Saturday 17th Oct 2026
"For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost." (Luke 19:10)
Other Scriptures: Luke 15, Romans 3:22–24, and 2 Kings 7:3–9
Hold a finger in Luke 19
My title is "Are we lost?" It’s the classic, question asked from the passenger seat—the one every husband driving in circles quietly dreads, especially when his pride is firmly keeping his hands on the wheel and preventing him from pulling over to ask for directions.
On the surface, it’s a funny, relatable dynamic about navigation and stubbornness. But if you hold that moment up to the light, it becomes a parable for the spiritual dilemma we face in our relationship with God. Are we too proud to admit we need help?
What about the world around us, are they lost? Why, if we know the way, would we not share this good news with them? It's not good when those who know the way refuse to share directions with those who are lost.
Introduction: The Lepers' Discovery
In the Old Testament, 2 Kings 7 records a time when the city of Samaria was under a brutal siege by the Syrian army. The starvation inside the city walls was so severe that mothers were fighting over food, and a donkey’s head was sold for silver. People were dying by the hundreds.
Sitting outside the city gates were four outcasts—men afflicted with leprosy. They looked at each other and said, 'Why sit we here until we die? If we enter the city, the famine is there. If we sit here, we die also. Let us surrender to the Syrians.'
But when they crept into the enemy camp under the cover of twilight, they discovered a miracle. The Lord had caused the Syrian army to hear the noise of a massive chariot army, and they had fled for their lives in sheer terror. They left everything behind.
These four starving lepers walked into tents filled with gold, silver, clothes, and an abundance of food. They ate, they drank, and they began plundering the tents, hiding the wealth for themselves. It was the greatest day of their lives.
But suddenly, in the middle of their celebration, a heavy conviction hit them. In verse 9, they turned to one another and said:
"We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news, and we remain silent."
They realised that while they were feasting, an entire city just a few hundred yards away was starving to death in the dark. Silence in the face of salvation was a sin.
If we look at ourselves today, we have to ask a difficult, heartbreaking question:
Is the Church in danger of doing the same thing?
Has the church lost its witness and become just like the world around us, trying to fit in
Are we sharing faith to the faithless, hope to the hopeless, healing to the sick, love with those starving for love?
Has the fire of evangelism grown cold in so many hearts?
Why do some never witness or evangelise?
Have we stopped believing that people are truly lost?
Or perhaps we have believed the lie of satan that we are not good enough.
Other excuses could be that we say to ourselves that we don’t know enough theology, or we fear being rejected or we have a reputation and we don't want to look foolish.
Some have adopted a quiet, comfortable illusion. We look at our kind neighbours, our co-workers, and our good friends, and because their lives look comfortable on the surface, we think, 'They’re doing just fine. They don't need what I have.'
Perhaps an important question is has the church itself lost its way?
Can we sit inside our churches, feasting on the bread of life, while a world right outside our doors is spiritually starving?
While churches can lose their footing, Scripture provides a clear blueprint for what a faithful church looks like:
In Acts 2 and 4 we read about the first church in Jerusalem.
Galatians 6 and James 1
Scripture shows that churches in the 1st century did not typically become lost overnight; they drift slowly through apathy, compromise, and self-reliance. The biblical remedy offered throughout Revelation and the Epistles is always the same:
Remember, repent, and return to the original calling of the Gospel.
What does it mean to be lost?
Biblically, to be "lost" is a tragic state of spiritual exile, where humanity has fallen away from God’s original creation mandate—the command to reflect His image, walk in communion with Him, and faithfully steward the earth (Genesis 1:26–28).
By turning to our own way like wandering sheep (Isaiah 53:6), we have fallen short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23) and become alienated from the true life and purpose for which we were designed (Ephesians 4:18).
In this state of lost purpose, a person is dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1), blinded by the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:3–4), and left harassed and helpless like a sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:36). Being lost is not merely a lack of earthly direction, but an spiritual peril that leaves one cut off from the Creator and bound for eternal separation (2 Thessalonians 1:9)—a condition so dire that it required Christ to step into human history to seek, save, and restore us to our God-given destiny (Luke 19:10).
1. The Universal Condition: All Have Sinned
To understand why people are lost, we have to look past outward appearances and see the heart. Our culture likes to divide the world into 'good people' and 'bad people.' Some think evangelism is only for the broken, the criminal, or the deeply troubled. But the Apostle Paul shatters this illusion in Romans 3:22–23:
"There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
Scripture makes no exceptions. It doesn't matter how respectable, educated, or kind someone is. To 'sin' literally means to miss the mark—to fall short of God’s perfect, holy standard. We have all rebelled. We have all chosen our own way over God's way.
It can't be true then that some people don't actually need a Saviour. The Bible tells us that without Christ, every single person—regardless of their moral standing—is facing the same spiritual bankruptcy.
2. Confronting the Deception of Universalism
Because the reality of sin is so heavy, a lie has crept into parts of our culture. Some don't want to believe that the world is eternally lost. So here comes the doctrine of universalism—the belief that in the end, God will save everyone, regardless of what they believed or how they responded to Jesus. It is a philosophy that says, 'All roads lead to heaven.'
It sounds loving on the surface, but it is a deception. If universalism is true, then Jesus died for nothing. If everyone gets in anyway, then the cross was a mistake.
Jesus Himself did not preach universalism. In John 14:6, He made an exclusive claim:
"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
Acts 4:12 echoes this truth: 'Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.'
Universalism tells us that people will just drift into heaven. But Jesus told us in Matthew 7:13–14 that the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and many enter through it, while the gate is small and the road is narrow that leads to life.
If we embrace universalism, we put a blindfold on our neighbours and pretend they are safe while they walk toward eternity without Christ. We must reject this lie, because true love speaks the truth about danger.
3. The Reality of the Lost
Because all have sinned, and because there is no other name but Jesus to save us, the natural consequence of rejecting Him is eternal spiritual displacement. In the New Testament, being 'lost' is not an insult; it is a tragedy. It describes something of immense value that is currently in the wrong place, separated from its Owner.
In Luke 15, Jesus tells three famous parables: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son.
• The condition: The sheep was vulnerable to predators. The coin was part of a set and lost its value. The son was starving in a pigpen.
• The spiritual truth: Without Christ, humanity is 'dead in our trespasses and sins' (Ephesians 2:1).
If we truly believe that sin causes an eternal separation from God, evangelism ceases to be a social awkwardness and becomes an urgent necessity.
True love cannot look at a world trapped in sin and remain silent.
4. The Heart of Christ, the Seeker and Saviour of the lost.
Look at Luke 19 again and how Jesus actually interacted with people who were lost. Let’s consider Zacchaeus in Jericho.
Jericho was a wealthy, bustling city, and sitting at the top of its financial food chain was a man named Zacchaeus. On paper, Zacchaeus had made it. He was a chief tax collector—he didn't just collect money; he ran the whole operation. He was wealthy, influential, and living in comfort. But under the Roman system, tax collectors grew rich by extortion, squeezing their own people for every penny out of them. To his Jewish neighbours, Zacchaeus was a traitor, an outcast, and a notorious sinner.
Yet, despite his money, Zacchaeus was spiritually bankrupt. He was isolated, despised, and deeply lost.
When word spread that Jesus was passing through Jericho, something inside this wealthy man snapped. He didn't just want to hear about Jesus—he was desperate to see Him. But Zacchaeus had two problems: he was short in stature, and the surrounding crowd hated him too much to let him through to the front.
So, throwing aside his dignity, this wealthy tax collector broke into a run ahead of the crowd and climbed up into the branches of a sycamore-fig tree, hiding among the leaves just to catch a glimpse of the messiah passing by.
Jesus was walking through a massive, pressing crowd—hundreds of people shouting, reaching, and surrounding Him. Human logic says you focus on the crowd, or you seek out the religious leaders, the respectable people of Jericho.
Instead, Jesus stopped.
He didn't look at the crowd; He looked up. He looked past the green leaves straight into the eyes of a hated, extortioner hiding in a tree. Jesus didn't wait for Zacchaeus to come down. Jesus called him by name:
"Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today."
The crowd muttered in disgust: "He has gone to be the guest of a sinner!" They saw an irredeemable traitor. But Jesus saw a lost soul who belonged to the Father.
That single moment of divine pursuit broke Zacchaeus’s heart. He scrambled down out of that tree, welcomed Jesus with joy, and right then and there, his life was completely transformed. He pledged to give half his wealth to the poor and pay back four times what he had stolen from anyone. Salvation didn't enter his house because he earned it; salvation entered because the Seeker found him.
Jesus looked at the transformed tax collector and declared the foundational mission of His entire life:
"For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost."
Jesus didn't sit passively waiting for Zacchaeus to figure it out. He went out of His way, stopped under a tree, and invited Himself into a sinner's home. If Christ's DNA is in us, we cannot stay safely inside the walls of our church building. A seeking Saviour requires a seeking church.
5. The Joy of Heaven
Jesus reveals what happens when the lost are found: 'I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent' (Luke 15:7).
Think about that. The halls of heaven erupt in celebration when one person passes from death to life. Heaven doesn't throw a party for our budgets, our buildings, or our programs. Heaven throws a party for the found.
Conclusion: We Cannot Remain Silent
The world is just as lost today as it was in the first century. But the Gospel is just as powerful. Romans 1:16 reminds us that the Gospel is 'the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.'
Jesus mission was to seek and to save, we can’t sit in our churches hoping that lost people will wander in, the shepherd went out, the lady swept the house, the father kept looking and ran to meet him.
Remember, repent, and return to the original calling of the Gospel.
Let us remember the words of those four lepers: 'This day is a day of good news, and we remain silent.' We have found the camp of abundance. We have tasted the bread of heaven. We have been rescued from our own sin.
Let us repent today of our apathy and the comfortable theological lies that excuse our silence. Let us ask God to break our hearts for what breaks His. May we see our communities not as crowds of strangers, but as people needing some good news of a loving saviour. Let us go out, with gentleness and respect, carrying the light of Christ to those who are still in the dark.
Practical Application: Sharing the Good News
How do we practically step out of our silence and share this bread of life this week? Evangelism does not require a stage or a theological degree; it simply requires a willingness to speak.
• Seeking can begin by prayer: Ask God to place one specific person on your heart this week—a neighbour, a colleague, or a family member who does not know Christ. Begin praying daily for their heart to be softened.
• Bridge the Gap with Hospitality: Before you share the Gospel message, share your life. Invite them for a coffee or a meal. Listen to their story, their struggles, and their joys. Relationships build the bridge that truth walks across.
• Share your story 'Before and After': You do not need to have all the answers to every complex theological question. Be ready to share your testimony. Tell them what your life was like before you found Christ, how you met Him, and the difference He makes in your life today. Like the blind man in John 9:25, your message is simple: 'One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!'
• Invite: Extend a Clear Invitation: Invite them into community. Ask them to join you for church next Sunday, or ask, 'Can I pray for you about that?' when they share a personal struggle. Give God the space to work through your small step of faith.
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