Pastor David Jang (Olivet University) says that Luke 15-namely, the lost sheep, the lost drachma, and the lost son-presents three scenes set in different spaces: a pasture, the inside of a house, and a family home. Yet he insists that these differences of setting matter less than the deeper common thread the text carries. The common thread is this: "a heart that willingly moves toward what has been lost," and the paradoxical proclamation that when that heart moves, heaven rejoices. The central point Pastor David Jang keeps holding onto in this passage is ultimately one thing. God's love is not sentimental language; it is God's very mode of being-an inability to endure the reality of the lost-and the grain of that love flows in the opposite direction of human calculation. That is why Luke 15 is not merely a chapter urging repentance; it is first a chapter that shows the God who keeps "a home to return to" open so that repentance is even possible.
The opening atmosphere of the chapter is unmistakable. Tax collectors and sinners draw near to listen, while Pharisees and scribes grumble at the sight. Their question-"Why does this man welcome sinners and eat with them?"-looks on the surface like a concern for piety, but at a deeper level it exposes the human instinct that finds the order of love unfamiliar. Pastor David Jang takes that sense of "unfamiliarity" as a diagnostic criterion for faith. If the world of Luke 15 feels strange even to us, it is not because the text is odd, but because we have drifted, ever so slightly, from the orbit of love. After the fall, human beings tilted toward valuing "big things, many things, visible things," and so we are easily tempted to treat one person, one soul, one tear, one turn of direction as insignificant. But the God of Luke 15 does not reduce the few to disposable statistics simply because the many are safe. Rather, without taking "the unproblematic ninety-nine" for granted, God goes out for "the lost one." On that road, God's love comes to us less as a moral lesson and more as a new order that overturns the human world.
In the first parable, the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine in the open field and goes after the one that is lost, "until he finds it." The decisive word here is not "efficiency," but "all the way to the end." As Pastor David Jang emphasizes, the parable reveals how radically different God's perspective is from ours. We gain stability through numbers, prove success through majorities, and sort right and wrong through profit-and-loss logic. But the shepherd in Jesus' story moves not by the language of calculation, but by the language of love. That language reaches its summit in the declaration that "one sinner who repents" makes heaven rejoice more. Heaven's joy is not determined by scale, but by restoration. Love is the power that brings someone back to their original place. So Pastor David Jang reads joy and love as two sides of the same coin: when love moves, joy happens; and joy, in turn, expands love-until that cycle becomes the language of heaven.
The second parable-the lost drachma-is even more ordinary and, more openly, "irrational." A woman loses one coin out of ten, lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and searches diligently "until she finds it." The drachma was not a trivial coin in the household economy of the time. In biblical and ancient currency explanations, a drachma is often mentioned as roughly comparable to a day laborer's wage, and Luke arranges the story so readers can feel that such a loss would never have been minor in a poor household. Yet the point Jesus makes deliberately stranger is the way she "publicizes her joy." When she finds the coin, she calls her friends and neighbors and says, in effect, "Rejoice with me." A party over one coin-by modern instincts-can sound exaggerated, wasteful, even absurd. Pastor David Jang says this very "exaggeration" is the grammar of the gospel. The gospel does not come quietly to fit inside human rationality. The amplitude of God's love breaks through our cost-benefit thinking, and the joy of recovering what was lost erupts as though it repays all the time of loss at once. That joy is a parabolic device that lets us feel-rather than merely understand-the size of God's heart toward sinners.
Then the third parable-the prodigal son-leads the heart of the first two into even deeper territory. Here, "being lost" is no longer simply a matter of straying off a path or slipping out of someone's hand; it is relational severance and existential collapse. The younger son demands his inheritance, travels to a distant country, wastes everything, falls into poverty, and descends to the place of feeding pigs. But the point Pastor David Jang persistently presses is this: the prodigal's repentance begins not with the fear of condemnation, but with the possibility of returning. He can turn back because there is a place to return to. Repentance is essentially a "turning of direction," and the New Testament concept of repentance-metanoia-has long been discussed as a change of mind and heart, a reorientation of life's direction. In other words, repentance is not mere regret or self-reproach; it is a decision made possible by faith that there is a Father to go back to.
The most decisive sentence in the parable is: "While he was still a long way off." The son is still far away, but the father already sees him, already feels compassion, already runs. This scene compresses the theology of Luke 15 into one moment. God is not portrayed as one who moves only after the sinner crosses the threshold; God is depicted as one who runs first the moment the sinner shows even a sign of returning. That running does not happen in a way that crushes human pride; it happens in a way that ends human despair. Before the son can complete his confession to the final line, the father is already clothing him, placing a ring on his finger, and putting sandals on his feet. This goes beyond the mere "form" of forgiveness and reveals the depth of "welcome." If forgiveness is the erasing of a record of guilt, welcome is the restoration of relational status. This is where Pastor David Jang uses the phrase "unconditional love." God's love is not a transaction that weighs conditions; it is a resolve that refuses to let the story end in loss.
At this point, the masterpiece that connects most naturally with the text is Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son. This work does not merely recreate the biblical passage like an illustration; it translates the texture of love into visual language. By depicting the ragged son kneeling with his face buried into the father's embrace, Rembrandt makes the "spaciousness of the one who receives" feel larger than the "misery of the one who returns." The painting is held in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and it is known as one of Rembrandt's late works. Those who contemplate the painting for long often speak of the subtle sensation given by the father's two hands. One seems firm, the other tender-an expression, many interpret, of love's duality: authority and mercy held together. Such a visual experience helps the language of a Luke 15 sermon move beyond rational explanation into a resonance that reaches the heart. Henri Nouwen is also widely known for a spiritual classic in which he meditates on the parable through Rembrandt's painting; even in official introductions to his work, he explains that encountering this painting sparked a deep spiritual journey. The reason Pastor David Jang marveled in his preaching at the detail of the "feet" touches the same place. The prodigal's feet are not beautified. They are torn, wounded, slightly twisted. Yet the moment those twisted feet come into contact with the father's embrace, human failure is given meaning again in the place of love. Love that does not dress up the one who returns, love that brings the one who returns back to life-this is the love of God that Luke 15 proclaims.
But the parable does not end with a "warm embrace." The final scene closes with the older brother's anger. This is precisely where Pastor David Jang handles the text most realistically and sensitively. The older brother's anger can look less like malice and more like a "reasonable feeling" lodged in the heart of many religious people. He stayed near his father for years, did not disobey commands, and worked hard. Yet a feast is thrown for the returned brother, while he feels he never received even a young goat. At this point, anger shifts from simple jealousy into a question of identity: "Then what have I been living for?" That is why Luke 15 is not only about the repentance of sinners; it is also about the self-righteousness of the "righteous." When the grumbling of the Pharisees and scribes expands into the older brother's rage, we realize that this passage was not given so we can condemn others; it was given so we can uncover "the older brother inside me."
Here, Pastor David Jang draws in several biblical contrasts: the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in Luke 18; God asking Cain in Genesis 4, "Why are you angry?"; and the landowner in Matthew 20 who pays the latecomers first in the parable of the vineyard workers. All these texts testify to one shared reality: God's grace makes our sense of merit uncomfortable. The gospel does not ignore the world of effort, but it does not make effort the basis of salvation. That is why the more accustomed someone is to merit, the easier it is to misread grace as "unfairness." The older brother is angry not because the father is unjust, but because the father is gracious. The father says, "All that is mine is yours." This is not only a sentence meant to soothe the older brother; it is a declaration of love's economics. Love is not a trade built on assumed shortage; it is sharing built on assumed abundance. The moment the older brother fixates on "my portion," he becomes impoverished by his own eyes-even while standing in the middle of the father's abundance.
At this point Pastor David Jang pushes the sermon into "how to live a year." His declaration that the highest priority in how we live is ultimately "coming to know God's love" does not remain a religious slogan. To know God's love means the focus of our attention changes. When my attention is fixed on the ninety-nine who seem fine, I am likely to seek stability through numbers and to evaluate people by function. But when my attention shifts to the lost one, the temperature of life changes. What looked like loss begins to feel like warmth; wounds I dismissed as someone else's problem enter the territory of my prayer. And then "joy" appears. Pastor David Jang's connection between "praise" and "fullness" as he mentions Ephesians 1 belongs to the same flow. Praise erupts not because circumstances are easy, but because love is full. When the joy of the loved one and the joy of the one who loves overlap, a person enters a state of "having no choice but to praise," even in hardship.
Therefore, the three parables of Luke 15 are also, in the end, a "training of the emotions." We cannot simply pretend we do not understand the older brother's anger, because he seems to have "good reasons." The problem begins when that sense of justification silences love. Anger can sometimes be another name for justice, but when that justice causes us to lose "the father's heart," it becomes the condition described as sin crouching at the door. Pastor David Jang does not tell us to suppress emotion; rather, he asks us to "reinterpret emotion with the wisdom of the Word." We need to ask what is making me so angry, what landscape of grace I am failing to see inside that anger, and whether my calculations are covering up God's joy. When Romans says, "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God," that richness is not the amount of theological information; it is the richness of wisdom that teaches us to read the world in God's way. That wisdom has power to transform complaint into gratitude, comparison into humility, and condemnation into compassion.
Seen this way, Pastor David Jang's reason for connecting Luke 15 to "church leadership" and calling gatherings of pastors "Shepherd's Meeting" becomes even clearer. A shepherd is not someone who measures achievement by whether the flock is large or small, but someone who defines himself by the heart that searches for the lost sheep. If we ask in one sentence what kind of world the church should pursue, Luke 15 makes us answer like this: "The church is a community that makes a way toward the lost." Making a way is not necessarily a grand project. It might be the courage to go to someone and share a table. It might be the daily faithfulness of lighting a lamp and sweeping one's house as though searching for a lost drachma-reordering ordinary life. It might be the forgiveness that runs toward someone who is still far off, embraces, and kisses. And at the end of every such road, there is "joy." Heaven's joy is not a distant mystery; it becomes reality that seeps into human life at the moment love produces restoration.
In the end, the conclusion Pastor David Jang draws from Luke 15 is a request not to stop at "understanding" love, but to live by "resembling" love. Choosing to go after the lost sheep; paying the cost of lighting the lamp to find the lost drachma; welcoming the lost son by running, embracing, and restoring; and even coming out again to plead with the older brother burning with anger at the threshold of the feast-every scene says the same thing: God's love is not a one-time event, but a sustained posture. Whenever we try to love, counter-arguments rise in the heart: "That person doesn't deserve it." "This is a loss." "Why is it only me?" But Luke 15 pierces those counter-arguments and tells a deeper logic: "He was lost and is found." That one sentence justifies all the "foolishness" of love. Just as the cross looks like folly to the world yet proves wiser than human wisdom, love sometimes gives birth to the deepest life through the most irrational-seeming ways.
So, if we ask where to place the year's priorities, Pastor David Jang places-before "success" or "achievement"-the work of "coming to know God's love." This is not escapism; it is a practical priority that makes life hotter and clearer. The more we know God's love, the more our gaze moves toward the lost; our words shift from grumbling to praise; our emotions are refined from resentment into gratitude. And at the center of that change, we come to know this: what God delights in is not a massive number, but one life that returns-and when we stand as a shepherd on the road by which that life returns, our own life is warmed as well. Luke 15 thus invites us not into a chapter that merely "explains" God's love, but into a chapter that makes us "feel" God's love. And the form of responding to that invitation is finally one: today, for the lost one near me, I take the first step. Heaven's joy begins right there.
www.davidjang.org
