“All the tax collectors and sinners were approaching to listen to him. And the Pharisees and scribes were complaining, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ So he told them this parable: ‘What man among you, who has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open field and go after the lost one until he finds it?’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

While we love stories of broken people being made whole, we don’t actually love broken people. We push them to the margins of society. If they are bad enough, we ship them off to places we don’t have to see or think about. We certainly don’t do many meaningful things to pull them out of their brokenness. The season of Advent, though, is all about preparing for the arrival of God’s plan to do just that. Jesus was sent to save broken people. This idea lies right at the heart of His mission. Let’s talk about it.

What we believe matters. In just the last few days we have been treated to a case study in how true that is. On a beach in Australia, as a group of Jewish worshipers were preparing to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, two Muslim men with direct ties to the murderous Islamic State opened fire on them, killing 15 and wounding another 40. This was a terrorist attack. These two Muslim men—a father and son—sought to kill as many Jews as they could, and they did so in conscious pursuit of the teachings of Islam.

Now, this does not by any means give leave for unthinking, broad-brush arguments that all Muslims are terrorists. There is absolutely not justification for such prejudicial thinking, and a great deal of evidence to the contrary. In fact, some of the early reporting I’ve heard is that it was a fellow Muslim man who risked his life to stop them. This attack, however, was not an isolated event. In the last few weeks there have been several attacks carried out or thwarted before they could be carried out, all of which were executed or planned by Muslim men seeking to faithfully carry out the teachings of Islam as they best understand them. Over the same period of time—and if you go back quite a ways, the story remains the same—not a single person that I’m aware of (and given the generally pro-Islam and anti-Christian bias of the mainstream news, it’s hard to believe I wouldn’t be aware of it) has carried out or planned a similar attack in his efforts to faithfully carry out the teachings of Jesus. Individual Muslims are absolutely not the problem. But extremist or radical or fundamental Islam represents an existential threat to Western society. What we believe matters.

Looking around the world today, and examining our culture, here’s something else that most people seem to believe: lost and broken people don’t matter. As I said a second ago, the world sometimes gives lip service to the opposite, but it doesn’t really believe that. If it did, we would be experiencing pretty profoundly different outcomes. If it did, you would see as many effective secular groups as there are effective Christian groups working diligently to do more to meaningfully help them. Instead, people who fall on hard times or run into world-breaking circumstances are pushed to the margins and forgotten about. Where that doesn’t happen, we almost exclusively have Christianity to thank.

The season of Advent and the celebration of Christmas offer us a good reminder of why. During Advent we prepare for and at Christmas we celebrate God’s demonstrating His great love for us by coming in pursuit of us to find us and rescue us from our sin and the effect of our sin when we were still broken by and actively pursuing our sin. There is no other God from any other religion who has done something similar. There is no other religious worldview that has such a thing as this lying at the heart of its set of truth claims.

During His ministry, many years after He arrived as a baby, Jesus explained that this is the heart of God. Whatever else we might have thought about Him before this point, God’s heart longs to be near those who are broken and hurting in order to restore them to wholeness. He delights to extend to them His peace, to give them hope, to restore their joy, and to make sure they have experienced His love to the fullest degree imaginable and beyond.

When Jesus was surrounded by a crowd that included many of the people who His society considered to be the worst of the worst—tax collectors and sinners—He offered them not condemnation for their state of affairs, but compassion and a reminder that God wants to bring them out of their brokenness, not discard them in it.

Luke tells us about the scene in chapter 15: “All the tax collectors and sinners were approaching to listen to him.” Today, because of the Christian worldview, we are programmed to see this as a good thing. Although not a few churches have forgotten about this central part of the heart of God, many if not most actively welcome the broken and hurting in their midst. I know of a church whose name more consciously claims this piece of God’s identity than about any other. The church is literally called Scum of the Earth. Members talking about being a part of Scum.

This is not the heart of the world for the broken. This was not the heart of Jesus’ own culture for the broken. “And the Pharisees and scribes were complaining, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.'” They were worried the brokenness and unrighteousness of these people who were coming to Jesus in droves was a disease that could be caught. Jesus understood, however, that it was His holiness, the holiness of God, that was more contagious. They simply needed to be exposed to it. And He was the greatest carrier in the world. His followers have since picked up the mantle.

But He wanted the religious people around Him who thought of themselves as good enough to understand where God’s heart was for these people they looked down on with scorn rather than with the compassion of the God the professed to serve. “So he told them this parable: ‘What man among you, who has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open field and go after the lost one until he finds it? When he has found it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders, and coming home, he calls his friends and neighbors together, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, because I have found my lost sheep!” I tell you, in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who don’t need repentance.'”

God loves all of His people. If even one goes missing, He goes after that one. He goes after that one until He finds it, and then He celebrates with all the joy of heaven. Some sheep remain lost because they don’t want to be found, but God goes after all of His lost sheep. He wasn’t content to remain in heaven, calling us from afar. When the time was right, He sent His Son—the second person of His triune identity—to come for us. He entered the world in circumstances that were understood to be broken themselves. He was poor. He became an immigrant. His mother was pregnant before she was married. His father died when he was still fairly young. His brothers and sisters hated Him. He had no permanent home. On and on His trail of misfortunes extends. And He did that on purpose, so that as one who understands all of our brokennesses and weaknesses, He can rescue us from all of them. We only have to receive Him and His love.

As the Advent season winds closer and closer to a close, may you receive the love of the God who was so passionate to be in a relationship with you that He sent His one and only Son for you. This belief has been making the world a better place for 2,000 years. When you receive it, it will bring Gospel good to your situation as well. I hope you will.