"To Seek and To Save" James 5:19-20 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Verses 19 and 20, James writes this, My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.

My wife and I were at a missions conference once with a missions agency we were part of, and we met a guy from New Zealand, and I asked him a question that was probably annoying to him, something along the lines of, are there really a lot of sheep in New Zealand?

Something like that.

And he told Deedra and me a story about the first time he was made responsible for a little flock of sheep.

He was a you know a high school student and he was sheep sitting, I guess you would say.

And he went out to the pasture where they were and he was confused about the fence, and it looks like they were supposed to be on one side, but they were on the other side.

And anyway, he had 14 sheep under his care that day, and he comes and finds them in the field and tries to lead them back around the fence, and the sheep go the wrong way and go into this different field that has a bog in it, a muddy little area, and the sheep all get stuck in the mud.

And um, if you've seen pictures of these kind of areas, it's not you know obvious that it's mud, don't picture like an American-style swamp or anything.

It's you know, it's grass like knee height, and it's some of it's bent over, and it's the kind of thing that if a person was walking by, a person would step on it and be, oh, that's wet, don't walk there.

But sheep aren't people, and so they lack that sense.

And so all 14 of his sheep just boom right into the mud and are stuck.

And so he goes in to try to pull these sheep out, and he said it was just insane that he's wrestling the sheep, and the sheep don't know him.

You know, this is his first day on the job.

He said they're biting at him and hissing at him and making all kinds of sheep sounds, and and the longer they're in there, the heavier they're getting because their wool is absorbing the water and the mud.

And so he said he spent 10-15 minutes to get the first sheep out of the water.

Wrestled this guy out of the water and lifts him up, and there's a little hill there, and he brings him up on top of the hill and plops them down, and now, you know, one down 13 to go.

And as he's making his way back down, he gets into the mud again, and he's, you know, filthy, I'm sure, at this point.

And lo and behold, the sheep he had just rescued has gone back into the mud.

And so now when he pulls him out, he's gonna take them onto the other side of the fence and lock them in, and he spends his whole day doing this.

And uh Deidre and I asked the question that is probably on your mind right now.

So, did the sheep live?

And he said, No, half of them died.

Day one on the job, loses half of the sheep he's responsible for because they get stuck in the mud and doesn't know how to get them out.

That's the story that's in my mind as I read these two verses.

These verses are about a sheep that has wandered away.

In fact, the word wandering, it's the word that's used twice in these two verses.

Verse 19, if any among you wanders, verse 20, whoever brings back the sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death.

This is a passage about sheep that have gone off the narrow path.

Narrow is the path that leads to eternal life, and few there are who find it.

Wide is the highway to destruction, and there are all kinds of people on it.

Yet you know this, I think of the uh allegory of the pilgrim's progress, that story.

There are lots of people who are on the narrow road to eternal life that aren't supposed to be on the road.

They're not pilgrims.

They've taken, they've climbed the fence, they didn't get on the narrow road through the narrow gate.

They are interlopers and they're just tourists, so to speak, on their road to eternal life.

They're hanging out there, and none of them will make it to eternal life, of course.

They clog up the highway, they're not actually going to go to glory, they're just on the narrow path through a period of time.

And they get distracted by the things on their way, you know, the path that leads to eternal life and the pilgrim's progress that goes through Vanity Fair, which is a city where all kinds of worldly pleasures are celebrated, and most of the tourists don't make it out of that city.

There's all kinds of dangers and shortcuts, and of course, shortcuts don't work.

You dodge off the path thinking there's a shortcut that avoids some difficulty, and the shortcut never puts you back on the real path.

This is what James is talking about here.

People that have gathered with the church, they are uh outwardly visible members of the church.

They're they're here, and yet they're not really on the highway to eternal life.

They're not really on the narrow path.

They are inwardly never converted.

Outside, they've made a profession of faith, but inside it's it's not legitimate, and they're just they're tourists, so to speak, and eventually they go away.

Now there's a second kind of people, too.

Those are the people who are genuinely converted, and they're here in church also, and they wander away occasionally also.

And on the outside, you can't tell the difference between the apostate and the wandering believer.

The Bible calls the first kind of person an apostate, those who reject the faith.

They've made a confession of faith, perhaps they were baptized, perhaps they were even a member of the church, they regularly participated in the Lord's Day worship, but they get to a point in their life where they apostasize.

They say, that's it, all done, enough.

Going off into the world.

There's also the case of believers that are part of the church that wander away into the world.

You can't on the outside tell the difference between those two kinds of people.

And so what you have to do is you have to go get them.

You remember in the Pilgrim's Progress, even Christian and his friend Faithful, they came across a shortcut.

They were legitimate pilgrims.

They were on the highway to on the path to eternal life.

They did get on through the narrow gates, and yet they came across a shortcut, and they fell for it.

The narrow path led up a dark hill, and they were intimidated by it, and this other path on the side looks like it avoided it, and so they go on to the shortcut.

They were foolish and they did it.

And they get lost, of course, and they come around the corner, and you remember who confronts them?

The evangelist confronts them and says, What are you doing here?

I left you on the narrow path.

How'd you get out here?

Get back! And then they run back to the narrow path.

That's the story here at the end of James 5.

There are people that wander away from the truth, and you know what's required for them?

Somebody to go get them.

Somebody to go bring them back.

Now, if you're familiar with the New Testament teaches on apostasy, you know that a true believer can never be lost.

James is riding with that background, of course.

John says it this way: there's a blessing behind apostasy.

He says this, some people went out from us to demonstrate that they were never of us, that there's a blessing in apostasy that some people leave the truth to demonstrate that they were never really converted.

And I call it a blessing because that's one of the ways God purifies the church.

It's better to have their hypocrisy exposed now than for them to go through their whole life deluded, their whole life deceived by their eternal condition.

But again, on the outside, you don't know if the person who's wandered is a believer who is lost or an apostate.

And so you're supposed to go rescue.

And these two verses could be really titled this.

So you want to be a sheepdog, do you?

Do you want to be a rescuer of sheep?

You want to be one of the people that goes out and rescues the lost sheep?

And how do you respond to them?

Let me give you an outline.

Three life-saving steps to rescue a wandering sheep.

Three life-saving steps to rescue a wandering sheep.

Let me read the verses one more time.

My brothers, if any among you wanders from the truth, and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.

Now, in this passage, there is a connection to prayer here.

This is not just James's signature line.

There's a connection to what's gone before it.

We looked at this last week.

God, of course, has a will for the world.

He has a decree.

He is sovereign over all things and he's bringing his will to pass in the world.

One of the ways God accomplishes his will in this world is through our prayer.

And last week, if you remember, I said some people will object and say, if God is sovereign, why bother praying?

You know, if God's going to do what God's going to do, why should I bother praying?

And I said it's very helpful to flip that question around.

Instead, ask, if God is not sovereign, why would you bother praying?

If God's not in control, why would you pray?

Rather, find the person who is in control and pray to that person.

But we understand that God is sovereign and he is doing his will in this world, and one of the ways, one of the ways God accomplishes his will in this world is through our prayers.

Our prayers are effectual.

Our prayers do work, they do bring about things in this world.

God, in his wisdom, allows us to pray and our prayers accomplish things.

Now, at the same way, in the same kind of parallel here, these last two verses, of course, a true believer is never going to be eternally lost.

Of course, God's not going to lose one of his elect.

Jesus himself, in the Olivet discourse, says it's impossible to deceive one of God's elect.

He says the Antichrist temptations and deception will be so extreme that it would confuse even God's elect if that were possible.

Praise God, it's not.

Nevertheless, one of the means God uses to rescue his children is us.

Going out after them.

Sometimes God's children as sheep wander, and we have to go fetch them and bring them back.

That's our calling.

Now, how do you do that?

How do you be that kind of sheepdog?

How do you be that kind of under-shepherd?

First, you have to bring the lost sheep, you bring his spirit to the truth.

You spy the lost sheep, you see him bogged down, stuck in the mud, and you've got to bring him back to the truth.

That's what he's wandered from, anyway.

You look at verse 19, he's wandered from the truth.

The truth is the magnet that holds someone to Jesus Christ.

If someone loves truth, they love Christ.

And if someone wants to wander away from Christ, they can't break that magnetic attraction to Christ without questioning truth.

And so they have to sever in their mind their love to the truth in order to sever their love for Jesus Christ.

After all, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

He is truth incarnate.

And so if you love truth, you love Christ.

So for the person to wander away to get lost, he's got to wander not just from Jesus, but particularly he's got to wander from the truth.

Something in the Greek here you can't notice in English, but the word for wander there, it's a passive verb.

If any among you wanders, it's passive from his wandering.

It's a passive structure there.

And there's no real way to, we don't have the word wander as a passive verb in English.

You know, passive means, you know, it's happening to you.

I was wandered.

But that's not how wandering works in English, is it?

I mean, when I think of this word wandering, I think of like a distraction.

I think of the little league outfielder, and the ball is hit his way, and the ball's rolling right to him, and his parents are so excited, like, yes, he's gonna get the ball finally.

After three hours, he's gonna get the ball.

And it comes right at him, but he's looking at a butterfly.

And it goes right through his legs, and you think, Wow, what are you doing?

And he's it's not my fault.

I didn't, the butterfly, it just happened to me.

I didn't make this butterfly.

It's here, and look how precious it is.

That's passive wandering right there.

That's what's happening here in James, that people are being wandered from the truth.

They've taken their eyes off of the ball and they have been deceived.

Now, who is the one who deceives them?

Well, the devil, of course.

The devil is the one who is over deception.

He is the father of lies, he is the architect, the chief angel of deception.

And that doesn't mean the devil is personally in charge of deceiving every single Christian that gets wandered away, every single Christian that's deceived, the devil's not doing each one personally.

The devil also uses means.

He has his minions, he has his demons, he has his staff that can help people wander.

He also is the prince of this rule world.

He's the ruler of the air.

He is the this whole world falls under his authority, so to speak, in the as much as it's fallen.

And so he uses every component of the fallen world to lure Christians away.

James warns us about some of them through this book, but the whole New Testament speaks of them.

Riches is one of the main ways people wander from the truth.

And he talks about this at the end of chapter 4 and the start of chapter 5.

When you start to love riches, you get wandered from the truth.

The riches become the butterfly you see.

Paul says, beware of the love of money, because by loving money, people have pierced their soul through with grievous pangs that lead to death.

You love money, it kills your soul.

People wander from the faith because of riches.

They wander from the faith because of pride.

They're too proud.

They're too self-righteous to lead a contrite, repentant life.

They're too good in their own mind, honestly.

They look at themselves and they don't see a sinner, they see a good person.

Good people don't last long inside of Christianity.

And they wonder.

Reputation.

You know, the more Christianity gets ostracized in a culture, the more your reputation suffers if you're associated with it.

I've known people that wouldn't get baptized because they, you know, it's it's it would hurt their reputation.

This is a bigger deal, I think, in other parts of the world where getting baptized severs your your ties with with family and jobs and you know, you you're okay associating with the church, but you don't want it to hurt your reputation.

To use American terminology, you don't want to be known as one of those icky Christians.

You're one of those evangelicals.

Gross.

You don't want that on you.

You're okay going to church and being part of the congregation, but you don't want to be numbered among them.

Or apathy.

I think that's one of the most common ways people apostasize.

Apathy.

You know, if you set something down, it stays there.

Except my car keys, they move, but everything else.

You set something down, it stays right where you left it.

And so it is with our soul.

You set your soul down and it stays there.

If you don't feed your soul the word of God, if you don't, if you're not active with the means of grace, if you're not pursuing the Lord, your soul is not going to just grow spiritually if you just set it there.

And some people they're not pursuing the Lord, and they they begin to wander from the truth.

And they might even say, Look, I didn't wander, I'm in the exact same place spiritually I was 20 years ago.

I haven't moved an inch.

That's wandering from the faith.

Sometimes it's just sin.

It's a person who says, I want to try this sin.

I've never tried this sin before, and I it might be fun, I want to experience it.

Or a person who's just not happy with their life.

This is what the adulterer thinks.

He's not happy with his life now, or his marriage, or his family, or his kids, or his work, or whatever now, and he thinks the adulterous woman would be sufficient to give him happiness, and she lures him away, like it's described in Proverbs 5.

And you know how that story goes.

She never satisfies.

She's not going to fix what's wrong with him.

She's not going to fix his contentment.

She's not going to fix the hole in his holiness.

She's only going to exasperate it.

And so now he's ruined his first life and he's unhappy in his second life, and this is, it spirals out of control.

To the love of riches, pride, reputation, apathy, just sin.

Those are all sufficient to get somebody to wander from the truth.

What a contrast with what God delights in.

God delights, Psalm 51, verse 6 says, in truth.

Psalms 51:6

The psalmist says, You delight in truth in the inward parts.

God delights in truth.

The wandering Christian wanders from the truth towards sin or towards riches or towards anything shiny, his own reputation.

Just laziness.

That's what the wandering Christian loves and what he goes towards.

But God delights in truth.

And that's why, brothers and sisters, if you want to rescue a wandering sheep, you have to bring them back to the truth.

You have to come before them and show them.

You put the word of God under their nose, so to speak.

You show them this is what the Bible says.

It seems like you're wandering from the truth.

This is what the word of God says.

The only way you can lure a wandering sheep out of the mud is with the scriptures because it is truth.

The first stage of your rescue mission has got to be to go after the lost sheep with truth.

And it's hard when you're stuck in sin to respond to truth.

It's hard.

The water is thick and black, and your wool gets heavy, and the longer you're stuck in the mud, the heavier you get, and the harder it is to get out of it.

The bog of sin is thick and dangerous.

The slew of despair is dark and weighty.

And it takes wrestling, and you can't just get in there and just yank a Christian out.

You know, you can't get in and just you pull his wool right out of him.

It's work, it's effort.

And the longer the person is stuck in the mud, the harder it is to get them out of their sin.

In that sense, sheep are sometimes like dads, you know, they make a wrong turn and they do not want to ask for directions.

They're just gonna keep going.

And the longer they burrow in the mud, the stucker they get.

And so you have to get in and bring them the truth and wrestle them out.

But the hard thing with a stuck sheep, the hard thing with a Christian who is lodged in sin, the hard thing with that person is that they're fragile.

They may bite and they may hiss and they may act like they're tough, but they are fragile.

Their ribs easily break when you grab them.

That's why the scripture says, 2 Timothy 2.25, that the man of God needs to know how to rescue lost sheep by correcting his opponents with gentleness.

Honey leads a sheep out of the mud better than a thrashing.

And nothing is sweeter than the truth.

I think of changing the metaphor from the lost sheep to a guy who burns his house down because of his own sin.

He decides he's gonna love sin, he lights his house on fire, and Jude, at the end of the book of Jude, says, Go get him.

Forget the sheep phonology for a second.

Think of the guy who, the Christian who's lit his house on fire with his own sin.

James says, go snatch him out of the fire.

Break the door down, go pull him out.

But sometimes people don't want to be rescued from their burning house.

For that person, notice what Jude says: show them mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.

In other words, show them as much mercy as you can.

Keep pursuing them over and over and over again.

Show them mercy, but be afraid of the fire, hating their garment stained by the flesh.

That's the love the sinner, hate the sin, right there.

To the sinner, show them mercy.

But despise, hate, be afraid of the sins on their flesh.

Well, you go after them to rescue them with the truth.

You bring their spirit to the truth.

Secondly, you save his soul from hell.

You bring a spirit to the truth, you save his soul from hell.

This is not a game when you're going after lost sheep.

This is not a game.

Eternity hangs in the balance.

It says in verse 20: whoever brings him back saves a sinner from his wandering, will save his soul from death.

It's not talking about physical death, it's talking about the second death, spiritual death, eternal judgment.

It's appointed for man who wants to die, and then the judgment, the scripture says.

Those who die will stand before God and be judged.

Some will rise, Daniel 12 says this, to eternal life, those whose names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life, and some will rise to eternal death and destruction.

This is why John writes, 1 John 5, verse 16.

1 John 5:16

If anyone sees his brother committing a sin that does not lead to death, ask, and God will give him life.

You see your brother stuck in sin, go get him.

Ask him to come out.

And it doesn't lead to death.

It means you're going to rescue him, you pull him out of the mud, you've rescued him.

And John says, You've given him life.

It doesn't mean he's going to live forever.

It means he's escaped eternal death.

He's escaped hell.

But John goes on to say, there is a sin that leads to death.

There is the sheep who's stuck and bites and hisses and won't get out of the mud.

And you have to walk away.

John says, for that person, don't even pray about that.

I mean, it's they've apostasized.

They're stuck.

There is a sin that leads to death.

I do not say you should pray for that, John writes.

Now, the point of this book of James, if you were to summarize all of James down to one sentence, it would be this how to distinguish between true and false faith.

It's very similar to 1 John.

He gives you the every chapter, he's giving you the list.

You know, are you going through a trial right now?

Do you understand that your trial is from the hand of a loving father for your good and for his glory?

Or do you reject that and you say, God, if you are in control of this, you're doing a bad job, but you're not aware of what's going on?

Do you get angry at God?

Do you rebuke him?

Do you question him?

And you're going through trial and you say, I know this is from God.

I want to know it's from God, but I don't understand what he's doing, then James says, ask God for wisdom, and he'll give you wisdom if you ask for it.

But don't be the double-minded man, because then you're not going to get any wisdom at all.

In fact, if you ask God, he'll give you wisdom because wisdom from above is pure, it's holy, it's undefiled.

Whereas if you are double-minded and you're looking for wisdom for your trial from below, you're going to find wisdom that is unspiritual and demonic, James says.

James 3.15.

In fact, as I mentioned, every trial, every chapter has this distinction in it.

Do not be deceived, he says in chapter one.

Do not be deceived.

Every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of lights, with whom there's no variation of shifting shadows, in contrast with the devil who is the author of deception.

So trials in chapter one.

Christians respond to trials one way and false converts another.

This is not just a one-check thing.

There's a whole world view in this book.

Not just trials, the word of God, James says later on in chapter one.

Do you respond to the word of God with obedience or do you respond to the word of God with anger?

Do you get angered at God because of what the Bible says?

Or do you obey it?

Or keep going to chapter 2.

What about prejudice?

What about how you treat people based upon how they look, chapter 2 says.

If you show prejudice, James says, you stand condemned by the law.

Think of that language.

You stand right now, you are condemned by God as a transgressor.

It's James 2, verse 9.

James 2:9

But if you respond to people with love, if you really fulfill the royal law according to Scripture, you'll love your neighbor as yourself.

You are doing well, he says.

Do you see this dynamic?

How do you interact with people?

Do you love them or do you show prejudice towards them?

Your speech.

Is your speech under the control of the spirit or is your speech worldly and speaking poison and evil things against people?

What about riches?

Do you trust the Lord with your future?

Or do you trust riches for your future?

Do you trust your own ability to dictate your future or do you trust God?

Do you submit your life to Him?

Another example, that's James 4.

James 5, do you leverage riches to exploit the weak?

Do you leverage your wealth to exploit those that can't defend themselves?

Or if you're on the exploited side of that, do you trust God to vindicate you?

That's James 5.12.

And by the way, in James 5.12, James says, if you fail to trust God and said you trust riches, you stand under condemnation.

So every chapter of this book gives you this distinguishing mark between true faith and false faith.

And every one of those with false faith, he uses some kind of language of standing condemned.

Standing condemned by God.

Well, what happens if you find yourself in the situation?

What are you supposed to do?

You don't know how to check the box.

You're like, oh, I try to check here, but I saw I checked there.

I don't know what to do.

James 4, verse 7, resist the devil and he will what?

James 4:7

Flee.

So dig in for the fight then.

You're like, I'm trying, I want to have real faith, and these the world is against me, the devil's against me, things are against me, and it's just it's a battle in my heart.

James says, resist the devil.

But what happens if you don't do that?

Isaiah 66, verse 24.

Isaiah 66:24

They'll go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who rebelled against me, God says.

You know, in the Old Testament, if someone rejected the Torah, they stood condemned by the law.

If they broke the Sabbath, they stood condemned.

If they committed adultery, they stood condemned.

They should be executed by being stoned to death.

How greater of a deal is it?

How much more severe of a punishment does someone deserve if they reject Christ than if they reject the old covenant?

If you deserve death for rejecting the old covenant, which was delivered by two angels, how much more punishment do you deserve for rejecting the very testimony of Jesus Christ Himself?

If the point of the Old Testament was to point you forward to the future Savior, what happens now if you reject the Savior and His way and His Word?

There remains for that kind of person no longer any salvation for sin.

They're like the hardened ground.

The water will rain on it, it won't even absorb.

They're lost.

Which leads us back to James, the word he uses.

James 5, verse 20 whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering.

James 5:20

That word sinner, a very common New Testament word.

Listen, when it is used in the New Testament, it's always referring to non-believers.

That's the thing with this word, it's referring to non-believers.

But it's often, not always, but often connected to hope.

It's referring to non-believers, but offering them hope.

For example, let me read you a few examples so you understand what James is meaning here.

Matthew 9, 13, Jesus says, I didn't come to call the righteous, but I came to call sinners.

So if you're a righteous person, and again, Jesus is being a little bit facetious here.

He doesn't believe that you're actually righteous.

He's playing along with your game.

You say, I'm too righteous, I don't need a savior, I'm too righteous.

Jesus says, That's great.

I didn't come for you anyway.

I came for the sinners who need saving.

Do you recognize the hope that's in that verse?

If you identify as the sinner, that means Jesus can be identified as your Savior.

Luke 15, verse 7, Jesus says, There will be more joy in heaven over a sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who don't need repentance.

Luke 15:7

Later on, Luke 15, Jesus says, There's joy before the angels of heaven when a single sinner repents.

Take the tax collector.

Luke 18, he goes to the temple, there's a Pharisee in there.

You remember the Pharisee's prayer?

God, I'm so thankful that I'm not like that tax collector.

I mean, look at that sinner.

I'm so thankful I'm not like him.

And the tax collector comes in and he prays, and you would forgive him if he prayed this way.

God, I'm so thankful I'm not like that Pharisee.

But that's not what he prays.

He says, God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

When you recognize that you're a sinner, then you can look towards your Savior.

The sheep who doesn't think he's stuck is not going to be too keen on a rescue.

The swimmer who doesn't think he's drowning is not going to let you pull him to shore.

So you go after the stuck sheep.

You bring him the truth.

You show him the truth in the word.

And hopefully he looks in the word and it is like a mirror to use again James's language.

He looks into the word and he sees that he's stuck.

He sees he's covered with the mud of sin.

He sees he's covered with the muck of this world.

Maybe he didn't even realize it.

Maybe he had his wandering had been so subtle and so gradual over so long he didn't even realize how stuck he was.

But then you hold up the word of God to him and he looks in it and he sees his sin for what he is.

And he needs help.

Again, if you haven't been in this kind of situation, you don't know how difficult it is to be rescued.

You don't know how thick sin can be.

But if you have been, then you know nothing is more effective in rescuing you than the word of God showing you the folly of your sin.

And that's why there is urgency in this.

Because if the person is not rescued, the person is on his way to eternal death.

First Timothy 1, verse 15.

1 Timothy 1:15

This saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of which I am the foremost, Paul writes.

First, you bring his spirit to the truth.

Second, you save his soul from hell.

Thirdly, you cover his sins with forgiveness.

You cover his sins with forgiveness.

You save his soul with death, and you will cover of multitude of sins.

Now, again, something that's here in the Greek that's kind of obscured in the English, the word for brings him back, it's one word in Greek and it's a word for converts.

In fact, if you have the King James Version, it says converts.

Someone wanders from the truth and someone converts him.

Whoever converts a sinner from his wandering way saves a soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

That's this word.

It's used elsewhere in the New Testament to speak of conversion.

Now, what it really means is to turn around, of course, and that's why it brings him back as a fine translation.

It connects with the idea that conversion and repentance go hand in glove.

They're two sides of the same coin.

You're lost in death, you turn to life.

You're blind, you turn to sight.

You're in darkness, you turn to light, you're lost, and now you're found.

It is, of course, a conversion.

It's a turning around.

You're going and burrowing into the mud, and the rescue party gets you turned around and faced in the right direction.

That's the image here.

And so it's right for James to use this word.

It's right for him to call it conversion.

We often get sidetracked by, you know, the question of is this his first conversion?

Like, is this his real conversion?

Is he now saved at this point, or was he saved earlier and now he's just been backsliding?

And it falls to American evangelicals and Baptists to get so wrapped up on that question, which is not at all what James is talking about, as if it would affect it at all.

As if the shepherd comes across his lost sheep and starts wrestling out and says, wait a minute, is this the first time I've rescued you or the second?

Because that changes everything.

It doesn't change anything.

It doesn't matter if this is the first time he's been rescued, or the second, or the seventh, or the 70th.

You rescue him anyway.

He's stuck in the mud.

You pull him out and point him towards the truth.

And if you know somebody like this, you know that it's oftentimes it's harder for you to forgive that person for their sin than it is for God to forgive them of their sin, isn't it?

Because you think, I know what this person is like.

I know how many times he sinned this way.

I mean, it's almost been seven times he sinned this way.

But you cover all kinds of his sin.

All kinds of his sin are covered up.

A multitude of whatever sins got him stuck, when you rescue him, his sins are forgiven.

Just the same image here with the elders earlier.

When the person comes to the elders to pray and they're confessing their sins and the elders pray for them, their sins are forgiven.

Have confidence that as they turn to God in faith, whether it's being pulled out of the mud or through the prayers of the elders, their sins are forgiven.

But remember, the longer the sheep is there, the more the sins accumulate.

But praise be to God that as our sins increase, his mercy increases all the more.

Amen.

Romans 5, verse 20.

Romans 5:20

The law came in to increase sin, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.

Now the perfect analogy for this, where this comes practical.

Matthew 18, again.

Jesus says, the shepherd is a hundred sheep.

He loses one of them.

Looks around.

99.

You count them.

Fred, 99.

Tom, 99.

They got 99.

One's gone.

Where did that sheep go?

Where did that sheep go?

The shepherd is not going to send one of his hired hands after the lost sheep.

He's going to go himself.

Now, for Americans who haven't been around sheep, we get distracted by this.

We do some simple math.

We're like, you lost one, you got 99.

Don't risk the 99 to go for the one.

I've heard people say that.

Because then the 99 can get lost.

But understand, in a shepherding environment, the guy's got 100 sheep.

He probably has, you know, some hirelings with him.

He probably has some associates with him.

He can leave them.

There's probably some fence he can put them in.

He's not feeding them the wolves to go after one.

But he is going to go after that one.

I mean, as a parent, I have three girls.

If we're somewhere and we lose one of them, I don't look at the other two and go, hmm, well, I got two still.

You know.

We're doing all right here.

I still got my two.

We were at a zoo lights a couple weeks ago, with a month ago, with a whole bunch of other families from church.

And there was, I don't know, we had like, I think, a million kids with us.

No, we probably had a hundred kids with us between all of our families that were there.

And and one, one kid got lost.

And so we didn't do the quick count and be like, hey, we still got the 99.

No, we herded all the kids in a little pin, like the food court area, and left some parents with them, and everybody scatters to go look for the lost one.

He was found, by the way, or you probably would have heard about it.

The shepherd goes out after the one and he finds them and brings him back.

Now you think that's nice.

Nice story about the lost sheep.

How?

How do you go after the one?

Well, Jesus says, very next passage in Matthew 18, if your brother sins against you, go confront him.

Go get him.

Don't just say, ouch, go get him.

And you go and you find him.

And you speak to him about his sin.

You say, hey, you're sinning.

You're wandering from the truth.

You're sinning.

And Jesus says, if he responds to you, great, you've won your brother.

Case closed.

But if he rejects you, if he bites you and says, Don't leave me alone, let me keep sinning, you need help.

Jesus doesn't say just leave him, let him go away.

Hey, it's love, let him do his thing.

No, Jesus says, you go back and you call backup.

You go get a friend, you go get a witness.

And now two of you go pull him out.

You know, one grabs the front legs, one grabs the back legs.

Get him out.

The two of you confront him on his sin.

And if he comes out, then you've won your brother.

Great.

But if he doesn't, if he refuses, he says, No, I'm happy here in the sin.

Again, you don't walk away.

This time you go and you get the elders, Jesus says.

Go find the elders.

This is the first thing Jesus says about elders, by the way.

Go get them.

And you bring the elders.

And the elders go after him.

Very similar to James here in James 5, where if someone's beleaguered and they feel like their prayers are hitting the ceiling, so to speak, then they go to the elders and the elders can pray for them.

Jesus, Matthew 18, says the same thing.

Send the elders out.

And the elders go to him and they try to get him out of the sin and he won't come out.

He's stuck in a sin.

Then James says, you tell the church.

You tell the church about it.

This is like one of those, in the fire department, those everyone goes calls.

Everybody out of the garage.

Everybody go after him.

And you give his name to the church.

And you know, in our American culture, we think, oh, that's gossip.

That's not nice to do.

No, it is nice.

What would be unloving to do would be like, hey, let him drown in the mud.

It's right to give his name to the church and tell everybody, go after the person.

If you know him, go fetch him.

And he won't come out.

He resists the church.

James says at that point, I mean Jesus says Matthew 18 at that point, treat him like an unbeliever.

Deliver him to the devil.

He's done.

Treat him like an unbeliever.

And what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.

What you loose on earth will be loosened heaven.

And that's where he goes into.

If somebody does come back, forgive him his sin, even if it happens seven times.

More than that.

No.

This is not academic for Jesus.

This is not a nice lesson in how elders should do church discipline from Jesus.

Because Jesus is the great shepherd.

And he came after us when we were stuck in our sin.

He got into the mud to get us.

He wrestled us out of our sin.

That's why I love the picture on the screen.

He wrestled us out of our sin and he put us on his back.

And he carried us out of our sin.

And him carrying us resulted in his own death.

As he lifts us out of our sin, our sin is placed on him, it's imputed to him, it becomes his sin.

And as our sin was placed on him, he was struck by the wrath of God for our sin.

In other words, Jesus is the great shepherd who laid his life down for the sheep and he died rescuing us from our sin.

But because he himself is righteous, because he has an internal and eternal strength that is the very essence of God, he rose from the dead, offering life to those who believe.

Because of that, he can extend forgiveness of sins to those who are stuck in the worst kinds of sins.

Because he has already conquered death.

And if anyone turns from their sin and places their faith in him, he will forgive them of their sins and carry them on his own back.

Lord, we're grateful that you are the great shepherd of the sheep who lays down his life for us.

I pray for this congregation.

I pray that we would be a holy congregation, that you would use the efforts of those in this congregation to rescue brothers and sisters from sin.

Lord, we know that there are people who don't want to be rescued.

Who want to be left alone to wallow in the mud.

It's a hard thing to do.

I pray that we wouldn't walk away from anybody without the whole church after having gone after them.

That we wouldn't walk away from anyone giving up.

And for those who are turned over to the evil one, we pray even in doing that, that as they're delivered to the devil, it would be in the end for the salvation of their own soul.

They would be convicted by their sins from other means that are outside of our church, outside of our own families, but that you would still bring someone in their path to open their eyes to the truth.

We know she told Ezekiel that you don't delight in the death of a wicked person.

She longed that all would come to saving knowledge.

We know that you told Ezekiel in Ezekiel chapter 3 that if you see someone, if we see someone who is lost in their sins and we don't sound the alarm, their blood is on our hands.

Ezekiel 3 · chapter mention

But if we sound the alarm and they still rebel, then we are innocent.

I pray that this congregation would be innocent of the eternal blood of those who reject you.

That we would be bold in rescuing the lost.

We pray that you'd use us to do that this week.

And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You have been listening to Emmanuel with Pastor Jesse Johnson.

You can find more resources like this at IBCBA.com.

Here is a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

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