He Comes Toward You
Most of us pray like we're trying to get God's attention. Like we have to wave Him down before the real conversation can start. Jesus told three parables in a row to break that picture. Every one of them is about a God who moves first.
The Picture Most of Us Are Carrying
Most of us pray like we are trying to get God’s attention.
Not consciously. We wouldn’t say it that way. But you can tell from how we open. The throat-clearing. The polite preamble. The slow ramp-up. The half-step before the real thing. The vibe of someone in a long lobby trying to flag down a busy receptionist.
Underneath that posture is a picture. The picture is that the conversation has not started yet. He is somewhere — at the desk, in the meeting, behind the door — and you are out here, trying to get noticed, hoping today will be the day He looks up.
Jesus spent an entire chapter dismantling that picture.
If you’ve been around the church for any length of time, you have probably heard the parables in Luke 15 dozens of times. Lost sheep. Lost coin. Lost son. They are usually preached as cute stories about how God loves you when you wander.
Which is true. But it is missing the part of those parables that should change how you pray.
Because all three are about the same thing. They are about who moves first.
The Parable That Breaks the Spreadsheet
Luke 15 doesn’t begin with the parables. It begins with a complaint.
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming close to him to hear him. The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, “This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them.”
The Pharisees were not confused. They were offended. Jesus was eating with the wrong people. Tax collectors who had collaborated with Rome and skimmed off the top. Prostitutes. The morally and ceremonially unclean. The people the religious system had filed under write-off.
The Pharisees ran a per-capita economy of attention. You earn your way in. The clean stay clean. The unclean stay outside. You measure who is worth God’s time by their religious productivity, and you allocate accordingly.
Jesus’ response to that economy is to tell them three parables in a row. They are usually printed as separate stories. They were not preached as separate stories. They are one sermon with three angles, all making the same point.
A shepherd loses one sheep out of a hundred. He leaves the ninety-nine and goes after the one.
A woman loses one coin out of ten. She lights a lamp, sweeps the whole house, and turns over every cushion until she finds it.
A father has two sons. One leaves and humiliates him. The father runs — actual runs, which dignified Middle Eastern men did not do — to meet him on the road home.
In every single one, the question is not will the lost thing eventually find its way back. The question is who initiates the search.
And in every single one, the answer is the same.
The Shepherd Who Should Not Have Left
Picture the actual mechanics of the first parable.
The shepherd is in the open country. He has a hundred sheep. One wanders off. He has to make a choice. He can stay with the flock — the responsible thing, the obvious thing, the thing every business school in human history would tell him to do. Cut the loss. Protect the inventory.
Instead, he leaves the ninety-nine in the wilderness and goes after the one.
That decision is not safe. The ninety-nine are now exposed. Predators. Other dangers. Other chances to wander. The reasonable thing — the risk-managed thing — would have been to write off the one and protect the many. Sheep do not come find the shepherd. Sheep get lost and stay lost. If the shepherd does not move, the story ends.
Jesus tells the story like the shepherd’s leaving is not even a question.
“Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep and lost one of them, wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that was lost, until he found it? When he has found it, he carries it on his shoulders, rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’…”
The shepherd does not weigh the cost-benefit. He does not say, well, ninety-nine out of a hundred is still a great quarter. He does not console himself with the average. He goes.
And when He finds the sheep, He does not lecture it. He does not punish it. He does not wait for it to come the rest of the way on its own. He puts it on His shoulders. Rejoicing. The carrying-home is happy work.
The whole point is the direction of the motion. The shepherd is the one moving. The sheep is not chasing the shepherd down. The sheep is the recipient of a pursuit it did not initiate.
That is the picture Jesus gives the Pharisees of how God works.
Why the Math Has to Break
If you read Part 1 of this series, you already know where this is going.
The math of the lost sheep parable looks broken because we are reading it on a finite scale. We assume the shepherd has limited time, limited energy, limited focus, and that spending those limited resources on one sheep means the ninety-nine are getting less. On a human scale, that’s true. There is no human shepherd who can give the same intensity to one and to ninety-nine without short-changing somebody.
But the parable is not about a human shepherd. The parable is about the kind of attention God has, told in human terms so we can almost grasp it.
For God, going after the one does not deplete what He has for the ninety-nine. The math doesn’t work that way for Him. He is not running on a fuel gauge. He doesn’t get to the lost sheep on the last drop of pursuit and have to coast back to the ninety-nine on fumes.
He is fully with the lost one and fully with the ninety-nine at the same time. He is fully with you when you finally turn toward Him in prayer at 11pm, and fully with the believer in Mongolia at the same moment, and fully with the woman in a hospital in Lagos, and fully with the kid hiding in a bedroom in Dallas, and fully with every other person who has reached for Him in the last sixty seconds of human history.
The parable looks like a tradeoff because Jesus is borrowing a finite picture to point at an infinite reality. The shock value is intentional. He is saying: if even a finite shepherd, who would actually be losing something by leaving the ninety-nine, would still go after the one — how much more will the infinite Father, who loses nothing, come toward you?
That argument is from lesser to greater. From the limited to the unlimited. From the good shepherd you can imagine, to the perfect Shepherd you cannot.
The Coin and the Son
Look at what changes across the three parables.
The sheep wandered off through stupidity. Sheep are not strategic creatures. It got distracted by a tuft of grass and looked up two hours later and the flock was gone. Wandering, not rebellion.
The coin didn’t wander. A coin does not have agency. A coin is lost because someone else dropped it, and it is sitting somewhere in the dust under a piece of furniture, doing absolutely nothing to be found. The owner has to do all the searching.
The son rebelled. Out of all three, this is the only lost thing that left on purpose. He demanded his inheritance early — which in that culture was the equivalent of saying I wish you were dead — and walked into a far country to spend it on his own preferred sins.
Three different reasons to be lost. Three different categories of wandering. And in every case, the one who moves first is the searcher, not the lost one.
The shepherd does not wait for the sheep to find its way back. The woman does not wait for the coin to surface. And the father does not wait for his son to walk all the way home — Jesus is explicit about it:
“He arose and came to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion, and ran, fell on his neck, and kissed him.…”
While he was still a long way off. The son has not arrived. He has not finished his speech. He has not made it back to the house. He is still on the road, still in the part of the journey where he is rehearsing his apology, and the father is already running in his direction.
The father does not wait for the son to bridge the gap. He starts bridging it from his end.
That is the entire pattern. The lost thing is not the one who closes the distance. The searcher is.
What This Does to How You Pray
Here is what these parables do, if you let them, to the way you pray.
Most of us pray like the lost sheep is supposed to find the shepherd. We assume the burden of locating God is on us. We assume that if we are not feeling Him, we have to go look harder — read more, study more, attend more, work up more emotion, pray with the right posture, find the right words, perform the right kind of seeking.
That is exactly backwards.
You are not looking for Him. He is looking for you. He has been the entire time. Every honest impulse you have had to turn toward Him in the last twenty years was not you finding Him. It was you noticing that He was already coming.
Which means when you sit down to pray today, you are not the lost sheep starting a long, slow trek toward a distant shepherd, hoping you have enough faith fuel to reach Him. You are the lost sheep that has just been found. The shepherd is already on the way. The conversation is not something you have to start. It is something you join.
You are not waving Him down. He is already moving toward you.
The throat-clearing, the polite ramp-up, the half-step preamble — those are all the body language of someone who thinks they have to flag down a distant God. That God doesn’t exist. The God who exists is the one Jesus described in Luke 15. He is the shepherd in the hills with a lantern. He is the woman with the candle going through every corner. He is the father on the road, sandals slapping the dust, no dignity left, eyes only on you.
You don’t have to get His attention. He has already given it. And He has been moving toward you the entire time.
A Picture from the Old Testament
If you want to see how long this has been God’s posture toward people, go back to Ezekiel.
“‘For the Lord Yahweh says: “Behold, I myself, even I, will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered abroad, so I will seek out my sheep. I will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.…”
That is centuries before Jesus. God is already calling Himself the Shepherd who searches. He is already promising that the day of clouds and thick darkness — the day everything fell apart — is the day He goes looking. He keeps it up:
“I will seek that which was lost, and will bring back that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick; but I will destroy the fat and the strong. I will feed them in justice.”’
Seek. Bring back. Bind up. Strengthen.
Every verb in that list has Him as the subject. He is the one searching. He is the one returning the lost. He is the one binding up the wounded. He is the one strengthening the weak. The sheep do not do any of these things to themselves, and the sheep do not pull them out of the shepherd. He brings them.
The God who told the Pharisees the parable of the lost sheep was not making something up on the spot. He was telling them what He had been doing the whole time. They had stopped seeing it because their math had taught them not to.
You can be the same kind of person without realizing it. You can have read the Bible cover to cover and still imagine that God’s pursuit is allocated by who deserves it, and that the burden of starting the conversation is on you. He doesn’t allocate that way. He never has. The whole arc of Scripture is a God who moves first.
The Party at the End
There is one detail that ties all three parables together that we usually rush past.
When the sheep is found: a party. Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost. When the coin is found: a party. Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece I had lost. When the son comes home: a party. The biggest one. Bring out the best robe, the ring, the fattened calf, let us eat and celebrate.
Jesus is making one more point with the parties.
He is saying that heaven’s economy is not the economy of efficiency. It is the economy of celebration. The shepherd is not annoyed at the inconvenience of the chase. The woman is not embarrassed about the lost coin. The father is not lecturing on the porch.
They are all happy.
Which means when you finally turn toward Him after a long quiet stretch — when you finally pick the conversation back up after weeks or months or years of putting it off — the response on His end is not finally. It is not I was wondering when you’d get around to it. It is not the cold patience of a parent waiting for an apology.
The response is delight. The same delight the shepherd has when the sheep is on his shoulders. The same delight the woman has when the coin is in her hand. The same delight the father has when his son’s face is buried in his neck.
I tell you that even so there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.
Heaven throws a party over one. Over one. Not a smaller party because the budget had been spent on the people who came home before you. The same intensity, every time.
He is not exhausted by your return. He is thrilled by it.
What This Does to the Conversation You’ve Been Postponing
If you have been postponing the conversation — and a lot of us have — Luke 15 does something specific to that delay.
It says the delay was never the disqualifier you were treating it as. The shepherd is not standing in the meadow tapping His foot waiting for the sheep to apologize. He is in the hills with a lantern. The woman is not waiting for the coin to roll back. She has the candle out. The father is not waiting for the son to deliver a polished speech. He is already running.
So the conversation you have been putting off — the one you’ve been telling yourself you’ll start when you’ve gotten your act together, or when you’ve stopped doing the thing, or when you finally feel ready — that conversation is not waiting on you. He has been moving toward you the whole time you have been waiting on yourself.
You don’t have to walk the whole road back. You just have to look up.
He came on a cross. The whole story comes to a head there. The Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. That is not a parable detail. That is a sentence Jesus says about Himself outside the parables, in plain language. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.
He went all the way after you.
Now He is in the room. Already. Right now. Not annoyed about how long it took. Not running a tally on your absence. Just glad you finally turned around.
That is the kind of God who is on the receiving end of whatever you are about to say to Him.
A Prayer
Father, I have been carrying a backwards picture of how this works. I have been pretending that prayer is me trying to flag You down from across the room. I have been treating You like the receptionist and me like the lobby.
That isn’t who You are. The whole story is the other way around.
Thank You for being the kind of Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to come after the one. Thank You for being the woman with the candle, going over every inch of the floor. Thank You for being the Father who runs while the son is still a long way off — who does not wait for the speech, who does not wait for the apology, who closes the distance from His own end.
Forgive me for the prayer lives I have postponed because I thought I had to bring myself the rest of the way home. I cannot bring myself home. I never could. You come for me. You always have.
Help me, today, to stop trying to flag You down. Help me to talk like a person who has just been found, not like a person who is still hoping to be noticed.
Amen.
Reflection Questions
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In the lost sheep parable, who do you usually identify with? The shepherd, the lost sheep, or the ninety-nine? What does that reveal about how you’ve been picturing prayer?
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Read Luke 15 in one sitting — all three parables. Notice the verbs. Who is moving toward whom in each story? What does that say about the direction of the conversation between you and God?
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Where have you been postponing the conversation because you assumed you had to walk the whole road back first? What part of that road has He been walking from His end while you were waiting on yourself?
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What is one thing you would say to Him today if you genuinely believed He was already on the way to you, not waiting for you to finally show up? Say it.
Coming Up Next
So the math doesn’t work. The assumptions are lies. The Shepherd is already on the way. All true on Sunday morning. The question is what any of it does to your Tuesday — to the way you actually pray in the car, the kitchen, the hallway, the slow stretches of an ordinary week. In Part 4, we’ll bring all of this back to ground level and look at what changes when you start living like the conversation is already open.
Next: “A Conversation That’s Already Open” — What This Does to Your Tuesday