Why Not Admitting You're Lost Is The Most Disastrous Decision You Could Ever Make

276 miles!  276, wow that’s a lot of miles.  A few years ago, an insurance company in Britain did a study to see if it was true.  Do men really not ask for directions when they get lost?  They found out that it is true, at least a bit.  In their study 1 out of 4 of the men they surveyed waited at least half an hour before asking for directions.  And 1 out of 10 refused to do it ever!   And that means that men drove an average of 276 extra miles a year due to getting lost.  

But hey don’t blame us guys.  It’s not our fault!  It’s testosterone’s!  In yet another study, scientists discovered the more of this classic male hormone a guy has in his system, the less likely he will be to ask for directions.   So, hey, what can we guys say?   It’s not my fault, I won’t ask, honey.   Blame it on the testosterone!

But hold on before I throw the guys any further under the bus, that study with guys getting lost for 276 miles, it’s not as clear as it seems.   It turns out women get lost too.  Yes, they are more likely to ask for directions.  But still do you know how many extra miles a woman’s lost ways adds each year?  Hold on, wait for it.   It’s 256 miles.   Yes, that’s it; A 20-mile difference.

And maybe that study points to a truth that goes deeper than the whole controversy about men asking or not asking for directions.   It points to an obvious truth.  Everybody gets lost.   Yet as obvious as that truth is, people forget it all the time.  People forget they get lost.  In fact, they won’t even admit they are.   And because of that, awful things happen in our world.   People get hurt, even killed.  Folks get wounded in ways that take years, even a lifetime to heal.   Relationships get wrecked.  Marriages and families get blown up.

What do I mean?   How can not admitting you’re lost lead to stuff like that?  More crucially, if it does, how do you make sure you’re found.  In these words, Jesus shows the way.  Let’s listen and hear what Jesus has to say.      

Luke 15:1-10        

How does someone’s refusal to admit they’re lost lead to broken marriages and families, even death?   It happens because being lost goes far deeper than getting turned around in an unfamiliar neighborhood.   In life, lost is happening all of the time, in all sorts of ways.  But because people refuse to face that, to even see it, all sorts of pain and brokenness enters the world.  So how does that change?  Here Jesus tells you.   First, you need to really grasp what it is to be lost.   Only then can you truly see how you can be found. 

Jesus tells these two stories because he is dealing with a controversy between the two crowds that hung around him.   On one side, Jesus attracted all sorts of folks who didn’t fit into the respectable circles, tax collectors, prostitutes, all sorts of sinners.  And Jesus welcomed them with open arms.    Jesus even ate with them.   But on the other side, Jesus also attracted religious leaders.   Jesus’ wisdom, his knowledge of the law impressed them.   But when he ate with the moral outcasts, it drove them nuts.  

You see.   In Jesus’ culture, when you ate with someone, you’re weren’t just making a nice gesture. You were making a statement. You were saying.   These people belong. They belong around my dinner table. And that means they deserve to belong in the people of God.  And the religious people could not grasp that.    How could Jesus create a community centered around God and include people like that?   

But these religious leaders didn’t get a crucial truth.  They defined disconnection from God in very narrow ways.   If you did morally bad things, you were disconnected from God.   And if you did morally good things, you were connected to God.   That’s it.  It’s that simple.   But Jesus knew these categories didn’t work.  They didn’t conform with reality.    So, Jesus told three stories to blow these categories away.   In the last story, Jesus will do the final demolishment of their false definitions.   But in the two stories we look at today, Jesus begins that work.

In the first story, a sheep wanders off and gets lost.  But the sheep didn’t intend to get lost.  The sheep didn’t think about it at all really.  You see.  Wandering off, that’s what sheep do.  They’re, well, stupid that way.   A sheep follows his appetites.  So, whenever he sees something he wants to eat, he goes after it, even if it gets him in trouble.  So, sheep are always getting lost, always getting in some sort of mess. That’s what sheep do.  And even when they’re lost, they still don’t get it.   The shepherd has to not only catch the sheep.   The shepherd has to hold it down, tie up its legs, and throw the animal up on his shoulders to carry the poor thing home.  Sheep don’t have a clue. 

Now Jesus isn’t talking about sheep really.  Jesus is talking about human beings.   Jesus is comparing human beings to clueless sheep.   When I first realized this, I thought. That doesn’t seem fair.  It’s even a little insulting   But, then I thought about it, a bit more.

Jesus isn’t so much saying we’re stupid as sheep.  Jesus is helping you see what it is to be lost.   You can think.  To be lost, you have to willfully do something bad.   But the sheep didn’t willfully do anything bad.  The sheep did something foolish.   It wasn’t even a foolishness the sheep could help.  It came naturally.  But it still got him lost.  

And let’s be honest here.  Like sheep, people have all sorts of natural inclinations that get them in trouble.   People yearn for human connection, and sometimes they do foolish things to get it.   Or they yearn for achievement, success, fulfillment, significance. you name it, but often those yearnings lead to messes instead.   Like sheep, in your hunger for what will fill you, you can get lost.   You’re simply following your hunger, hunger for things you do really need. But that hunger often doesn’t lead you to abundance or life or the joy you yearn to have.  Instead your hunger, your need leads you away from those very things, into disconnection, into lostness.

But lostness doesn’t stop there.  That’s why Jesus goes on to talk about a coin.   Isn’t that kind of weird? It’s not like a coin can decide one day to simply ditch her sister coins, and go her own way?    Coins don’t decide anything.   Coins don’t even get lost on their own.   So, how does a coin get lost?  Someone loses it.

Do you get what Jesus is saying?  Lost-ness can happen not because of anything you do, but because of what someone does to you, of a careless way that another may treat you. 

I’ve been reading this book about a woman named Lila, how in the strangest of ways, she ends getting married to an old preacher, even having his child.  And Lila really loves the old preacher.  She has never had someone treat her with that sort of tenderness and respect that he does.   But still she can’t trust him. She’s always on the edge of running away.  And as for God, she hardly trusts that God even exists.  But all that distrust, all that lostness didn’t begin with anything she did.  It began because so many folks had been careless with her, untrustworthy, even brutal.  And the carelessness had wounded her deeply, had made her doubt that she could really trust anyone, even herself, much less God.   In Jesus’ words, she had become a sort of tragically lost coin. 

Do you get what Jesus is saying?  Lostness goes far beyond just not obeying the right rules.  You can’t simplify lost-ness like that.   In fact, as you’ll see in the last story, you can be obeying all the right rules and still be terribly lost.   Jesus is saying. Lostness includes everyone, all the time.   

Who hasn’t had their appetites, their hungers lead them into a bad or difficult place, a place you regret being?   Who hasn’t been wounded by the carelessness of another, hasn’t been lost in that way?  No one can act as if lostness is something that lies outside of you.  Lostness lies in some way inside everyone.   It defines what it is to be human.  

We’re all lost.   We’re all caught up in a web that draws us away from connection to God and each other, from the abundance God yearns to give us.   And if you look at lost as something that lies outside of you, that those people over there are lost but no, not you, then you may be the most lost of all. 

Soon after I got here, I was talking to a church leader here.  He was wrestling with a tough issue in his relationship.  And he said something like this, “You know, Kennedy, I’m pretty messed up. (actually he said another more colorful phrase but you get the idea.”  And I said, “Well, of course, you are, I’m messed up too.  That’s why we’re here.”

Yet that’s the reality that people often are scared to admit, just how messed up they are.  We want everybody to see our highlight reel.  God forbid that they see our not so pretty behind the scenes    But, Jesus is saying.  Don’t you get it?  Everyone has that sort of behind the scenes.  Freedom comes not when you hide it, but when you acknowledge it, accept it. 

It's when we don’t, that things get bad.  I once saw a t-shirt that went something like this.  “I don’t have a problem with alcohol.  I drink, I get drunk.  I fall down.  No problem.”  At first I laughed.  Then I just felt sad.   Do you know the only character flaws that can really destroy you?  It’s the flaws you won’t admit.   Everyone is lost. 

So, if everyone’s lost, what do you do?  You realize what everyone needs to realize when they’re lost.  You need help.  You need to be found.  And the good news is in these stories that’s what happens.  The shepherd risks everything to go after the lost sheep.   And he doesn’t stop until that sheep is found.    The woman searches for that lost coin.    And she doesn’t give up until she finds it.   

Do you see what Jesus is telling you?  Yes, you are lost because everyone is.  But God is always looking for you, doing whatever God can to bring you home, even if it means in Jesus dying for you.  You see.   Being lost is not the end of your story.   Being found is.  And being found isn’t even a once and for all moment.  Being found once it begins, continues throughout your life.   Every day, as you let him, Jesus brings you closer and closer to home, to being found in the fullest and most complete sense of that word.  Where today do you need to be found like that?  Where do you need to let Jesus find you?