purse. That is what Jesus does when we are lost he lights his lamp, he sweeps the home and he does whatever it takes to find us and bring us back to himself. My God, if that doesn't just woo you, I don't know what will. And Jesus, he's going into these parables and he's saying OK, if you don't believe me about this lost sheep, let me tell you about this inanimate object. And here's where we come to the final parable about the prodigal son.
Speaker 1:This one is going to need its own episode because it is packed with richness, with so much culture going on that you can't see. It is so powerful, the things that are happening in between the lines of this little small paragraph at the end of Luke chapter 15, that you just couldn't possibly read into unless you did a study on that culture on that time in Jesus's day, in his, where he lived. There is a resource that I want to encourage you to get. It's called the Cross and the Prodigal by Kenneth Bailey. You can get it on Amazon.
Speaker 1:It is a book that takes Luke chapter 15 in each of those parables and it breaks it down from a peasant's view, from Jesus's culture and where he lived, and it shows you what was going on back in those days and what they were actually seeing through each of these little stories. And it goes into way more detail than I could go into on any one of these episodes. So I highly recommend that you get it and get super excited about this final episode about the prodigal son, or as they call it in the Middle East, the running father, because it is so powerful it's going to rock you, I promise. So that's going to do it for today's episode. I pray that the Lord keeps you in his perfect peace Until next time we will see you back here on the Wide Path Dropout Mama podcast. Thank you.