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The sinner is set forth in the parable as a silly, wandering sheep. And it suggests what is true — that sin is not always a matter of premeditation. Sin is oftentimes an ignorance, a misunderstanding, a darkness of mind. A young man does not at eighteen say, "Now I will waste my time and squander my money, ruin my health, and hurt as many by my influence as I can." That is not the way the thing is done. It would not be true to so represent it, any more than it would have been true for Christ to have represented the sheep as getting together in one corner of the fold, and saying, "Now let us get out and run off into the woods, and get bitten by wolves, and be killed." Neither sheep nor men act in that way. Men wander off — they get led astray — they get farther away from virtue than they ever expected to be — they are lost before they know it. Looking at him from one point of view, the sinner is to be condemned; looking at him from another, he is to be pitied. In this latter light it is that the parable presents him to us. My friends, let us catch the spirit of the Saviour, as we go in and out among men. Men are like ice. You can melt them sooner by being warm toward them, by centring the rays of a great, earnest, glowing love upon them, than by going at them with hammers of threat and warning, and trying to beat them down and pulverize them. Sandstone kind of men can be treated in that way; but when you hit a man in that style made of granite, the hammer recoils, to the injury of the palm that held it. June is better than December to quicken life and growth in the natural world; and if you want people to blossom and get fruitful spiritually, pour around them the warm, genial atmosphere of God's penetrative and stimulative love. My people, refresh your memories to-day with the real object of Christ's incarnation. He did not come to publish certain sublime truths, He did not come to found a Church, to build up a religious hierarchy, to introduce habits of prayer, and peculiar views of God and duty. He came absorbed, rather, with one thought — devoted to one sublime, unselfish mission. It was to go after His lost sheep. This yearning, this irrepressible desire, it was, which burned and glowed in His whole life, as the pure fire glows in the diamond. This it was which gave fervour and intense beauty to His life. Before Christ came, who cared for the lost? Who cares for the bleaching bone in the wilderness? — it may be the bone of an ox, or a dog, or a man; who cares which? It is a dry and lifeless bone, and nothing more. It has no connection with our beating flesh, no relation with our living thought. Who cares for the shell on the shore? The waves have heaved it up from the caverns of the deep, and ground it into the sand: there let it lie. What hunter cares for the scattered feathers which some fierce hawk has torn from the back and breast of its prey? Why mourn over a bunch of soiled plumage? Had the hunter seen the hawk pounce on it, he might, perchance, have shot the hawk, and spared the bird; but the bird is lost. Why look? why mourn? why care? So little man cared for man before Christ came. The life of Christ was wonderful, because it was full of leeds nobody else had ever done. His very sympathies were a revelation. Ask Film as He rises from His agonizing prayer in the garden, when a thicker darkness than subsequently draped the earth lies on His soul; and He says again, "I came to save the lost." Ask Him as he sinks fainting beneath the cross; and amid His panting are shaped the selfsame words — "To save the lost." Ask Him as He hangs on the cross itself, about to yield up the ghost; and His quivering lips reply, "I came to save the lost; and here My task is finished." We are like vases of rare tint and exquisite workmanship, which, shattered by some violent stroke, have been regathered in all their fragments, and so carefully rejoined, and glued with transparent cement, that no eye can detect where were the lines of rupture. The seeking love of God found us in fragments, and made us over into a perfect whole. If any of you have children, or friends, or relatives, far away from God, widely wandering from the truth of statement and life, I trust you will not be discouraged. Hope and pray always. Die as you have lived, hoping and praying. Build your hope on the seeking love of Christ. Ally your life with His in this work. Help reform society; help reform the Church, so that people shall not stare and look astonished when a really bad man or wicked woman is saved — when a soul that has in very fact been lost, and which was found in its sins as a lamb found in some dark, stony gorge, nearly dead from exposure and wounds, is brought to the fold.

(W. H. H. Murray.)

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KJV: And he spake this parable unto them, saying,

WEB: He told them this parable.