Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2756
“The Son of Man hats come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Luke 19:10.
OUR Lord’s mission upon earth was a very gracious one. It had a narrow side to it, for He came only as a Minister— not as a Savior, mark you, but as Minister—to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He was, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, “a Minister of the circumcision for the truth of God.” And He did not traverse any other country but Palestine, in order to preach the Gospel to the people, but He kept Himself to the seed of Abraham.
Yet there was abundant room for one personal ministry within that realm alone. If a Christian worker were to say that he would confine his labors to London, he certainly need not think that he would have a restricted range! And our Savior’s personal preaching in Palestine gave Him more work than any one man could accomplish. But, even in that restricted sense, it is remarkable that He should have said to the woman of Canaan, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The lost sheep were the peculiar desire of His heart—not so much Israel, as “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” His eye was especially fixed upon them, His Grace sought out the objects most needing it. His mercy hungered after human misery in order that He might relieve it so that there were always uppermost in His mind, thoughts of pity and love towards the sons of men.
If you were never lost, you have no part or lot in His work of salvation. But if you are lost, and know it, this is the very link which unites you to the Savior! He has come to seek and to save just such as you are and I hope, in the observations I am about to make, that I shall be able to show that He came to save you!
I. I shall speak concerning OUR LORD’S MISSION. He has come to seek and to save that which was lost.
Notice, first, what a gracious mission it was!It was a mission of pure mercy and indescribable love. Our Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world to seek His own honor, but to seek and to save the lost. Not to get anything for Himself, but to give everything to those who are lost. His mission is one of undeserved goodness, on His part, towards those who have treated Him evilly and who deserve very different treatment at His hands. There was no law except His own love to compel Christ to come to save sinners. They had no claim upon Him. When He resolved to come, it was an act of matchless Grace. If He had not chosen to come, He would still have been the ever-blessed Son of the Highest, enshrined in everlasting Glory though everyone of us had perished! His coming was Infinite goodness, returning good for evil, coming down to our lost estate and determining, by superabundant affection, to save us from it! Our Savior is embodied Grace,
Incarnate Love and His mission is Grace itself. Let us never forget that He came to save the lost—not to save the good and the excellent.
Ah, my Brothers and Sisters, Christ’s eyes look in the opposite direction to ours. We usually look for some goodness on the part of men before we help them, but He looks to their sin, degradation and need. He is kind to the unthankful and the evil. He justifies those who are not, in themselves, just—while we were dead in trespasses and sins, “in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” Grace, pure Grace, abounds in Him and is blessedly manifested in His mission of saving the lost.
Further, while that mission is a very gracious one, I call your attention to the fact that it is also a great one. Jesus Christ came to seek and to save the lost and there are plenty of them. It is no small charge that Christ has taken up when He speaks of saving the lost. What a mass of our fellow countrymen are lost! I mean, in the common use of the term, “the lost classes” that are morally gone astray and are, by universal consent, put down among the lost. Look at whole nations of mankind that are sunk up to their eyelids in infamous transgression, lost to every sense of shame and decency. Christ, however, has come to save just such as they are and, to tell the truth, the difference between us and them, by nature, is not more than skin deep! We are a little better washed on the outside than they are, but the inside of the cup and platter of fallen humanity is pretty much alike in all men. We may have been better taught. We may have been more restrained than they have been, but a viper is still a viper wherever he may live and man is, in every case, a lost man, a depraved and sinful creature. To my mind, it seems a wondrous charge for Christ to undertake—to save “the lost” without any qualification added to the word—just “the lost.”
What a mission Christianity had when it first came, for instance, into Rome! When Christianity first came there it was inconceivably vile. Its emperors were madmen! I think I cannot truthfully say less of such monsters as Nero, Tiberius and Caligula, whose power seemed all to be bent to supply themselves with the means for the indulgence of the most abandoned forms of vice. The city of Rome was full of statues, the larger part of which, thank God, have been utterly destroyed—and I often wish the rest had been, for many of them are polluting and depraving even to look upon. The city was full of idols as well as of art and the principal images were not the more respectable ones, like Jupiter and Mercury, but Venus and Bacchus and other abominations from the filthy crowd of Olympus. The rich indulged themselves in every luxury. Women, while their maids waited upon them, and dressed them, practiced upon their female slaves cruelty of such a kind that one would think that everything feminine had gone out of them. Slaves were tortured and put to death—and nothing was ever said about such common crimes. In the amphitheatre, into which the multitudes crowded, scores and even hundreds of gladiators died in a single day—slaying each other in mutual conflict to make a Roman holiday! The nation was full of corruption, bribery, filthiness. A few characters shone out brightly, the more renowned because they were so few, but the land, as a whole, was such that, if Vesuvius had belched forth a torrent of fire high enough to set all Italy in a blaze, and an earthquake had opened its mouth and swallowed it all up, there would have been as much justification for its destruction as for that of Sodom and Gomorrah of old!