Watch This Week’s Message
When was the last time you completely lost something? Not misplaced-for-a-second lost. Actually lost — the one set of keys, the one phone, the one AirPod that, for some reason, is never the one you can find. For the next fifteen minutes, that thing owns you. Couch cushions come out. The trunk gets checked twice. Everything else stops.
Jesus told a story about that kind of losing, except the thing that goes missing isn’t a set of keys. It’s a person.
A shepherd has a hundred sheep. One wanders off. Ninety-nine stay put. By any reasonable measure, ninety-nine out of a hundred is a good year. It’s an A. It’s the kind of number a shepherd could go home, put his feet up, and feel good about.
But the shepherd in Jesus’s story doesn’t do that. He leaves the ninety-nine in the open country and walks into the wilderness for the one. Every number has a name. Every name has a story. And every story matters to God.
The Church Broward County Needed
Seven years ago, a family without connections in South Florida moved to a city where they didn’t know anyone. Not to build the best light show in Broward County. To go after the one more.
Broward County is roughly 93 percent unchurched — one of the top five most unchurched regions in the country, out of 2.4 million people. Researchers who studied why people in South Florida don’t go to church expected to hear about money, or judgment, or bad past experiences. What they found instead was simpler: the number one reason people gave for not going to church was that no one invited them. When someone did invite them, they said they’d go, because they could go with someone they already knew.
That’s the whole premise behind Vibrant Church’s next series: you have a one more. Your one more isn’t the crowd or the city. It’s a specific person who is far from God but close to you — someone whose name and number are already in your phone.
Two Crowds, One Meal
Jesus told the parable of the lost sheep to two very different audiences sitting at the same table. Tax collectors and sinners — people who’d been told by the religious establishment that they didn’t belong — were gathered around him. The Pharisees, meanwhile, muttered about it: “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” In that culture, sharing a table wasn’t just a meal. It was a statement of belonging. And that’s exactly what bothered the religious crowd.
Religion sorts people into good and bad. Heaven doesn’t use that category at all. Heaven sorts people into lost and found. If you’re hoping your goodness earns your way into heaven, that’s a problem. And if you think your worst decision permanently disqualifies you, that’s not true either. Scripture says God isn’t slow in keeping His promises — He’s patient, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
Repentance isn’t the guy with a bullhorn on the street corner. That’s religion, and it’s not the same thing. Repentance is simpler and kinder than that: I drifted somewhere I don’t know how to get out of, and because of God’s mercy, I can change direction.
Nobody Drifts on Purpose
Here’s something worth sitting with: sheep don’t run away. Goats run away — a goat has a plan. Sheep get lost one patch of grass at a time. Head down, one step for more grass, then another, until eventually you look up and have no idea how you got there.
That’s how people end up far from God. Nobody decides to walk away forever. It’s a season where church didn’t fit the schedule. A relationship where faith wasn’t a priority. A promotion that came with more money and less room to grow. A hurt or a loss that got wrongly pinned on God. One decision after another, head down, until the way back isn’t obvious anymore.
And here’s the part of the story that’s easy to miss: a lost sheep doesn’t find its own way home. It has no homing instinct. It gets carried. Somebody — a praying grandmother, a coach, a coworker who wouldn’t quit inviting you, a spouse who prayed for years without ever making you feel like a project — has to come get it. The search was never our idea. God’s been doing it the whole time. The shepherd doesn’t go looking because the sheep deserves it. It gets found because it’s his.
The Ninety-Nine Aren’t Abandoned — They’re Sent
If you’ve been in church a while, you might be doing the math: I’ve been showing up, serving, giving — and God’s going to leave all that to go after the lost? Look closer at where the ninety-nine actually are in the story. Not in a pen. Not in a barn. In the open country. They’re not abandoned. They’re the search party. You’re not being left behind. You’re being sent.
The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few — so ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers. That’s an invitation, not a job requirement. You don’t need a theology degree to be part of it. Sometimes the most disarming thing you can say to someone with questions is “I don’t know either.” Church was never meant to be a museum for people who have it all figured out. It was always meant to be a hospital for the broken.
Who’s Your One More?
The shepherd doesn’t drag the sheep home with a lecture about how it got lost. He puts it on his shoulders, joyfully, and throws a party — not because the sheep did anything to deserve it, but because he couldn’t hold it in. Heaven celebrates one.
So: who’s your one more? The coworker who has it together on the surface and is falling apart on the drive home. The family member searching everywhere except the one place that would actually help. The friend who came once and never came back. You may already know their name.
If that’s you — if you’re the one who’s drifted, the one still out in the open country — you didn’t wander far enough to be a lost cause. The same God who came looking for all of us is already looking for you, too.
We’d love to help you take the next step, whether that’s finding your way back or walking with someone else on theirs.
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