After I turned nineteen, and years before I owned a pager or a cell phone, I moved more than seven hundred miles away from my mom. One morning, I left early to run errands, forgetting our scheduled call. Later that night, two policemen came to my door. Mom had been worried because I’d never missed one of our chats. After calling repeatedly and getting a busy signal, she reached out to the authorities and insisted they check on me. One of the police officers turned to me and said, “It’s a blessing to know love won’t stop looking for you.”
When I picked up the phone to call my mom, I realized I had accidentally left the receiver off its base. After I apologized, she said she needed to spread the good news to the family and friends she had informed that I’d been missing. I hung up thinking she’d overreacted a bit, though it felt good to be loved that much.
Scripture paints a beautiful picture of God, who is Love, relentlessly beckoning His wandering children. Like a good shepherd, He cares about and seeks out every lost sheep, affirming the priceless value of every beloved child of God (Luke 15:1–7).
Love never stops looking for us. He will pursue us until we’ve returned to Him. We can pray for others who need to know that Love—God—never stops looking for them either.
How does it encourage you to know that God continually pursues you in love? How is He using you to reveal His love to others?
INSIGHT
This parable (Luke 15:1–7) is the first in a series of parables about lost things: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the well-known story of the prodigal son (vv. 11–32). What prompted Jesus to tell these stories was the indignation of the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law”—the religious leaders. We’re quick to judge these self-righteous leaders, but we might want to pause and consider why they were upset. They were irritated that Jesus was welcoming “tax collectors and sinners” (vv. 1–2), who did not even attempt to live up to the high standards the religious elite set for them. Tax collectors, for instance, extorted from their fellow Hebrews, effectively exploiting the power of the Roman occupation force in order to get money from their own countrymen. Jesus sees such people not as rabble to be avoided but as valuable “lost sheep” to be rescued.