Christ Seeking Lost Souls¹

John Flavel

There are five particular ways in which Christ’s seeking of lost souls differs from you seeking lost cattle.

1. Your cattle sometimes find the way home themselves, and return to you of their own accord; but lost man never did so, nor can he. He was his own destroyer, but he can never be his own saviour; it was possible for him not to have lost his God; but having once lost Him, man can never again find Him of himself. Alas, his heart is bent to backsliding; he has no will to return. Hear how Christ complains, “Ye will not come to Me” (Jn 5:40). Man’s recovery begins in God, not in himself.

2. Your servants can find, and bring back, your lost cattle as well as you; but Christ’s servants cannot do so. Ministers may discover them but cannot recover them; they see them daily but cannot save them; they can lament over them but they cannot help them; they can entreat them and beg them to return and obey, but they cannot prevail with them. Melancthon thought, when he began to preach, that he would persuade all; but old Adam was too hard for young Melancthon.

3. You seek all the cattle that have strayed from you, especially the best; but Jesus Christ only seeks poor lost man. There were other created beings, and such as by nature were more excellent, that lost their God and themselves – I mean the apostate angels – but He did not come to seek them. In this His singular love to man appears.

4. When you have recovered and brought home your lost cattle, you may lose them a second time and never recover them again, but Christ cannot lose them again. Man once recovered is for ever secured by Him. “All that Thou gavest Me, I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition” (John 17:12), and he was never savingly found.

5. Though you prize your cattle, yet you will not venture your life to recover them; you let them go rather than regain them at such a risk; but Jesus Christ not only ventured His life, but actually laid it down, to recover and save lost man. He redeemed them at the price of His own blood; He is that good shepherd that laid down His life for the sheep. O the surpassing love of Christ to lost souls!

¹Taken, with editing, from Flavel’s Husbandry Spiritualized, The Heavenly Use of Earthly Things, in volume 5 of his Works. He has been making a spiritual application of farmers seeking lost cattle and now shows how this differs from Christ seeking lost souls.