When Jesus told this parable to the crowd, He was telling them things they already knew…mainly that if you lost a sheep, any respectable and determined shepherd would go out looking for it. That’s because sheep equaled money, and each lost or dead one acutely effected the shepherd’s bottom line. And no where else do we see this idea better explained than in the 23th Psalm. For David was himself a shepherd, caring for his father’s flocks, which may have led him to ponder the correlation between himself and his sheep and how he could trust the Lord, his heavenly Shepherd. In Biblical times shepherds were a scrappy bunch, but there was one thing about them you couldn’t deny…when a sheep wandered off, they were relentless in their search to bring it back safely to the flock. Jesus is just as determined…refusing to give up, for He tells us in Luke 19:10, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”