Preaching from Luke 15:8-10, Pastor David Watson continues the Black Sheep series by diving into the parable of the lost coin. Jesus tells this story — along with the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son — in direct response to the religious leaders' grumbling question: "Why does this man welcome sinners and eat with them?" Rather than getting lost in the debate over what the ten coins represented, Pastor David zeroes in on what he believes Jesus is really driving at: missing pieces are a serious matter. Whether it's a puzzle, a piece of IKEA furniture, or a diamond lost in a hay field, when one piece is gone, the whole thing is incomplete. And to God, every lost person carries that same weight of incompleteness.

From there, Pastor David unpacks what he calls "coin philosophy" and "coin anatomy." Coins can't lose themselves, and they can't unlose themselves — they simply end up in the dark, forgotten, until someone comes looking. That someone, Jesus makes clear, is God. Drawing on Matthew 22:20, Genesis 1, Psalm 139, and Romans 5, Pastor David reminds us that we bear the image of our Maker, and it is he who assigns our value — not our usefulness, our appearance, our success, or what anyone else has spoken over us. The search God conducts for lost people reveals their value, and the celebration that follows when one sinner repents defines the depth of his affection. Repentance, then, isn't about trying harder or cleaning yourself up — it's about choosing to believe what God has already declared to be true about you.

Pastor David Watson opens with a raw and unforgettable story — a missionary intern who falls through the floor of an outhouse in Kenya, Africa, and is left stranded for hours with no way out. He uses this image to ask a piercing question: when you are at your absolute worst, do you believe you are worth rescuing? The answer the gospel gives, he says, is a resounding yes. Jesus doesn't wait for us to clean ourselves up before he comes after us. He jumps into the hole with us, extends his hand, and asks if we'll let him rescue us.

From there, Pastor David anchors the sermon in Luke 15, a chapter he describes as containing the three greatest stories Jesus ever told. He focuses on the first — the Parable of the Lost Sheep — explaining that Jesus told these stories in direct response to the religious leaders' grumbling question: "Why does this man welcome sinners and eat with them?" (Luke 15:2). The tax collectors and sinners, the outcasts and the broken, felt the most seen and the most valued when they were around Jesus. And rather than apologize for it, Jesus answered with a story about a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to go after just one that is lost.

Pastor David draws out three crystal-clear truths about the heart of God from this parable. First, God still sees the lost as his — loss doesn't mean without value. Second, God seeks and saves the lost, just as the shepherd relentlessly pursues the wandering sheep. And third, God celebrates the finding of the lost, throwing a party when even one sinner repents. The closing challenge is deeply personal: stop trying to clean yourself up before coming to God, because the cleaning comes after the rescue, not before. Jesus is not waiting for you to get it together — he's already looking for you.

Pastor David Watson anchors this sermon in Matthew 9:35-38, a passage he describes as the very reason his family packed up and moved fifteen hours from home to help plant a church in Lavon, Texas. Using the literary structure of a chiasm — a device Matthew employs across chapters 4 through 9 — Pastor David shows how Jesus repeatedly and intentionally saw the crowds that everyone else overlooked: the distressed, the dejected, the broken, and the lost. Jesus didn't wag a finger at their condition. Instead, He felt splanknizomai — a deep, gut-level, physical compassion that forced a response. And then He turned to His disciples and asked the question that drives this entire sermon: the harvest is abundant, but the workers are few — so who is going to care for people like that?

Pastor David makes clear that Jesus wasn't speaking to an institution or an organization. He was speaking to individuals — followers who had said yes to His call. The corporate answer of the church is we care, demonstrated by flinging the doors wide open and casting the net as far as it will reach. But the personal answer has to come from each believer individually. Pastor David's response, and the motto his family lives by, is: love hard, pray hard, work hard. To love hard means to carry a fierce, sacrificial burden for broken people the way Jesus did — even at the risk of rejection. To pray hard means to get on your knees and beg the Lord of the harvest before anything else moves. And to work hard means to remember that there is no harvest problem — only a worker shortage — and that every follower of Jesus has been commissioned and empowered to go.