“Rejoice With Me…” | Rev. Derek P. Elphick

(Luke 15:6). No matter how far we may wander from the beaten track, no matter how bad things may get, no matter how much we may struggle or get frustrated or disappointed, discovering what’s been “lost" in our lives is not simply the "way out” from boredom or inaction - it’s a cause for celebration! Our discontent with the status quo brings the Lord and His angels more joy than we can possibly imagine (see AC 5992) and it's all that's needed to put us on the path of purposeful living again.

Readings: Luke 15, Arcana Coelestia 5992, Heaven and Hell 461

Minister: Rev. Derek P. Elphick

Delivered May 10th, 2026 at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, PA.

The Bryn Athyn Church is a congregation of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, located in Bryn Athyn, PA. We are committed to helping each other draw closer to the Lord God Jesus Christ through lives of love and useful service, guided by the Old and New Testaments and the Heavenly Doctrine for the New Church (contained in the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg). Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings; services and times can be found at brynathynchurch.org.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Well, good morning and welcome to our 930 Family Service and a very special Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there and uh welcome to those of you joining us online. Today's topic is a consideration of loss, the ex losses that we experience. And we turn first to the three parables recorded in Luke chapter 15: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the lost son. What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one which is lost until he finds it. And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance. Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it. And when she has found it, she calls her neighbors and friends together, saying, Rejoice with me, for I have found the peace which was lost. Likewise they say to you, There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Then Jesus said, A certain man had two sons, and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me. So he divided to them his livelihood. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine, and he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine eat, and no one gave him anything. And when he came to himself, he said, How many of my higher father's hired servants have bread enough and to spare? And I perish with hunger. I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. And he arose and came to his father, but when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. But the father said to his servants, Bring out the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and sandals on his feet, and bring the fatted calf here, and kill it, and let us eat and be merry, for this my son was dead, and is alive again. He was lost and is found. And they began to be merry. Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And the servant said to him, Well, your brother has come, and because he has received him safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf. But he was angry and would not go in. Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him. So he answered and said to his father, Lo, these many years I've been serving you, I never transgressed your commandment at any time, and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might meet Mary with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came and has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him. And he said to him, Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost, and is found. And then we turn to the book Secrets of Heaven, which references these three parables. The angels, through whom the Lord leads and protects us, inspire charity and faith. They notice the direction in which our delights turn, bending them towards goodness so long as our freedom is not taken away. They notice any new influence on us from the hells, and to the extent we allow it, the angels shut off these hells. Above all, angels call on the goodness and truth that we have and use it to block the evil and falsity stirred up by evil spirits. We stand in the middle and are free to turn toward one or the other. The angels are motivated to do all this by a love that they receive from the Lord, for nothing gives them greater delight and happiness than removing evil from us and leading us to heaven. This is their joy. As recorded in Luke 15. The Lord then takes the utmost care of us constantly, from the first thread of our life to its end and beyond to eternity. But hardly anyone believes this. Amen. May the Lord add his blessing to the reading and hearing of his word. Well, children and adults, I'd like to talk for a few moments about the subject of loss, losing things. And there is what we could call a hierarchy in terms of things that we lose, some that are not very important, and think other things that are very important to us. And if you think about it, loss is very much a part of our lives. I mean, it happens, it's happening the whole time. So on a very simple level, uh we lose things like we are parents might uh lose their uh key fob for their car, or they might lose their phone. And those are those are important. I mean, you need the car to be able to get to a sports event, you need the phone because basically those are computers now that have all of our information in them. And so those are important things, and uh hopefully you find them, but sometimes these things get lost. We can lose other things like a paper clip or a pencil or a piece of paper or something that we're doing, no big deal. But you know, the experience of loss is definitely something that we can relate to. It happens quite a lot. But then there are other things that happen. As you get older, you start to lose, and you may notice this with your parents or your grandparents, we start to lose things like you know, our hearing, our sight. It doesn't completely go necessarily, but we start to lose things. We lose our strength. We can't run the mile like we did when we were younger. And so this is the progression of life. As we get older, we start to lose our capacity to be able to do things that we once did. So the first thing I want you to think about is does that mean it's all over? Now, when you speak to people who are getting older, it does feel like that. It appears like we're losing all the important things in our life. One of the hardest things is losing a loved one or a friend prematurely at a younger age. That's really, really hard. That's a loss. And so the Lord's word gives us incredibly important things for us to be able to have the right way of interpreting loss. Because, as we're going to see in these three parables, there's good ways and bad ways of interpreting loss. So, in this parable, very quickly, if you think about it, we all, all of us, everyone on planet Earth, starts off life with uh a hundred sheep. A symbolic hundred sheep. A hundred means that which is full. We get a full uh measure of something, a hundred sheep. And sheep represent these deep, deep affections that we have. Deep affections where we believe in God, we believe in the Ten Commandments, we believe in doing the right thing, we believe in being charitable, we believe in an afterlife. There's incredible things, tons of them. This is what the full uh represents. And they're all deep affections that are buried deep inside of us, which the Lord implants in each one of us. Irrespective of whether we're in a religious family or not, or in the church or not in the church, everyone has these. In life, what happens in this parable is one of the sheep goes astray. And in this parable, the man goes to find the one lost sheep. Now, our worldly sophisticated material mind might say, Big deal. You got 99. Why do you need to go after that one? Why is that so important? Well, the Lord's telling the parable, it's not us. And in this parable, there's this incredible joy. The man goes, he's lost one sheep, and he is determined to find that one lost sheep, and he comes back, puts the sheep on his shoulder, and says, Come rejoice with me. I have found the sheep which is lost. That one sheep represents these heavenly affections, these, these, all of these beautiful things that we have inside of us, what we call ideals, the things that we strive for, the belief that God is there at every point in our life, the belief in an afterlife, the belief in doing the right thing, and all of the beautiful, pure thoughts and feelings that we have, especially when we were young. That's what that's what these uh these the sheep represents. And so we can see why, in on a deeper level, why the man was like, no, I am absolutely got to go and find this lost sheep. It's not, we don't really have a choice. We really need to go out and find that lost sheep because if we don't, we have we have nothing. We lose everything in terms of our belief in the things that are really important in life. We do have a choice. We could say, no, like I said, I mean our mind could say, what's the big deal? 99, I've still got 99. But that's not the point of the parable. In the second parable, there's a woman who has 10 silver coins. And we might say the same thing. She loses one, and we might say, big deal. She's still got nine. Why bother? Well, those silver coins represent the truths that we acquire from the Lord's word. And these truths are really powerful. These truths are really important. They tell us about the Lord, how his providence works, why bad things happen, why we experience loss, the topic of today. All kinds of things. How to repent, how to turn from evil, how to confront evil spirits, which we're going to talk about in a moment in the third one. And so we might again say, big deal. But the woman in the parable, the Lord's telling the parable, no, she lit a lamp and she swept that whole house until she found that one lost coin. It was that important. And the truths of the Lord's word are that important in our life. They are the truths of eternal life. And they are what give us, they are our uh, you could call them our sort of lifeline to the spiritual world, to the Lord, to angels. And so again, in our mind, we really don't have a choice. We need to we need to go back and get that lost coin. It's that important. The last one is the parable of the prodigal son. And in life, when we're young and as we get older, we make mistakes, we do really dumb things, and we hurt people, we sin, and we turn around. Like in this parable, the prodigal son came to himself. We realize because of the truths that we've learned, because of the feelings that the Lord has implanted deep inside of us, we come to ourselves like that prodigal son and realize I have sinned, I've done wrong, I need to make amends with the people I've hurt, and I need to make amends with the Lord. But there's a new piece that is added into this third parable, and it's the presence of the older son. The Lord was giving this parable to the scribes and Pharisees, and the older son, in a historical context, represents the Pharisees who couldn't give a rip about what was lost. They couldn't give a rip about any of what thing that the Lord was saying about the lost sheep, the lost coin, or the lost son. In fact, they wanted, in that parable, the son, who they the son, the older son who did not want to join in the celebrations, did not want to rejoice because someone had turned their life around. In that case, that's what the scribes and Pharisees represent. They wanted that older son, the older son wanted the younger son to remain lost. And that's a very important thing for us to realize. In this recitation that we read together this morning, we're going to read it again. There's a really key thing for us to understand how to interpret the things that we lose. The evil spirits want to snatch away from us our memory and our the things that are really important to us. And they act like thieves. My sheep hear my voice, this is the Lord speaking, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. Neither shall anyone snatch them out of my hand. Neither shall anyone snatch them out of my hand. This is what gives the angels and the Lord more joy than anything else, is being able to protect us. They can see when evil spirits are trying to snatch away. No, you won't see your loved one ever again. No, it's really heaven's not real. The afterlife's not real. Snatch away, snatch away, snatch away. All of these precious, beautiful things that we have acquired over life. And that's why it's so important that we go in search of the lost coin and the lost sheep. And that we be that lost son where we recognize. Because the evil spirits act like thieves. They're trying to steal really important things. And they're trying to say, yeah, you're right. All that stuff that's happening to you as you get older, you're losing all the good things in your life, and you're really going to end up with nothing, and life will be meaningless. And the teachings of our church completely turn that around. In this parable, what we're really being told is that we don't lose anything. We certainly don't lose the ones that we love because we know in so many places that we will meet again in the Lord's good time. But all of those precious affections, all those precious thoughts, the innocent thoughts and feelings that we have, the clean thoughts, not the dirty ones, the clean ones, all those can be restored to us. And that's why we go back in search of those things that we lose. The evil spirits are trying to snatch them away. They're trying to steal those precious memories, those precious thoughts and feelings. And this is why it gives the angels and the Lord more joy than anything else to be able to help us remove those evils, to catch what's going on, and to realize that in terms of the losses that we experience, they're not actually losses, they're not the end, they're actually the beginning.