A reflection on 1 Thessalonians 4:1-12 & Luke 15:1-10

Here’s the truth these passages tell together: You you cannot live as being found while pretending you were never lost.

The Lord shares table fellowship with tax collectors and sinners in Luke 15. The religious leaders respond with horror: “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them!” The Pharisees consider themselves the found ones, safely in the fold, their righteousness secured. The Lord reveals to them a different reality: they are the most lost, precisely because they do not recognize their need for finding. The “sinners” who gather around Him know they are lost. They are not performing. They are not maintaining behavioral compliance through sheer willpower. That honesty—the willingness to acknowledge “I do not have this together”—marks the beginning of actual transformation.

The shepherd does not wait for the sheep to find its way home. He pursues it. The woman does not wait for the coin to roll back into view. She lights a lamp and searches every corner. God does not remain enthroned, waiting for penitents to crawl back with proper groveling. He moves into the darkness, searching. He is on hands and knees sweeping every corner. Divine love is relentless, pursuing, active.

Once pretense ends, once God finds one in the messy, broken, lost places, the real work begins. Not the work of performing righteousness for others’ approval, but the inner work of transformation. When Paul instructs the Thessalonians to “control your own body in holiness and honor,” he is not advocating repression or rule-following. He is naming the truth: bodies are sacred, treating anyone (including oneself) as merely instrumental denies who persons actually are. The warning against sexual immorality points to the deeper pattern—using bodies as objects for self-gratification is about avoiding real relationship, real vulnerability, real presence. It is living in the head instead of the heart.

The person who “wrongs their brother” is not merely breaking a rule. They are refusing to see the other person as person—someone made in God’s image with infinite worth, someone who matters to heaven itself the way that one lost sheep matters, the way that one lost coin matters. Paul’s instruction to “live quietly, mind your own business, work with your hands” is not about dullness. It is about moving from anxious performance (the Pharisees’ pattern) to grounded presence (what the found life actually manifests). Finding one’s center. Doing one’s actual work. Not constantly managing image or proving righteousness.

Paul provides the critical piece: “God has given us His Holy Spirit.” This is not solitary effort, achievement through willpower alone. The Spirit is God’s presence actively transforming from within. The same God who searched when one was lost now dwells within, sanctifying—making holy not by demanding perfection but by inviting into genuine communion.

One sheep out of ninety-nine matters. One coin out of ten matters. Nothing is disposable. Nothing is refuse. When the lost is found, heaven itself celebrates. Personal healing participates in what the universe is already accomplishing: matter being united to divine life, creation being transfigured, the resurrection pattern taking hold in real bodies living real lives.

The shepherd imagery traces back to David, to God as Israel’s shepherd, to the ancient pattern from Eden onward: humanity lost (“Where are you?”), God seeking, God restoring. Christ is the Good Shepherd who enters death itself to bring the lost ones home. The body is the temple where this occurs. Life—including sexuality, work, relationships—is the arena where communion with God happens and divine life grows.

The path forward requires ending performance. Facing what is actually lost or broken—wounds, avoided parts, unacknowledged realities. This is not weakness. It is honesty. It is being the lost sheep that knows its condition, not the Pharisee maintaining pretense. Allowing God to find one there. Trusting that He is searching, that nothing about the person is disposable, that restoration matters to heaven itself. Then—only then—living into the holiness one was always meant for becomes possible. Not as external obligation, but as truest self coming alive. Grounded. Embodied. Integrated. Moving from head to heart, from performance to presence, from manufactured righteousness to transformation by divine love working within.

Holiness comes not by pretending one was never lost, but by allowing oneself to be found. The found life is not about perfect behavior. It is about real transformation. Real transformation requires facing what has been denied, feeling what has been avoided, and trusting that God is already there, searching, ready to bring one home.