November 7

My people are lost sheep; their shepherds have led them astray, causing them to roam the mountains. They have wandered from mountain to hill; they have forgotten their resting place. — Jer 50:6 BSB

When God the Holy Spirit takes hold of a soul, just as the fingers of a man’s hand wrote a sentence of condemnation on the wall of the Babylonian king’s palace, so the Holy Spirit writes the word “lost” on the conscience of every vessel of mercy. When He writes this word with power on their conscience, they carry it with them, branded as if in letters of fire, so that the impression is never erased until it is blotted out by the atoning blood of the Mediator.

In the Holy Spirit’s work within the hearts of God’s people, “lost, lost, lost” is written deep. It becomes the cry of their lips and the feeling of their souls. No one has ever been found by the Good Shepherd who didn’t have that word “lost” engraved in some way upon their heart. No one has ever been gathered into the Shepherd’s arms, sought out from the mountains and hills, carried on His shoulders, and brought home with joy who didn’t first feel the weight of their lost condition as a guilty sinner before God.

When the Holy Spirit teaches a soul to feel its own weakness and helplessness, sinking it down into despair and fear of the wrath to come, that is the time when the Spirit usually begins to reveal the mercy of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This is wonderfully illustrated in Ezekiel 16, where the vessel of mercy is compared to a newborn baby, abandoned by its mother and left in an open field, unloved and uncared for, with its body loathed from the day it was born. In the same way, the quickened soul is unpitied, abandoned, polluted, helpless, and wretched. But it isn’t left to perish. “When I passed by you,” says the loving Redeemer, “and looked upon you, behold, your time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over you”—a sign of betrothal, as with Ruth—“and covered your nakedness. Yes, I swore to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine.”