Join Pastor Jack Hibbs as he unfolds the Parable of the Lost Sheep, a story that echoes the deep, unconditional love of God for humanity. Through relatable narratives, Pastor Jack illustrates how even when we stray, the divine shepherd follows us, eager to bring us back into the fold. This episode is a reminder of the powerful message of salvation and the lasting joy that comes from being found by faith, reflecting on the transformative impact of divine grace in our lives.
God loves you, and He expects humanity to love Him back when they pause long enough to take a look at the cross.
SPEAKER 03 :
This is Real Life. Welcome to Real Life Radio with Pastor Jack Hibbs. I’m David Jay, thanking you for joining us today as we listen, learn, and are challenged by God’s Word, the Bible. You ever feel like your Christian values are under constant assault? In a world where biblical truth is often labeled hateful or backward, how do we stand firm without becoming combative or isolated? Pastor Jack Hibbs wants to help you find answers with this month’s featured resource, When Culture Hates You. It’s written by Natasha Crane. And in this straight talking book, you’ll discover how to tackle tough conversations, maintain biblical convictions, and respond to cultural hostility with both grace and truth. Now, think of it as your essential guide for navigating a world that often views faith as the enemy. You’ll learn how to speak confidently on issues of morality, identity, and belief without losing sight of God’s love because sometimes the strongest stance is one that balances conviction with compassion. Now, if you’re ready to stand strong in an ever-shifting culture, look no further. When culture hates you, it’s available for a gift of any amount at jackhibbs.com slash realradio. One more time, jackhibbs.com slash realradio. on today’s edition of Real Life Radio. Pastor Jack now continues his series called The Parables of Jesus with a message called Parable of the Lost Sheep Part 2. You know, whenever Jesus spoke to the crowds, he often spoke to them using relatable stories with common everyday sort of themes that the Bible calls parables. So today in this parable, Jesus is teaching us how we are like sheep who have gone astray. You see, God, with his concern for us, compares us to sheep. And like sheep, we don’t run away from the shepherd, but we’ll often wander away. But the Lord cares for each and every one of us personally. And he’s going to come after us, never stopping until he’s found us and rejoices when he does. So today, Pastor Jack teaches that we are God’s concern and his concern for us. It’s unquestionable. And just as sheep, we are easily overwhelmed and tend to collapse under pressure. We’ve got to have God to see us through. Now with his message called Parable of the Lost Sheep Part Two, here’s pastor and Bible teacher, Jack Hibbs.
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The parable of the lost sheep is something that warms the heart of the reader. It warms the heart of the listener. It’s something that can be told at bedtime to a child and yet have such profound weight upon all of our hearts as people. People have been created in the image of God, mind you. And I love saying that because today you can be a deep, founded, rooted believer and you know that’s true, or you can be an absolute atheist and not believe in God at all, and to hear tonight, right now, that God made you, according to the scripture, in his likeness. And I want you to think about the intellectual honesty that that demands of you, that you would use your mind to think, that you would contemplate and meditate on the fact that is not, as fallen as the world is, I get it, but is not creation and your life absolutely amazing? I’m not talking about how you’re like, well, I need more money, or I’d like to be healthy. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about just the pure existence of life. is an awesome testimony of the powers of God. Yes, this world has fallen. In fact, even the fallen world shows you proof and evidence of God’s perfect word because God said we were created in perfection through Adam and Eve. They fell, and you and I are the residual offspring of that fall, but everything that we look at depicts the amazing handiwork of God. The universe, animal life, plant life, it’s absolutely awesome. And scientifically, mathematically, in every way, when you look at what God has done, you cannot honestly announce with fact that it’s all an accident. It’s just a long process of a bunch of accidents just coming together and eventually, you know, people will say if you just give it enough time, out comes you. And yet that’s impossible. That’s mathematically impossible. It is scientifically impossible. We know from the second law of thermodynamics called entropy that everything goes from order to chaos. You ever buy a new car? I’m kind of spoiled. My father-in-law retired from Ford Motor Company. and has all kinds of perks, and he went home to be with Jesus, but my mother-in-law gets all those perks, and what does that mean? That means we get all those perks. So all the whole family drives, well, almost the whole family drives Fords. Why? Because we get them so cheap. And so every so often, we get new ones. It’s kind of cool, huh? And as soon as you buy one, what happens? Yeah, it starts to fall apart. I always said, well, Pastor, you should buy a car that won’t fall apart. No, let me tell you something. That car that you bought, it’s falling apart. Have you ever bought a pair of clothes? What does it do? The moment you take it off the rack, it starts to fall apart. This is not very encouraging, but the moment you’re born, they tell us we begin to die. Why? Entropy. Everything is going from order to chaos. And the Bible says that’s exactly what would happen. And then inserted in the midst of man’s drama of life and death and of guilt and shame and of joy and happiness comes God’s message of salvation that comes through Jesus Christ. That we’re not living right now for all the gusto we can grab and the old saying that we, you know, eat, drink, and be merry for, you know, tomorrow we die. What’s that, eat like a dog, drive like, what is it? Live like a hog, die like a dog? Anyway, it’s not a good ending. And then the gospel comes in your life. Salvation. And the Bible is all about Jesus the shepherd saying, As a shepherd, saving you and I is lost. sheep or lambs of God. And this is part two of the message that we started last time before. So if you want to get more of it, look at part one online or get it, but follow along with me. Luke 15, we’ll dive back in verse one. Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to him, that is to Jesus, and the Pharisees and the scribes complaining, saying, this man receives sinners and eats with them, amen. Thank you, God. So he, Jesus, spoke this parable to them, saying, What man of you having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? Verse 5, and then when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors saying to them, Rejoice with me for I found my sheep which was lost. And I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, that is changes their mind, than over 99 just persons who need no repentance. So church, last time we looked at the first argument found in verse four, and it was this, regarding the parable of the lost sheep. You can probably look at your notes from last time. And that is, we are God’s concern. Doesn’t that bless your heart? We’re God’s concern. God says, I’m concerned about you. The Bible says that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to eternal life. Man didn’t write that. God wrote that to us. We hear people whining and complaining about God. If your God is so good and the God of the Bible is so loving, then why does he send people to hell? Nowhere in the Bible does he say he sends people to hell. People say, I don’t want you to govern my life. I don’t want you, God, to be in my life. And they leave with themselves or for themselves God. The destination where all of mankind, because of the fall, is headed. But God reaches out and says to all of us, get out of that destination. Get out of that journey. And he provides the way of heaven. He wants people to be in heaven. God is concerned about you. He loves you. He’s concerned about you. Everything about your life, he cares about. And you know all the stuff that’s gone on in our lives that stinks? The stuff that’s hurt us? The stuff that’s terrible? Well, I can tell you that that very thing, in fact, maybe if not a lot of us, how about maybe all of us, a lot of us, most of us, in this room, if we were to set up a camera and a microphone, we could stand in front of that and give testimony to the fact of this is how I was brought into the world, this is how I was raised, but Jesus saved me. How many of us has got a, how much dysfunctionalism do we have in this room tonight? Raise your hands. Dysfunctionalism means we were raised in a not normal sense. I’ll raise both my hands. The great thing about Jesus is he takes how you and I were raised in such a goofy way, he turns that around and makes it our strengths. How does he do that? He’s called the redeemer. Oh man, you know, I was raised by baboons in the middle of the South Africa. They did this and all of this and boom, and there’s no hope for me. Are you kidding? Watch what happens when Jesus gets a hold of your life. How does he do it? I don’t know, it’s amazing. It’s called a testimony. the more amazing the testimony for some reaches some. Then there are those who just say, gosh, Pastor Jack, I don’t have that kind of testimony. I was raised in a loving home. It was awesome. I was talking to a pastor the other day, by the way, in Orange County, and we were talking about stuff. And I said, what about your life? He said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was raised in the most godly home. My parents loved me so much. My parents were the most, I never heard them argue. They were always praying. They raised all of us kids. It was absolutely amazing. And Jesus is all I’ve ever known. And I didn’t do drugs. I never had sex before marriage. This guy’s 50-something years old now. And he said, I’ve been married to my wife for 30-something years. We’ve got our kids now. We’ve had a blast. And I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I said, you’re amazing. because you are a rare testimony regarding the keeping power of God. How much stuff do we go through in life that we didn’t have to go through? And the whole desire is for you and I to, not only now that we know Jesus, but to raise our kids’ understanding that God loves them, and he’s got an amazing plan for their lives, and he’s got a prepackaged, tailor-made direction for their lives to be lived. What a testimony that is. We saw this last time when Jesus says, what man of you, verse four. We saw that we are God’s concern because his concern for us is assumed. Jesus makes it a statement that you ought to know that God is concerned about you. It’s an assumed statement, and we looked at that together. The second thing we looked at, and this is where we left off, is that God’s concern for us in the latter end of verse four when he says, having a hundred sheep, If he loses one of them. Listen, Jesus is trying to get you and I to see in technicolor the heart of God. Does not leave the 99 in the wilderness. In other words, the 99 are safe. They’re okay. Jesus is saying the Father heart of God will go after that wayward person and get them back, which shows us that his concern for us is unquestionable. Beyond question. His love is concern. And we end it here in John 3, 16. For God so loved the world that he gave. He gave his only begotten son. It was God’s idea to save us. We were lost. And God says, I want to save you.
SPEAKER 02 :
You’re listening to Real Life with Pastor Jack Hibbs. You know, to hear more episodes and maybe catch up in the series, go to jackhibbs.com. That’s jackhibbs.com. And now let’s get back to our teaching. Once again, here’s Pastor Jack.
SPEAKER 01 :
My problem in life, is it your problem too? My problem in life is trying to meditate and take in the depth of God’s love. I don’t, that’s where I fall short. The more I meditate on what the Bible says, what God has spoken to me about his love for me, his love for you, This is what I need to do. Now it begins to make sense if I meditate on it. But still, even when it makes sense, it’s just enough. Because what? Can I say such knowledge, said the psalmist, is too wonderful for me? Listen, don’t answer. Do you really, really, really believe that God is so absolutely in love with you that he will not, cannot take his eyes off of you? That is absolutely true. You say, well, I’m a, I don’t believe in God and I’m a very mean person and I’m very bad and I came here tonight because it was raining outside and I didn’t know what to do with my life. Well, listen, you may be here for whatever reasons you think, but it’s not by accident. It’s not by accident. My God doesn’t make accidents. Oh, yeah? Well, then why did Adam and Eve blow it? He made a couple of accidents if they blew it. No, actually… God’s love for you is so unquestionable that the Bible says there’s nothing he can learn. He can’t learn anything. He knows all. He knew before Adam and Eve were ever created what they would do. And he made them anyway. Oh, then your creator’s dysfunctional because look at the pain and the sorrow and all that. I understand where you’re going, but here’s the point. You’re failing to understand that he’s gonna rectify everything in eternity. You say, what possibly can justify this action? Thousands of years, if not more, of pain and… Calm down. The truth is, love is a risk. Love demands us to be vulnerable. And only where there is love can there be options. That’s why totalitarianism… You know, you always see these political parades… You know, Vladimir Putin goes out and speaks. You see a million people there, you know, swooning in his presence or the latest president or whatever he is of Iran. You know that stuff, do you remember that? You see that stuff in the news where, you know, there’s this dictator and the people are out there. We love him, we love him. And we just had recent elections and 100% of everybody voted for him. And we just love him, we just love him. And yet it’s a communistic, dictatorial type rule. Let me tell you one thing right now. That leader knows that they don’t love him. Because if you step out of line in one moment, you’re dead. That’s not love. You only want to be involved in a relationship where love is in a circuit. Where the love that you extend to somebody, they extend it back to you. We touched on that a little bit, by the way, in 2 Corinthians on Sunday. God loves you. And he expects humanity to love him back when they pause long enough to take a look at the cross. And they stop and think for a moment, who died on that cross and what was he doing there? I mentioned this man before. I’ll mention him again tonight. Even though he’s dead now and he’s somewhere in eternity, I fear where he might be. But I’ve always really enjoyed Christopher Hitchens. You know who he is? What a brilliant man. Brilliant, yes. Wise, no. He hated God. It’s funny because it came out. You can watch him on YouTube. Brilliant. He was such an atheist and such a hater of God and I just loved him dearly. And I think if you watch him on YouTube, you’ll see what I mean. Just brilliant. But he missed God. He didn’t miss God. He spent his life throwing rocks at God. And it becomes very evident to someone who’s watching and listening to him that he is fighting with a God that he says doesn’t exist and he’s so angry at this God and upset with this God. And one of his accusations against God is that he is a child abuser. that God is a child abuser. Because he says in John 3, 16, he said, you Christians, you say for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. That makes him a child abuser. That’s how twisted he saw this God he didn’t believe in. And you look at the man, so everyone, he was brilliant, but when you listen to his arguments against God, they quickly go personal. You’ve got to leave reason and logic behind. When you attack God and denounce his love and you have to attack God in an unreasonable theater or an unreasonable way. So tonight you may be here saying, I don’t believe Jesus loves me like that. Well, he does love you like that. And I encourage you to look at the cross. His display of love for you is unquestionable. Just look at the cross. And I’m not asking you, of course I would never force you, I’d never even invite you to be forced or coerced to think, but I’m gonna ask you, can you meditate for a moment on who was dying on that cross? For you. Third consideration under point number one is found in the latter part of verse four, and that is this. We are God’s concern. His concern for us is immeasurable. You can’t fathom it. And go after, he says, the one which is lost until he finds it. God says, I am gonna pursue you until I find you. But listen, church, what happens after God finds you? Now look, this can be divided into two scenarios. A, Jesus is speaking to the believer who’s wandered away. That’s a good argument because it is a lamb who has wandered away. It’s no stretch at all, does no damage to the context that Jesus is speaking to a believer who has backslidden away and the depiction of it is a lost lamb. It fits, it works. But is it also true that Jesus is speaking about a lost sinner, someone who doesn’t know Christ? Well, we don’t know. We can debate this in a theological setting. Save your breath and save your time. Did Jesus come after you? Did Jesus get your attention, church? He got my attention. Every one of us in this room, everyone listening or watching right now has got an idea. They’ve got a testimony about how Jesus got ahold of them. It could have, and look, when you pave it out, when you lay it down, you can think it through. Well, you know, boy, I never would have thought of it, but three years of financial ruin brought me to the point of finding Jesus. It could be this life situation. There was this hardship in our family, or this happened in our marriage, and it brought me closer, or brought me to the knowledge of Christ, whatever it is. Now, here’s the amazing thing. God uses everything, and he doesn’t cause everything. Now look, you go over here and you lick some of these sockets that are here on the stage. Did God cause you to lick the sockets and light up like a light bulb over here? Can you imagine? Say, I want to do what I want to do. What do you want to do? I want to lick that electrical device right there. I want to see what that tastes like. Oh, okay. Listen, get your phones out. Let’s record this one. And you go over there. And… And your fingers are burning and your nose is black and you start crying because that really hurts. Did God tell you to do that? No. But God did give you the wisdom that you ought not to mess around with electronic devices, especially when your tongue is involved. Could get hurt. But you did it anyway. No one’s going to tell me what to do. And so you go do it. God didn’t cause it. God didn’t tell you to do it. But the pain from that event, God will use it now that you’ve created the situation. And the outcome, God will say, how did you like that? Did you like that? That hurt. Well, I tell you what, there’s one way to avoid getting burnt like that, and that is follow my lead. And God says to us, follow my lead. Yeah, but this is going on. This is what’s happening. God is at work. We got word yesterday that some friends of ours, they just received word and the wife has maybe four weeks to live. Boom, all of a sudden, bang. Four weeks, maybe four weeks. Six weeks, maybe. And what do you do? Well, they know Jesus. They know the Lord. Even though that is part of life in this fallen world, that remember, Jesus says, I’ve come to give you life, not take it away. I’ve come to give it. But in this fallen world, death because of sin, the scripture says, is in effect. The amazing thing about God’s salvation is, Jesus said that if a person were to die believing in me, yet shall he live. Think of that for a moment. If a person is living right now, believing in Christ and dies, Jesus says, don’t zoom in on the tiny issues. Their body stops living here in this planet. This place is burnt. This whole thing’s coming down. Jesus says, the moment, the Bible says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. The moment they stop breathing their last breath, they take their first breath in eternity. And a Christian takes their first breath in the presence of God. And it’s good, by the way. It’s not like, oh, what are you doing here, Jack? It’s like, Jack, yeah! You know? The Bible says that there’s joy in the heart of God that he’s involved in all of that. You and I just look as far maybe as our nose will take us and we think it’s the end. Not for us. Not for the believer. Immeasurable. Honestly, this makes… This almost makes no sense if you think about it. Because if you’re a farmer, if you’re a shepherd, would you really, really leave 99 to go after the one? Mathematically, it’s like, well, you know, that one has kind of been of a stinker anyway, that one sheep. And if I leave the 99, then maybe a wolf will come when I’m gone. Jesus is announcing to us that the 99, which in the parable is not often spoken about, they’re obviously very secure. They’re obviously very well taken care of. Isn’t that sweet to think? That Jesus says, listen, it is so important. These are okay. These are great. These are walking with me. They’re in the, you know, every night they come into the sheepfold. It’s all good. But this one’s been missing. And he goes after them. Immeasurable love.
SPEAKER 03 :
pastor and Bible teacher, Jack Hibbs, here on Real Life Radio with his message called Parable of the Lost Sheep, Part Two. Thanks for being with us today. You know, this message is part of Pastor Jack’s series called The Parables of Jesus. It’s a series that highlights the teachings of Jesus while he was ministering here on this earth. And we’ll continue on the next edition of Real Life Radio.
SPEAKER 01 :
Have you ever felt alone? Well, of course you have. We all do. We go through those seasons. But what’s important is not what we feel, but it’s what God’s Word says. And God has promised to never leave us, no matter what we’re facing. In fact, it’s been my experience in life that what we’re facing is not just a problem. It’s an opportunity for God to reveal Himself to us. He’s even found in the silence. So Lord, in Jesus’ name, bless my brother, my sister, as they may think that the heavens are shut up to them, but Lord, that you would speak to them and encourage them as they are facing the giants in their life. May you be the one that delivers them. In Jesus’ name, amen.
SPEAKER 03 :
This program is made possible by the generous contributions of you, our listeners. Visit us at jackhibbs.com. That’s jackhibbs.com. Until next time, Pastor Jack Hibbs and all of us here at Real Life Radio wish for you solid and steady growth in Christ and in His Word. We’ll see you next time here on Real Life Radio.
