P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

AN ALL-OUT RESCUE ATTEMPT

Your child . . . is dying. And only a herculean effort - all your money, all your work, all your waking hours, all your prayers and pleadings - can save her. Would you do it? Would you give the 110%? The parables of Jesus in Luke 15 reveal a God who goes ALL OUT just to save one sinner.

There was a terrific first-person story in the July 2000 issue of Reader’s Digest where a man named Rick Murdock abruptly found himself in a fight for his life. In August of 1995 he noticed an enlarged lymph node on his neck; after several months of procrastinating and putting it off and being bugged by his wife, Patty, he had it checked out. Diagnosis: mantle-cell lymphoma, a runaway type of cancer. This 49-year-old man with two teenaged sons was facing an enormous battle.

The ironic thing was this: Murdock was the president, the CEO, of CellPro, a Seattle-based biotech firm that was in the business of searching for cures for — guess what — lymphoma. His own company was chasing the solution to the very disease he now had in his body.

Well, needless to say, the race was on. Murdock describes how he became a driven man: scouring magazines, medical journals, getting on the Internet, attending seminars. And of course, CellPro and its team was ready to go around-the-clock to save the boss. After a series of late-night sessions fueled by Cheetos, they decided to go with a transplant using Murdock’s own stem cells: take out the stem cells, blast the cancer with chemo and radiation, then reinject the stem cells and hope to rebuild his immune system. But CellPro would have to come up with a way to purify his own stem cells, which were already tainted. That was the bottom line of this race against time: the Rick Project. And the clock wasn’t just ticking; it was spinning hysterically around the dial.

“We weren’t going to simply cut corners,” Murdock writes, “we were going to slice them right off.”

Well, it’s a beautifully told story, condensed from the book appropriately titled Patient Number One. And it illustrates a theme we often find in Reader’s Digest articles and in our own lives. Friend, when it’s life or death, especially OUR life — or the life of one of our children — boy, we go all out. We spare no expense. We stay up night and day. We burn up the phone lines and wear out the Internet modems. Our motto becomes four words long: “Whatever it takes, baby.” Whatever it takes.

In their book, Becoming a Contagious Christian, Bill Hybels and Mark Mittelberg adopt that same slogan as they point out that every single person on this planet is worth, to God, that kind of desperate rescue. Here in Luke 15, we find three stories about lost things: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost prodigal son.

“That which was missing,” they write, “was important enough to warrant AN ALL-OUT SEARCH.”

We’ve already made the point that in this story of the ninety-nine safe sheep and the one that got lost, it’s God who goes searching for it. God takes the initiative. But not just initiative: ALL-OUT initiative. He doesn’t just search; He scrambles on His hands and knees, He wades through deep currents, He fights through thorn bushes and alien, battle-scarred territory. The search is an all-consuming, complete, total effort. Heaven’s best.

I love this line from the same book by Hybels:

“Jesus’ stories in Luke 15 tell us that you have never locked eyes with another human being who isn’t valuable to God.”

Think about that the next time you want to be impatient or dismissive of that certain someone who “doesn’t deserve” eternal life. Doesn’t deserve Calvary or heaven. Doesn’t deserve for God to make more than a casual, discounted two-dollar effort. Can you think of someone like that? Well, good for you, because heaven can’t. Every single person on our discard list, on our throw-away pile, isn’t just targeted for redemption by God, but for His very best, all-out effort. The old college try.

In the 19th-century classic, Christ’s Object Lessons, we found a couple of marvelous paragraphs on this very point. Notice:

“These souls whom you despise, said Jesus, are the property of God. By creation and by redemption they are His,” the author writes, “and they are of value in His sight. As the shepherd loves his sheep, and cannot rest if even one be missing, so, in an infinitely higher degree, does God love every outcast soul. Men may deny the claim of His love, they may wander from Him, they may choose another master; yet they are God’s, and He LONGS to recover His own.”

Remember, Jesus shared these parables within earshot of the religious elite, the Pharisees and priests. In fact, He tells this “lost sheep” story right after the rulers grumble among themselves: “This Man eats with prostitutes and pornographers and scuzz-balls and tax collectors!” This is a direct response to their criticism; He wants them to know that these lost, desperate, wandering sheep have made GOD desperate to win them back.

Here’s the second soundbite from the same book:

“The value of a soul, who can estimate? Would you know its worth, go to Gethsemane, and there watch with Christ through those hours of anguish, when He sweat as it were great drops of blood. Look upon the Savior uplifted on the cross. Hear that despairing cry, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ Look upon the wounded head, the pierced side, the marred feet. Remember that Christ risked all. For our redemption, heaven itself was imperiled. At the foot of the cross, remembering that for one sinner Christ would have laid down His life, you may estimate the value of a soul.”

Isn’t that something? Can you visualize the desperation here? Men and women in a lab, at two in the morning, exhausted but working with intensity, spinning out those stem cells, trying to save their friend’s life. A young mother traveling across the oceans with her little boy, coming to City of Hope Medical Center, willing to make any sacrifice to rescue him. A Savior from heaven’s highest courts, traveling down to the dust and the degradation of Planet Earth, willing to submit to the cross if only to save me. Or you.

And our closing thought, friend — our closing challenge — is this: you and I, if we’re in God’s family, are also part of this great effort. Project Rick. Project Natasha. Project Kim. Project John and Jane Doe, from every lonely village and sprawling inner city. You and I have on the white coats in the laboratory, and we’re commissioned to help the Good Shepherd go and get that one lost sheep. That same book I just mentioned shares this invitation:

“How many of the wandering ones have you, dear reader, sought for and brought back to the fold? When you turn from those who seem unpromising and unattractive, do you realize that you are neglecting the souls for whom Christ is seeking? At the very time when you turn from them, they may be in the greatest need of your compassion. In every assembly of worship, there are souls longing for rest and peace. They may appear to be living careless lives, but they are not insensible to the influence of the Holy Spirit. Many among them might be won for Christ.”

How about it, friend? Are you with me? Do you want to help the Lord make THIS happen?

“And all through the mountains, thunder riven, And up from the rocky steep, There arose a glad cry to the gate of heaven, ‘Rejoice! I have found My sheep!’ And the angels echoed around the throne, ‘Rejoice, for the Lord brings back His own! Rejoice, for the Lord brings back His own!’”