In this sermon, the speaker discusses three parables from the Bible: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal son. The speaker emphasizes that these parables are not just stories, but descriptions of reality and God's laws. He highlights the importance of understanding the cost and effort God put into finding and saving those who were lost. The speaker also mentions that God has given each person unique gifts and callings, which are rooted in His nature and character.

Hi, I'm Derek Hong, Senior Pastor of Church of Our Saviour, Singapore. I'm so glad you're listening to this powerful message from the Word of God. I believe that as you do so, the Holy Spirit will touch your heart in a very personal way. If you would like to know more about Jesus Christ, or speak to someone, or have any questions, feel free to contact me through the Church website or telephone. Now, enjoy this message from God's wonderful Word. Billy must have a lot of close friends. As a man who's spoken to more people than any other evangelist in history, so I had the honour of introducing him, not his personal connection, but in the one that was the first global broadcast in Wellington, in New Zealand, as our capital, and it was kind of fun to introduce him. I was waiting for this link to come in. I told them the story about a young man who was in Bible college, and at the end of his college time they have a special, sort of a farewell service thing. It was not really a service, it was a huge get-together. One of the things that that particular college did, is if you had made a choice, you were going to marry somebody, what you would do, instead of giving them an engagement ring first, the boys would buy a bouquet of flowers. So I said, this young man, he's going to this Bible college, he bought the largest bouquet of flowers anybody had ever seen, and he kept it for this final farewell thing, and so this girl that he really loved, and spent time with her, and she seemed like she was interested, and so he had his big bouquet, and he came, she offered it, he offered it to her, and she looked down, and she looked at him, and she said, that's very sweet of you, but I can't accept it. And he was crestfallen, because he really loved this girl, and he said, well, why not? She said, you don't seem to have any great goals in your life. He said, well, why do you think I'm at this Bible college? I want to be an evangelist. She said, an evangelist? What kind of job is that? She said, I want a good job, and being taken care of at home, and I'm sorry, but I can't accept it. He was crestfallen. He took his little big bouquet of flowers, and there was a golf course out near that Bible college, and he was walking through there, and he had a big kind of a confrontation with God. He said, you know, should I just throw aside evangelism, and go do something else? I was good at selling. I think he was washing dishes faster than anybody else. He was trying to think what else he could possibly do, and sometime very early that morning, he made a decision. He said, no girl, no job, nothing shall ever come between you and your call on my life. And his friends found him in the morning. His face was kind of glued with his tears, and the dew of heaven to the pages of his Bible, and they found him lying there in the golf course, and they kind of got him up. He got up, and he went on, and he did become an evangelist, and I said, maybe somewhere in the U.S. tonight, there's a lady washing dishes at home who might be watching this, and I said, she probably had a lovely life, and she married somebody that did give her a nice background, and sort of home, and things like she wanted. But I wonder there, as she's at home, if she ever wonders what it would have been like to be married to Billy Graham. And my hand up, curtain open, and Billy broadcast around the world. So, it has been a great joy to meet many men of God who've had a passion since they were young people to be his followers. And if you look in history, and you look in your scriptures, you'll see that the majority of people that God has called into ministries have started when they are young. As a matter of fact, still today, globally, 19 out of 20 people who are getting saved in the world today become Christians before they reach the age of 25. And so, this will be my fifth generation of young people that I'm working with. I'm not really, really ancient. Now, Billy's beat everybody, he's 92. My father died at some time over 95. So, Billy's still hanging in there. But I'm still a kid. I'm just 66. I was the youngest of that group that you were talking about, the father's thing. And I think the reason they chose me as a father is because this is my fifth generation of teenagers. And sometimes people look at me kind of with sympathy. Why don't you grow up and get a real job, they say. Stuff like that. And I tell them, well, the reason why I'm still working with young people is this, because God gave me more than one brain cell. And I've lived long enough to see what God's done in scripture, He's done in history, and He can do it again. So, I enjoy working with my special group, teenager, you're only a teenager, you know, for just a very short time, seven years, between what Pat Byrne used to call Twix 12 and 20, that short block. And even in the Old Testament, if you lived a long time, even if your life had been shrunk from the nearly a thousand years of the original creation, shorter and shorter and shorter, you still got three score and ten, which gives you at least, hopefully, 70 years. So, those of you with advanced degrees in mathematics will be able to work this out, that seven is a tenth of 70, which is a tithe of your life. So, I have a friend who's one of the contributors in the study Bible, Greg Johnson, he says this, to the young people he works with, if you give a tithe of your teenage years to Jesus, He'll give you an open heaven for the rest of your life. And coming to the Lord myself, after ten years, by the way, I need to tell you this, how many people that are here today are not married yet? Put your hands up. Like three of you. Well, the others are kind of a bit reluctant, in case people go, She's free! Woo! And run over towards you. There is actually a rule, if you want to reach world class at anything, they've done a lot of research in all kinds of different fields, different kinds of training, whether it's in athletics, or it's in music, or anything else, and the rule has now become known as the ten thousand hours. If you want to restructure your brain and your whole life, based on one particular thing, you're deciding, this is the thing I'm going to do for the rest of my life, this is the thing I'm going to give most of my life to. In order to reach world class, you have to put at least ten thousand hours into that thing. Now that works out roughly three hours a day, at least twenty hours a week, for ten years. That's how you get your ten thousand. Now it doesn't matter what you're doing, you could aim to be the world's best cook, or the world's biggest crook, it's still going to take ten thousand hours to get to that level. So, just keep that in mind. When I first, I've got to show you a few pictures first, I think we've, yeah we've, no, we've got the little dancing shoes, they're being carried by somebody, hopefully Jesus. But I want you to see a couple of pictures of my family. I haven't got my wife here, she's gorgeous, and I've got about eight thousand pictures of her, but we'll be here too long. My background is, I come from a, my dad is there on my left, you're, no it's still a, does that go away or becomes something else? That's not my father. Yeah, that'll give you a picture. My father is that brown looking fellow on the side, he's Maori. My grandfather is that, and that's, beside him is his grandfather, and that little kid, carried by my great grandfather is me. So that's my roots. My dad is Maori, but he's really not an ordinary Maori, had a very strange life. This is my mother, isn't she gorgeous? She's part French, and part, little bit gypsy, little bit Spanish, mostly Scottish and British. Okay? Very artistic, very creative lady. My dad became a professional athlete. He had a very rough background, he was born to a Maori princess, but who was raped by a passing man who left her pregnant. She died giving birth to my father, and it was an embarrassing thing for a tribe of people, but they did, the king, or the chief if you like, his wife, which was his grandmother, moved in to take care of him in the forest. This chief had actually three wives, one died and then one took care of dad in the forest. And so, he only spoke Maori until he was 12, and then his grandmother died which left him alone, and then a passing missionary heard a child crying in the, not actually quite sure how old he really was, because all of his tribal, what do you call it, not only his birth certificate, but all of his papers, he would have owned about a quarter of the North Island if he kept those papers. But his grandmother was a Christian, but she smoked a pipe and they lived in a wari, which is like a sort of grass hut type thing, and he thinks that his grandmother fell asleep and set the house on fire. It's possible that he also set the house on fire, because there was ships going past, in the ocean they were near, and he made a little ship that had fire in it. So somebody set that house on fire, but when his grandmother came to, he got her out of the flames, and the house was burning down, and she remembered there was a little wooden box in there that had all of his royal things, and all the things that showed people how significant he was, and he thought she'd gone crazy and was trying to kill herself, and he's very strong, he held her down until everything burned. So when she died, he was left orphaned, without any backing, people didn't know, so when he died at 95, he may have been 100, we don't know, we just know his grandfather died at 108 years old, so he was an amazing man. I'll show you a picture of my dad, if I can find it here for you. Oh, that's my dad when he was young, and that little character was my younger sister, it was like a little Shirley Temple. And, you know, curly hair, that kind of... And there, at three years old, she became a professional dancer, travelled with her dance teacher right through New Zealand, giving these major concerts. She was a professional hula dancer, both fast and slow hula, came like a little mermaid out of the sea in an opening shell to do these dances in these large events. So my little sister's kind of a, you know, Hollywood girl. My father became a major professional athlete, I'll give you a picture of him. When he died, I made this... When he was dying, I made this T-shirt for him. Dad's on the left, the other one there, you probably recognise. I made a little montage there, because in professional cycling, on the track, somebody holds you, then you'll launch, and they hold you there. In those days, you actually strapped the feet in, there was no quick releases, it was almost like making the pedal-duron shoes, and they'd strap you in, so they had to hold you, and the person who launched you was the one who caught you at the end of the race. So when we all knew Dad was slowly dying, I made this T-shirt for him that he could wear, and underneath that little word, Lo, always, is the one that catches you at the end, is the one who launched you at the start. Lo, I am with you, always, even till the end of the age. And so he wore that T-shirt. He only had one, but he kept washing it and wearing it. So that's my father when he was young, an amazing, amazing man. So you'll often see this kind of thing, Prattney wins 100-mile race, he held every race record, track, field, road, never went overseas, never competed in the Olympics, because in those days, if you won any money at all, you were cut out from the Olympics for the rest of your life. And when he was 16, he won like five pounds or something, and they cut him out from the Olympics. The first Olympic Games he ever was allowed to compete in was in Australia when he was 86. It was the Masters Games, held in Brisbane, and it was funny because he's still riding, and there was some man who was 70 years old, he was an Australian, and he'd trained for four years, and he was called the world's oldest competing cyclist. And when the local television knew that he was there in Brisbane, and my father was there, who was at least 17 years older than him, they put him together for a fun race, and put him in this new track that hadn't been yet released for the Olympics, and he was there to show how trained he was, and Dad just borrowed somebody's bike, and put some old shoes on, and you know, you go in one of those, you go together, once round, then as you cross the line, they trigger. Dad killed him. He left him behind in the dirt. It's like chariots of fire ending, you know, running and pow, all like that. He fell off the bike, the poor guy at the end, he just couldn't handle it. I don't think he even went into the Olympics. But because of that, they allowed Dad to compete, but not officially, because 70 was the official cut-off date for being in the Masters Games. And against 30-year-old ex-Olympic athletes, my 86-year-old Dad got on his bike and competed. You see, when he walked at 86, he walked like this. But when he got on the bike, he was poetry in motion. It's a good thing they didn't allow him to win, or he'd have taken two golds and a bronze at the Olympic Games. The Australian Bible Society got all excited when they heard about this, so they came to Dad the following year, when he's 87, and they said, would you do some fundraising for us? How about, like, one of these sponsored lap things, where people pay, you know, whatever they want to, for a lap. And people looking at my Dad when he's old, see if I can find a picture of him here. See if I can find it. Yeah. There he is. And my gorgeous mother, around that track. They asked him, how many laps could you go? He said, oh, you know, how long would you... He said, oh, I don't know. How about three days? He'd competed in six-day cycle races when he lost his partner halfway through and finished them on his own. It was no big deal. So they had some John's Ambulance there in case he died, and people monitoring and everything. I know there were some people that, he's an old dude. I'll tell you what, we'll give him a buck a lap. They probably thought he might do like 20 laps and then he'd fall off his bike and die, and so they put in the money. Do you know how many laps my father did? 900 laps at an Olympic pace over three days. 330 kilometres. Look at him there. I know a lot of people went broke that day, but the Australian Bible Society did very well. So looking at Dan and thinking of your pastor and how much both Armour Publishing and he and other friends here have contributed this study Bible. For this, my last minute, I want to tell you how much we appreciate the investment that Singapore has made in this real world-shaking sort of event. It's actually an amazing thing. It's never been done before in history. It's the largest study Bible ever done. It covers 2,000 years of church history and not which person killed which person. It's when people were behaving themselves and living like God told them to do. Evangelism, missions and spiritual awakenings. We've put together 2,000 years of cross-section and 105 contributors. Billy's one, but he's not really writing anything more. So all just many, many of these wonderful men and women of God who had visitations of the Lord, who saw supernatural things happen in their life, most of all saw such a revelation of the Lord that it completely changed and transformed their lives and they found a way to pass it on to other people. So that's the book pastor's talking about and I want to thank you all for that. Now, the lovely thing too that I've learned about your pastor that if you bribe him, he will actually give you more time. I've usually had like 30 minutes. Today I have 40 minutes, maybe even 45. Not now, it's all kind of worn out, but yes. I want to show you a couple of other things, but first I'd like you to find the book of Luke, please. Luke chapter 15 and I'm just going to give you a very simple parable without absolutely the stories. You know what's wonderful about God? He gives great stories. Most of what Jesus taught was not like academic stuff at all. Matter of fact, almost all the Jesus words that he used were short words. We translate them to English. Most of his words in English would be like one syllable words, like love. Sometimes he used a big one like water, but most of his words were short words, fire, light. See that? And it's strange, but one of the great Quaker writers of the past said you'll notice, he's the same one who helped come up with the Alcoholics Anonymous thing. He said if you read the words of Jesus, you'll find that a lot of the words that he uses are just short words, but those words are always words of penetration. Light penetrates the darkness and makes it bright. Light and water penetrates the wood, penetrates the ground and makes it soft. Fire penetrates the wood and makes it burn. Salt penetrates the meat and stops it from rotting. So with Jesus, when you listen to him, he reveals to you things that may seem very simple to you, but actually they penetrate to the heart and when they get inside you, they explode. And it is lovely to study God. So many times, the Pharisees in the old days looking at Jesus could not understand why at all he was the way he is. One of the big things they were angry with him, he didn't look like they think he should have looked. He should have only hung out with religious people. Instead he seemed to hang out with the people of prostitutes and tax collectors and other horrible people and they couldn't understand Jesus at all. And when, like this Luke 15 that you should be looking at now, opens with some of the major religious figures of his day criticizing Jesus and who he is and what he was talking about. And Jesus gives them three stories. And I believe that stories are one of the major ways that God communicates truth to people. I love giving children stories and stuff. Little kids understand things. They don't have sophisticated, cool ways of dealing with simple... You tell them there's a ghost there, they'll stay away from the cupboard for a long time. They're not sophisticated enough to create all these kind of corrections we carry on in our lives. But God's simplicity is loaded with power. This is how he creates the universe. Like this. Light, beam, and we've got the universe. Just like that. Only faster. We would probably think for a couple of thousand years and design this and that. He just talks and it is. Here's three great stories. And I want to give a little background on these first. I want you to see first there's some common elements in this. You can see on... Oh, the shoes are looking at me again. There. What man of you having a hundred sheep? So we've got actually three different things here. We've got sheep. If you go down a little bit, we've got... There's a hundred sheep. There's ten pieces of silver. You go a little bit further, you have two sons. So see how the numbers are going down. It starts higher with a hundred. Then it goes to ten. Finally winds up with two. They're different things. One's sheep, one is silver, and one is a son. They all do start with S, of course, in English. But it's interesting, isn't it? And then there's somebody in each case that is out looking for something that is called lost. I think lost is one of the most understood biblical words in our time because we have a whole generation that has fundamentally become lost. It's not that they don't live near people. In terms of young people and teenagers, we have probably one of the most sophisticated ways educated and connected than any generation in history. Kids today, and those of you who are texting busily while I'm talking. And Facebook. I'm on Facebook, all right, but I'm not going to answer your letter. I'm already in 5,000 good friends and I haven't got time to answer 5,000 good friends every day and to pass on the essential content of a Facebook communication. Just like every single day over the sky we've got satellites and in a single day there's over a trillion conversations carried every day. Trillion. That's a lot of conversations. The average content of those communications is like this. What's up? That's about it. What's up? The second one is I'm having a cappuccino at Starbucks. That's about it. This is not going to change the world. Believe me. It will help Starbucks. Notice the hundred sheep and they lose one. There's ten pieces of silver. She loses one. There are two sons. One of them leaves. So I'm going to give you names connected with each one of these. And if you want to take notes on this you can just call this simple. At the end of this I'm going to give you a song. It's not a worship chorus. It's gorgeous and stuff. It's just my mother was an entrepreneur and all her early life she wanted to be a singer and when she married Dad she soaked her whole life and career into his. She never did actually become a singer. She wouldn't have been an opera singer. She would have been a pop singer. And she studied some of the top pop divas just like Elvis Presley studied people like Mario Lanza to become great at that thing. But I remember when I was 12 she bought me a special thing. It was called a stereogram and it had a record player on it. You may not know what that technology is. I don't mind. But I have a thousand albums in my revival library that cover from the 30s through to the 21st century. And even after they stopped doing albums which had nice big pictures on them they added about another thousand CDs that add those stuff. And the reason I've kept that is because I want to show people what God does in every generation. John Wesley, the great Methodist, said this If you want to understand a nation study its entertainment. That's strange. Here's a man who wrote at least 236 plus books. I'm a mentor to musicians. Spent a lot of time with some very well-known Christian musicians. Every year we had a thing it ran for almost six years when Keith Green was alive called the Garden Valley Artist Retreat. And we had 300 of the best Christian songwriters, singers you can imagine all come together not to do the latest licks and show what kind of cool things they were in. They just came together to hang out together and to learn stuff about God that would help them more in the careers that they came in. And it was wonderful. You should have listened when you have... Do you remember Michael Jackson did We Are The World? We could have done one called We Aren't The World. But there was... Imagine what it's like to have 300 of the best Christian singers, songwriters there are all worshipping God at the same time. Nobody song-leading them, just singing. It was awesome. And nobody did the Garden Valley album. We just sung. We talked about God. We talked about His wonders and what He was like and they went out and started writing stuff about what God taught us that weekend. Anyway, see these common elements? In every case something is wonderful. The lost becomes found and this statement is made. Rejoice with me for I have found what or which was lost. So notice that when this thing is made it brings real joy but not just joy for the person who finds it. He wants everybody to get in on that. And I've learned something about God. He wants back the things that He's lost. And you belong by right to Him. I don't care what your background is. I don't care where you come from. I don't care whether you're religious or irreligious. He is the Father, is the rightful Father of this people. There are no races, just the human race. And we are supposed to be His people and the sheep of His pasture. And all of these things in the Scriptures tie back to this. God is the rightful owner of this planet. He's the one that made us. He designed us. He is our rightful owner and Lord and Savior. All of those things. I remember C.S. Lewis saying enemy occupied territory. That is the story of Christianity today now. When the world fell many of us were ripped away from God and have since lost our way. And the thing that is beautiful about us is this little word rejoice. I'm going to show you in a second something I discovered about two years ago that was really quite wonderful for me. As I was sitting with Pastor here we were just briefly looked at one of the prayer times you have on the seven mountains. I want to show you something that will interest you. I am presently fairly fully recovered now from a quite serious it's called a it was actually a brain stroke. Simplest way I can describe it. Not by a clot. But one of the main things that fed a section of my brain it just blew. It just blew in my brain. So day after Christmas I went up to be with my sister with my wife and my son. We went up and had Christmas dinner with them. Came back down fell asleep. I woke up a bit late. My wife was giving me a phone. A young man had called asking me about a computer. What kind he should buy and stuff. And I made computers and stuff. I'm trying to listen to him and I understood fully what he was saying but for ten minutes he talked to me and I couldn't answer him. The reason is is because that part of the brain it blew all the nouns. It's the simplest way I can say it. Of fifty years. All the names of anything were gone. Out of my mind. I didn't realize that but when I tried to talk to my wife I called her Levonnie. That little girl who was when I was a kid that we just had Christmas dinner with. My wife's name is Fayona. I have been married to her for forty-two years and I called her Levonnie. My poor son whose name is William I called Winky which is my name. And I've been married to myself as far as I can remember. I couldn't even remember people that I've lived with for a long, long time. Let alone names of computer systems and operating systems and food and places and name it. If somebody gave me a knife, a fork and a spoon I'd know what they did. I wouldn't stick the fork in my eye. I'd know what they were but I didn't know the names of them. You know what it's like to have a doctor of literature in arts, sciences, history communications and youth culture except you can't remember any of the names in it. And your answer would be yeah, what is that? So, there's a wild little word here it's this rejoice with me. Now, another quick thing. I told you about my mother and her desire to be a singer and burying it in my dad's life. When I finish this I want to tell you the story of how my mother finally came to the Lord. But one of the things I discovered in this trying to fix the brain when they saw, the surgeons found how big this stroke was they were amazed that this whole side of my body had not become paralysed. I seemed to be able to walk and do everything else. It was just the problem with the names. And so for almost six months the hospital sent out nurses five different ones at different times to test how much I knew and it was very strange. But one of the things I found a book called This is Your Brain on Music made me appreciate just how wonderful God is. This man who wrote it is both a neuroscientist that's his research he's also a music producer and his book puts together the two things that he found are why people are so interested in some kinds of music why people have special kinds of music and one of the things he found is this you all know at least you may know that one half one side of your brain processes music. You can remember tunes for things some of you go I know it but you may not remember the words because they're stored somewhere else. My words were all vanished. Blown up. But this is what he said if you relearn the music the brain will not only restore that it will take the lyrics and transfer them to another place in your body on your brain of course probably it won't show up on your toe or something which would be embarrassing. But my poor wife and my son over the last six months have heard me down in my lab I have a lab by the way a laboratory when you're a nerd that's what you have a laboratory it's underneath I have a studio in it I have a darkroom I have my old chemistry lab I have a digital electronic design lab I have a bunch of things and they're all behind a wall like James Bond you hit the wall and the door opens up I can show it to you if you come to New Zealand I'll have to kill you afterwards because it's a secret but I'm downstairs they're all upstairs and I hear tiny little shades of songs coming out because I'm taking songs that I learned when I was all the way from before I became a Christian to the time I first got saved Cliff Richard and Pat Moon were two of the people we did a lot of these songs and they got saved about the same time I did maybe a year or two later and so a lot of the songs that we used to do and the band I had for two and a half years I've been re-recording and what is wild it not only goes over the music it starts storing the ideas or the thoughts or the stuff connected to it if you love somebody and you like this song and it reminds you of that person it also stores that so this part of the brain basically blown up has 90% back that's what my son says of course I've forgotten what his name is I was going to ask you but 90% of that data is back from music and Jesus this book biggest book in it 66 books in here biggest book in it is Psalms so whenever I come to a church and I listen to the worship teams and listen to people sing it tells me something about the church it tells me something about their dealings with God and God's dealings with them because every time there's been a revival in history two things have repeated one is we begin to understand how bad it is when you hurt a God who loves you more than you can imagine the great grief that is on God's heart is one of the big missing elements in our day the grief of God over the sin of the world we put that in the Revival Study Bible is one of the core things that has recurred in every spiritual awakening the second one is the joy that comes when God gets you back and the tremendous release that actually creates new kinds of music so I believe every real revival will have new kinds of music new kinds of singing these music young people I've had some come visit me in my office and remember all the scary stuff is behind a wall they don't see that but I have part of the library about 4000 books in that bit and there's another 6 in the US but I've got a wonderful set of old books and one of them has got 13 volumes the volumes have about they're probably .8 type 600 pages and they are the poetical works of John and Charles Wesley and there's thousands of them every time something happened John or Charles wrote a song about it no wonder they said over a thousand tongues to sing they needed at least that number to sing half of what they wrote so look at this got to hurry here sheep quick tale about sheep sheep are dumb I come from a nation used to have 80 million sheep and 3 million people now it's got over 4 million people and a lot less sheep sheep don't like that very much we ate them actually in the bible you'll see the word cattle that doesn't mean just cows it means domesticated creatures that once they're domesticated they take on care from you could probably call a cat a cow cat wouldn't like you very much dogs are like cows in bible ideas they're another creature you have by the way I figured out the difference between dogs and cats do you know the differences dogs want to be people cats want to be god that's the difference between them basically stupid sheep went out the only sheep probably listened to too many old Pink Floyd albums went out looking at all these other dumb church sheep they all hang out together actually sheep are really dumb they don't even have proper teeth to bite you if they didn't like and little sheep lambs are worse there's one sheep don't want to hang out with these other dumb sheep they're all hanging out together so he goes out there he came fine skipping away then it gets dark and he goes which way did I come then it gets worse he hears this sound it is now true blood out there a flock call them wolves that look for sheep just like this and there's nobody else just him what would you do if you stuck out in a moor like that and it's pitch dark and you don't know where to run you're probably running around a little bit like this and somebody comes and gets him who is it if I had been a shepherd I'd go hey I lost one hey I got 99 fine let him go sheep do never do this again I'm not even going to show you what's left of your brother and this lovely old song none of the ransomed ever knew how deep were the waters crossed how dark was the night the Lord passed through before he found his sheep that was lost you and I don't know what it cost God to pull us in our stupidity in our dumbness out of what we've been into to bring us back to the safety of the fold but he did it and we're alive because of him ah got three minutes now and I've got to give you a very fast can I just say this God's laws are descriptions of reality they're not inventions you walk away from them he's telling you the truth it's not his own religious invention it is a description of how things actually work and you can't break them you walk out it's like saying yea verily if thou jumpest off a forty storey building without a hang glider without a bat suit a spider man situation you will accelerate at thirty two foot a second a second and when my head strikes the cement fourteen storeys below thee thou shalt be paced amen that is a description of reality second one simple woman loses a coin you all lose stuff like that remember how she looks for it she takes the light it's just like maybe a diamond drops off a ring or something you're looking for everything you don't go look I've got ten rings it's fine this one's only worth twenty thousand so fine she's turning everything upside down she's looking underneath she knows she lost it in the house she didn't lose it at the airport it was right here somewhere she gets the light and she's looking you know why because it's lost lostness is not a distance it's a relationship two people can be in the same house and be a thousand miles apart two people can be a thousand miles apart and be this close because lostness is a broken relationship you don't know where the person is or that person is cut off from you and add this it is possible to be lost in the house this is a house of God you can be here you can have all of the background you can listen to the voice you can even see the light looking for you you can even hear his voice and still stay lost so if you're in a house of God and you really are the one he's looking for listen and obey him don't sit there hoping that just because you're in the house it'll make you not lost you need to be the person he's not only looking for he wants you back give him back last bit here last lost song I got my friend John down there hopefully we'll have a feedback here remember the last one the son that son he said to his father give me some money whatever dad gives him a generous thing gives him a gift and then he goes out read the story there this is what I found two years ago there are over 35 major vocations they're not at all religious and not only given to mankind by God and for God but even rooted in this very nature and character they're not Levitical religious they're not family roles husband, father, brother but in every way genuine divine callings here's just some of them each one of these is rooted in God's nature and character each one of these is what he is and these are the gifts that he gives to mankind it doesn't mean you have to be preacher and evangelist look at these things they're all real sacred callings get those back you get a wonderful advantage I reckon the church needs to rediscover these sacred vocations because then when you're sitting there you're not going to think I wish there was something for me to do you've been given a gift of God simply acknowledge who gave it to you and he'll show you some astonishing things here's a man, 25 year old hungry for God he had a visitation of the Holy Spirit he was given a Bible not the study Bible, it was just done then this is 110 years roughly before Azusa Street the person who gave it said this is not just a book about God it's a book about everything out there, he's starting to worship at that time his country was the most literate nation in Europe the most insecure he had to get a visa to go to another village extremely poor and no entrepreneurial vision at all he said as soon as I came to my senses I was filled with regret I had not served this loving transcendentally good God it seemed nothing in the world was worthy of any regard that my soul possessed something supernatural divine and blessed there was a glory no tongue can utter I remember as clearly as it happened only a few days ago it is nearly 20 years since the love of God visited me I wanted very much to serve God I asked him to reveal to me what I should do what happened to Hans Nelson Hauger he lived only 30 more years but he began over a thousand factories and businesses and over a thousand home churches sitting here you may know what your calling is you just don't know who really gave it to you I'm going to close with this last thing I'm going to do and if you like you can just alright I have so enjoyed my time here with you does this thing work too now feedback deal here this is one of those songs redone from the past I didn't borrow this from John Wesley he's been dead for a long time but here's what it sounds like like the one missing lamb of old I strayed from the shepherd's fold so Jesus found me unbound me mighty Savior like the coin no one else could find I dropped out of sight out of mind so Jesus raised me amazed me what a Savior His love never failed me He reached from above drew me back to the Father welcoming me in His blood like the prodigal son of the Lord I had forgotten my father's heart Jesus Jesus gracious Savior His love never failed me He reached from above drew me back to the Father blessing me in His blood now I'm thankful for the price He paid He raised a rich man in the games I played my blessed Jesus Jesus Lord and Savior looking for a place to be lost no no no no no Thank you, Winky. Let's stand together. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. You know, the word of the Lord to us is to be lost has nothing to do with distance. To be lost has to do with engagement, relationship, intimacy. That's what God has been calling us to. And if you know that you are lost, you can be lost in the house right here, you can connect with God again. So as you go from here, let the word resonate in your heart, restore your spirit, bring you close to him today. Amen. Let's drop our hands and just thank the Lord. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for all that you are doing in our lives. Thank you that you love us so much, that you keep looking until you find us. Even though we've been foolish, you never let us go. Even though we've been willful, you keep waiting for us. So Lord, we cling to you. Hallelujah. And we say to anyone here who is lost, let him today be found by you. In Jesus' name, everybody say, Amen. Let's do the blessing song as we close.