I Once Was Found, But Now I'm Lost

When I was growing up, the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin in Luke 15 were explained to me as parables of evangelism. That is, I was told these parables were Jesus’ way to describe the lengths to which we (the “found”) should go to reach people who aren’t Christians (the “lost”).

In other words, these parables were God’s job description for us.

This interpretation split the world into two kinds of people: lost people and found people. The lost people were those who did not know God, and the found people were those who did. And while that is one way to divvy up the human race, it also makes a very simplistic and wrongheaded assumption: that Christians don’t get lost or that Christian’s have no need to be found.

I’m convinced that we desperately need to rediscover the reality of Christian lostness. If we don’t, then all we are left with when a Christian wanders off into the far country and gets lost in his/her self-induced messiness is to doubt whether they were ever found in the first place. Sadly, this assumption is made all the time. Without a robustly real category of “Christian lostness”, what we often hear is that when a professing Christian goes off into the dark it can only mean that they were never in the light to begin with.

The fact is, however, that we all get lost AS CHRISTIANS. And these two parables reassure us that Jesus never stops finding us in all of our lostness—AS CHRISTIANS. Rather than these parables being about God’s job description for us, they portray God’s unflagging commitment to constantly come after those who once were found but now are lost.

To put it bluntly, these aren’t parables about found people pursuing lost people. These are parables about God pursuing found people who get lost.

Here’s the proof: in both cases, the lost sheep and the lost coin were at one time not lost. The lost sheep was in the fold and the lost coin was in the pocket. The lost sheep wandered off and the lost coin was misplaced. But the point is that neither started off lost. So, to interpret these parables the way I was taught is to misinterpret them. Not to mention, it downplays the reality of how quickly and easily we AS CHRISTIANS get lost along the way.

To deny that we all experience lostness is to blind our eyes to the truth about ourselves and others. We often, for example, get lost in our pursuit of meaning or love or purpose or importance. We get lost in our dependence on people and things to “save” us from aloneness, insecurity, and a sense of inadequacy. We get lost when hopes and dreams crash and burn: when one of our children goes off the deep end, when our parents get divorced, when a marriage fails, when she breaks up with you, when you don’t get the job you want or get into the school you want. We get lost in anger, hurt, bitterness, pleasure-seeking, self-righteousness, unforgiveness, pride, lust, selfishness, the thirst for credit, the need to be right, and so on.

I think, though, that the deepest lostness we experience is when our roles become our identity. For instance, many retired people I’ve talked to over the years have described a profound lostness of meaning now that their career is over. For so long they had located their identity in the work that they did and all that came with it. And now that their role has changed, they experience a late-in-life identity crisis. I also see this with parents when they become empty nesters. For so long their identity was anchored in being a parent and taking care of the kids. But when the kids grow up and move away they lose their sense of purpose and significance—they don’t know who they are or what to do. Their role had become their identity

When your roles become your identity, you experience new forms of lostness every time your roles change.

Because I was unfaithful to my first wife, I lost everything in 2015: friendships, family, my job, credibility, financial stability, hope, joy, opportunity. It was all gone. Overnight. Life as I knew it was over. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my value, my security, my deepest sense of who I was—my identity—was tethered to my roles. And because of this, when those roles vanished, I didn’t just suffer grief and pain and guilt and shame and loss—I began to suffer a severe identity crisis. Without these things and people I had unconsciously depended on to make me feel valuable and important, I no longer knew who I was—I was lost AS A CHRISTIAN.

But the good news for me and for all of us in these parables is that Jesus spares no expense to find us IN our lostness. He meets us in all of our meandering—seventy times seven. When we foolishly wander off, the Good Shepherd comes after us, picks us up, puts us over his shoulders, and carries us home—every time! He meets our guilt with his grace, our mess with his mercy, our faults with his forgiveness—every time! His pursuant love is mugging in nature. And he doesn’t chide us for getting lost—he seeks us, finds us, rejoices and throws a party.

Nothing and no one could bar the way of the God who is in hot and gracious pursuit of his lost children.

Robert Capon sums up these two parables poetically when he writes:

The entire cause of the recovery operation in both stories is the shepherd’s, or the woman’s, determination to find the lost. Neither the lost sheep nor the lost coin does a blessed thing except hang around in its lostness. On the strength of these parables, therefore, it is precisely our sins, and not our goodnesses, that most commend us to the grace of God. These parables of lostness…are emphatically not stories designed to convince us that if we will wind ourselves up to some acceptable level of moral and/or spiritual improvement, God will then forgive us; rather they are parables about God’s determination to move before we do—in short, to make lostness the only ticket we need to the Supper of the Lamb.

Two of the things I have learned very acutely over the last five years are (1) you are capable of failing and getting lost in a way that is unthinkable to you right now, and (2) God’s love and forgiveness are big enough to cover the fact that your greatest failure may be ahead of you.

So, no matter where you go, how far you run, or how stubborn your roaming may be, he will never stop coming for you with infinite amounts of gritty grace and forceful forgiveness. It is, in fact, his JOY to come after you.

Furthermore, your lostness doesn’t annoy God and it doesn’t throw him off. In fact, it gives him an opportunity to do what he loves to do—FIND YOU!.