Luke 15:4

What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-none in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?” –

Luke 15:31-32

And he said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine if yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” –

Luke 19:10

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. –

Since Genesis 3 our God has been seeking His lost children, all of them. His question to Adam, “Where are you?” wasn’t intended as a question about his geographic location but his relational position before his God and heavenly Father. What Adam needed to say was, “I’m lost, Father, I really am.” However, his sin rendered him unable to think. Adam couldn’t even think that thought, let alone voice the tragic reality.

Like Adam, our sin, too, renders us, God’s children, unable to think and unable to voice where we really are in our relationship with our heavenly Father. And so our Father has and will forever seek after his lost children until He finds them.

Three times in Luke 15 our Lord Jesus impresses this truth upon His disciples and the church leaders of his day. His gracious and joyous words were set against the context of the scribes’ and Pharisees’ contentious grumbling: “This man [Jesus] receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). They had picked that bone with Him since the earliest days of His ministry (Matthew 9). They continued to chew on it all the way to Holy Week, when “[Jesus went] in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner” (Luke 19:7).

That should cause us to question, in the story of the Prodigal Son, who is the real lost boy? (the younger or older? See Luke 15.) [Find the rest of the story on pages 111-116 of The Great Sending]