# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_2004_S98
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

3. Ablaze in One Mission with Compassion for the Lost
Scripture Focus
The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost (Luke
19:10).

Grieve for the Lost
Introduction
A father tells this story. We were on our annual Christmas trek to Chicago. Each year we brought our family to
spend time with Grandpa and Grandma and visit the museums. This year we decided to finish our Christmas shopping at suburban Woodfield Mall. In the midst of all the fun
and excitement, one of us noticed that little three-and-ahalf-year-old Matthew was gone. Terror immediately
struck our hearts. We had heard the horror stories: little
children kidnapped in malls, rushed to a restroom, donned
in different clothes and altered hairstyle, and then swiftly
smuggled out, never to be seen again. We split up, each taking an assigned location. Mine was the parking lot. I’ll
never forget that night—kicking through the newly fallen
snow, calling out his name at the top of my lungs. I felt like
an abject fool, yet my concern for his safety outweighed all
other feelings.
Unsuccessful, I trudged back to our meeting point. My
wife, Martie, had not found him, nor had my mother. And
then my dad appeared, holding little Matthew by the hand.
Our hearts leapt for joy. Interestingly enough, Matthew
was untraumatized. He hadn’t been crying. To him, there
had been no problem. I asked my father where he had
found him. “The candy counter,” he replied. “You should
have seen him. His eyes came just about as high as the
candy. He held his little hands behind his back and moved
his head back and forth, surveying all the luscious options.”
Matthew didn’t look lost. He didn’t know he was lost. He
was oblivious to the phenomenal danger he was in.
This is a candy-counter culture, where people who don’t
look lost don’t know they’re lost—but they are in a sinful,
anti-Christian culture from top to bottom. They live in a
culture that calls good evil and evil good. They are surrounded by civil unions, gay marriage, living together out of
wedlock, legal euthanasia, and abortion. The post-modern
world says that you must be tolerant of all views no matter what they are. You cannot force your views on others.
Just keep them to yourself. The world doesn’t believe in
Scripture as the absolute truth, the reality of evil and
Satan, and it thinks everybody will get to heaven somehow.
Many Christians don’t believe in these things either. They
don’t even know the present and eternal dangers before
them. They are lost.

and live forever’ therefore the Lord God sent him out from
the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was
taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden
of Eden He placed a cherubim and a flaming sword that
turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.” He
grieved for Adam and Eve and in His love cast them from
the Garden so that they could not eat of the tree of life and
live forever in their sin. He wanted to save them from being
cut off from Him for all eternity. In this action we see the
very nature of God. His will is to first and foremost have
mercy, to forgive and save, not condemn and punish.
The evidence is plentiful even in the Old Testament that
our God grieves for the lost ones. The prophet Ezekiel
shows us more of the very nature of God as God speaks,
“Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek
them out . . . and I will rescue them from all the places
where they have been scattered” (Ezekiel 34:11, 12b). “I will
search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up
the injured and strengthen the weak” ( Ezekiel 34:16). God
has a heart for the strays, the lost ones who have become
lost in a world that chases after philosophies of every kind,
from the voices of the new age to the voices of the culture
with its insatiable desire for sex, power, money, and the
will to do what you want, when you want.
In Isaiah 5 in the Song of the Vineyard you can hear the
grief of the Lord. He lists the many blessings He has bestowed on His vineyard, the planting of choice vines, the
watchtower, and the wine vat. He has provided His people
for their every spiritual need and yet, they do not bear good
grapes, only bad. They have become lost. He grieves that
His people are lost. Our Lord says, “What more could I have
done for my vineyard than I have done for it?”

I. God grieves for the lost ones
We don’t have to look very far to find God seeking the
lost ones. It happens almost immediately in Genesis
3:22–24, “Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold the man has become like one of Us in knowing good and evil. Now lest he
reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat
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2004 Convention Proceedings