Well, take your Bible and turn to Luke 15. Luke 15.
I’m going to take time to read the story that Jesus tells, famously known as The Story of the Prodigal Son.
I’m going to call my sermon Lost and Found because that’s the theme of Luke 15.
You’ve got three stories of lost things. This is a passage all about lost things because you and I are lost. We are born estranged from the womb. We are like sheep. We go astray. We’re like prodigal children. We leave our home that is our natural habitat, which is God, and we go and do our own thing.
So you’ve got The Story of the Lost Sheep. You’ve got The Story of the Lost Silver, and you’ve got The Story of the Lost Son. That’s the one where we’re looking at Lost and Found Luke 15:11 to 32.
Now, during the Iran hostage crisis of many years ago when 52 of our fellow citizens were held by Ayatollah Khomeini, Americans took the tradition of hanging yellow ribbons from trees and poles.
If you lived through that, you will remember that.
They hung these yellow ribbons from trees and poles, one as a protest against the injustices of the regime in Iran and then two, later on to demonstrate the joy of welcoming the hostages home.
In fact, some argue there’s a story behind that story. That the real story behind the use of yellow ribbons is connected to a convict who was coming in the end of his sentence. Over the years in prison, he had lost touch with his family. There hadn’t been much correspondence and so he wasn’t sure if he could go home. He wasn’t sure if his family would take him back.
And so he jotted down a note and he sent it to his family weeks before he was due to be released and it was this. “I’m going to come home and I’m not sure you’ll receive me. You know the big oak tree in the front garden? If you’re willing to take me back, I need you to hang some yellow ribbons on the oak tree and that will tell me to get off the bus. If there’s no yellow ribbons on the tree, that will tell me to stay in my seat and not get off the bus.”
And so the story goes that as he journeyed home and got nearer to his house, wondering how his family would respond to his return, he couldn’t even look out the window. As the bus was due to pass his home, he asked a passenger seated nearby if they would look and tell him if there was any yellow ribbons on the tree. And to his delight, the stranger told him that the tree was full of yellow ribbons.
With that as background, one of the stories Jesus told gives us a picture of a yellow ribbon tied to the open gate of heaven, bidding us to come home to God.
In The Parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus describes the joy of heaven in welcoming a repentant sinner home.
That’s the theme of this passage, that heaven rejoices when a sinner repents and returns to the fold of God.
You see that in verse seven at the end of The Story of the Lost Sheep. “I say to you, likewise, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 just persons who need no repentance.”
In The Story of the Lost Silver, again, we find in verse 10. “Likewise I say to you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
And while that phrase is not used in The Story of the Lost Son, the theme of joy upon the return of a repentant son is to be found in verse 22. “But the father said to the servants, ‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him and put a ring in his hand and sandals on his feet, and bring the fatted calf here and kill it and let us eat and be merry.”
The Lord Jesus had come to seek and see that which was lost and He wants us to know in the telling of these three stories and particularly, The Story of the Prodigal Son, that God takes returns and He rejoices over them.
The message of the parable is that no matter how far we have traveled from God, no matter how deeply we have sinned, if we will return in brokenness and humility, God in His amazing grace will run toward us and embrace us in His love and welcome us home.
So with that, by way of end reduction, let’s come to look at our text and let me just spend a couple of minutes putting the text in its context.
Let’s get our bearings in Luke 15.
This is a parable that’s not find in the other gospels. Sometimes, you will find triplicates and duplicates of a parable in Matthew, Mark, and Luke but here is a story, a parable found only in Luke’s gospel.
I think too that the first two parables prepare us for the third parable, The Lost Sheep and The Lost Silver prepare us for The Lost Son.
And with story of a son, the emotion is ratcheted up and you and I are drawn in because we can feel it, we can identify with it. Some of us have lived it. Some of us have indeed experienced the pain of a prodigal child.
We read from verses one to two that Jesus had rattled the religious establishment of His day. This is the context of our story.
“Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to Him, to hear Him and the Pharisees and the scribes complained, murmured, ‘This man receiveth or receives sinners and eats with them.”
The leaders in Israel, the religious elite and establishment were struggling with Jesus’ inclusion of sinners and tax collectors. They were bothered by the fact that He kept company and that He attracted such people and so they thought the problem was with Jesus.
But the point of Luke 15 is that the problems with them. They had forgotten the nature of God, the God they professed to worship.
And so Jesus in the story, especially of the prodigal son, exposes their hypocrisy. In fact, it’s really the story of two lost sons because there’s an older brother who’s just as lost at home in his self-righteousness as the other brother who’s lost in the far country in rebellion. That’s our context.
You have the piety of the impious sinners hearing Jesus and you have the impiety of the pious, the rulers, the scribes, and the Pharisees rejecting those who have come to hear Jesus.
We are being reminded in this passage that the gospel’s not for good people, it’s for bad people. Jesus didn’t come to see of the righteous but the sinner.
You see that message in verse seven, “But I say to you, likewise, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 just persons who don’t think they need to repent.”
Let’s come and look at the greatest short story of them all, 388 words in the Greek text, profoundly simple and simply profound.
Now, there’s a number of things I want us to see. Want you to see the younger son’s rebellion, then we’ll look at the younger son’s realization, the younger son’s reception, and the younger son’s rejection by the older son.
Let’s look at the younger son’s rebellion, the opening verse, Verse 12. “And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Give the portion of goods that befalls me or falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood and not many days after the younger son gathered altogether and journeyed to a far country and wasted what he was given in riotous, loud, noisy living.”
There’s a clash of wills in this home between father and son. We’re not told the factors, but it’s not hard to imagine as this young man rebels the allure of the world, the restrictions and responsibilities that he lives under within the home. Rightly, he’s a young man, so there’s a strong headedness to him. There’s what Paul in writing to Timothy calls youthful passions.
We don’t know the factors, but we get the point. We see rebellion. We see a young man who gives himself to a prodigal lifestyle by the wasting of his possessions with prodigal living.
Verse 13. Three things I just notice in reading the description of his rebellion.
Number one, notice the defiance. He demands his inheritance. Verse 12.
Now the father could bequeath his property when he liked but not as he liked.
According to Deuteronomy 21:17, in the Jewish home, when the inheritance was being divided, the elder brother or the elder son would receive two-thirds and the younger son would receive one-third.
So the dividing of an inheritance before a father’s death was not unheard of. In fact, some fathers did it upon retirement. Better to do your giving while your living kind of thing. But that’s not what’s going on here.
This dividing of the inheritance you’ll notice wasn’t initiated by the father. It was initiated by the rebellious heart of the son. “Give me what’s coming to me and once it comes to me, I’m gone.”
In some of my research, a writer, Kenneth Beale, he’s done extensive looking into the background to this story and the giving of inheritance says this quote. “To my knowledge and all of Middle Eastern literature, aside from this parable from ancient times to the present, there is no case of any son, older or younger, asking for his inheritance from a father who is in good health.” This is a no-no.
But by that piece of information, we’re being alerted to the fact of the deep-dyed defiance that marked this young man’s heart.
In fact, many writers point out what he was really saying was, “I wish you were dead but you’re not because if you were dead, I’d get what’s coming to me, but you’re not. But I wish you were dead. So give me what’s coming to me now and I’m out of here.”
You and I can’t imagine, can we? The tension, the emotion, the heartache, the conflict that would go along with this scene in real life.
Two things about the defiance by the way, pastorally and practically number one, you’ll notice the father let him go. That’s important.
There can come a time when you must let the rabble go and trust God to bring them low and then bring them back.
Erwin Lutzer says this in his book, “When you’ve blown it dealing with the sermon of their prodigal son, there comes a time when a boy’s decisions must be respected even when they lead to his ruin.”
That’s a very hard thing to do. It’s hard for any parent and especially hard for the mother. It’s not easy.
But I want you to notice that there’s no enabling here. The father doesn’t let him go and then follow him to the far country to protect him. He just lets him go. And you and I just need to know that.
And by the way, it’s more implicit in the text than explicit. There’s no blame attached to the father and one would assume that he let him go without guilt because he’s not to blame. He didn’t initiate this, the son did.
One writer said this, “No parent is perfect and many of us have a keen sense of our inadequacy, but faithful parents can have rebellious and resentful children. Sometimes, we stop showing the love we should because we feel like failures. We blame ourselves for our children’s rebellion and we experience deep feelings of failure. The father in the parable is able to continue loving his sons because he doesn’t absorb the failure as his own.”
We should learn from this model. Blaming ourselves for our sons or daughters who insist on going into the far country and living as they please will interfere with loving them and praying for them.
Just find that interesting.
And that’s going to be all I need to say, but we’re looking at the son’s rebellion and the defiance in the rebellion and we see that the father let him go.
And number two, we see that there are those who wish God dead because remember the father in this story is a picture of our Heavenly Father. We’re the prodigal that needs to return home. We’re the prodigals who have left home so to speak.
Philosophically, there was a movement born among German philosophers and in Europe where there was a God is dead movement, where it was argued. It’s time for the modern mind to jettison the superstitions of the Middle Ages. God’s dead. We need to move on and that spawns secularism and humanism and all of that.
So there are those who wish God dead philosophically, but there are those who wish God dead practically.
While someone may not make an argument that God doesn’t exist in a practical sense, they live as if He doesn’t. God is dead to them as they live.
In fact, that’s the language the father uses of this. “This is my son who was dead but is now alive.” Well, the son never died, but the relationship was dead. Non-existent. This son didn’t relate to his father and you and I can do that to God, can we?
We can ignore Him. We can defy Him.
So there’s hard defiance. We just defy Him and break His law. Or there’s soft defiance where we just ignore Him and we’re not as serious about the things of God as we should be day to day, decision by decision. We exercise a practical atheism.
God is dead and it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter.
We live wanting what God gives but we don’t want the one who gives what we want.
Just on a practical level, there’s a great story tied into Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, who’s down in the dumps and his wife comes in one day dressed in black. That was a symbol of mourning at that time and that culture.
Martin says to his wife, “Katharin, who died?” To what she replied sarcastically, “God did.” The great theologian replied, “Stop the foolishness, Katie.” To which she replied, “Well, Martin, you’re the ones living as if He is.” We can…
You see the defiance?
Number two, do you see the distance? He journeys into the far country. Probably, a gentile territory.
But the truth is this little phrase is not a geographical location. It’s a spiritual condition. It’s a story with this meaning that you know what the far country is it can be near or far, but it’s living a life away from God, out from under His leadership and out from under His lordship.
It’s akin to the phrase in the Old Testament about going down to Egypt. While that was true geographically, it often theologically in reality was a journey away from God and the land of Israel and the God of Israel.
And so this is kind of code. It’s a metaphor for distancing oneself from God, His presence, His people, His precepts. The defiance, the distance.
Thirdly, the dissipation, which is big word. It simply means wasted living.
We’re told that this young man wastes his possessions with prodigal living.
The word prodigal carries the idea of riotous, which carries the idea of loud and wild. It would suggest a life of wild parties, loud music, bright lights. Sounds familiar? It’s always been the attraction.
And then the idea of wasted, it literally means to blow away. It was used of the winnowing process of separating the corn from the husk and throwing it up into the air and letting the wind blow the chaff away.
So in a real sense, the Bible’s saying that he blew it all away. He took the inheritance and blew it. Wasted it. Threw it to the wind in a wasteful wild manner.
Now, before we get to the younger son’s realization, I think it is worth noting at this point in his story, if you put yourself in his shoes and walk his path, he’s having the time of his life.
Sin looks good in prospect but not in retrospect.
The Bible’s clear Hebrews 11:25, “There is pleasure in sin,” but there’s a sell-by date. There’s an expiration date. There’s a pleasurable experience to sin for a season, but then the bills are due on the wages of sin.
In fact, James 1:14 to 16 would warn us that sin when it is finished brings forth death.
And when sin is finished with this young man, you’ll find a Jew in a pig pen fighting the temptation to eat the Swell. That’s how far he will fall.
But at the minute, all of that is in suspension. He’s in Vegas having a jolly good time. And we need to just remind ourselves of that.
C.S. Lewis said that when it comes to sin and actions and direction and life, you must follow the path to its bloody conclusion.
When sin is finished, it brings forth death.
There’s a broad road and many that are on it says Jesus in the sermon of mine, but it ends in destruction.
Some years ago, I was on a youth and we decided to have fun with a guy who was dating a girl pretty seriously and so we thought, “Hey, let’s go down for the fun of it, just mess his car up with shaving foam and all kinds of stuff and write ‘Just Married’ in the back windscreen.” When we’re in the middle of our crime, so to speak, this guy comes out, he’s bigger than us.
And so it was me and my friend, Davey, and this guy runs at us. Both of us take off and we decide, “Hey, there’s only one of him. There’s two of us. We split.” And I drew the short straw. He still chased me.
I was running around this car with this beautiful castle called Castlewellan, castle in Northern Ireland, and in the running around and then the excitement, I lost my bearings and I lost my sense of awareness. I saw little wall in front of me two or three foot high and I decided just to skip over the wall and scamper away.
But I jumped over the wall and then I realized what I’d forgotten on the other side of that three-foot wall was a 20-foot drop. And for a split second, I was like the Road Runner in the cartoon like, “Oh, no.” There’s that moment where it suspended and that was me.
Now, I’ve often thought about that story because I think it applies here. Jumping over walls, boundaries, the things that God tells us not to do, it seems okay and seems easy until you get on the other side and then you realize as the Bible says, there’s a drop. It’s a big drop. Ultimately, it’s a drop right into the fires of hell, but you get the point.
Just want to stop there. Reading between the text.
He’s having a jolly good time. It looks like his rebellion’s paying off. He’s fulfilling his dream and his heart’s desire.
That moves us to the younger son’s realization. We’ll speed up here.
His rebellion turns south. He spent it all, according to verse 14. The Lord allows a severe famine which adds to his problem. He begins to be in want. He joins himself to a citizen in a country who sends him out into the fields to work. He would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods at the swine that no one give him anything. All those who joined him for the earlier parties that he paid for soon disappeared.
He realized that sin will take you further than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay. And so the bill was due on the wages of his sin and the payment was disappointment, degradation, and despair.
Things were now not working out the way he had envisioned. The world was not as much fun. It certainly wasn’t as friendly, and through sin and doing your own thing wasn’t as freeing as he thought. Plus, God had allowed him to get what he wanted, to a point where he got what he wanted and didn’t want what he got.
One of the writers I studied said, “This God allows us to get fed up with what the world feeds us.” He does. And He does that in love and He does that kindly.
And this young man was dealing with what one writer calls the ministry of the pig pen. God allowed this young man to sink very low and experienced rejection and heartache and the emptiness that comes at the bottom of the glass.
This young man’s at a place where basically he’s eating out of a dumpster. This is where he is.
Leviticus 11:7 talks about the pig being an unclean animal to the Jew.
This guy’s in a pig pen. If you could picture him, he’s like a dying out homeless person in a dumpster looking for the remnants of a McDonald’s hamburger or maybe a 9s of coke at the bottom of a discarded cup. It’s a sad picture. It’s a sorry picture. He’s reduced to taking anything. He’s broken, humiliated, destitute.
And I want that to be a warning to all of us and especially our young people. God sometimes will allow you to feed on what the world offers until you get fed up with what the world feeds and you’ll come back to the solid joys of the gospel and the Christian life.
Adrian Rogers somewhere tells the story of a mother who had two strapping boys and no matter how big she made the breakfast, there was never enough. And so she decides one day to get more pancake mix and she was going to show the boys for all their complaints.
And so, one morning, man, she just gives them pancake after pancake after pancake and she looks at one of them and said, “Well, do you want more?” To which he replies, “My stomach tells me I don’t even want the pancakes I have.”
And sometimes, God in an act of love will allow us to get all that we want only to find it’s not what we want and it’s not what we thought it would be.
His choices, the emptiness of sin, sinners, the providence of God with the famine, it all pushed this young man to sit down to a banquet of consequences.
Proverbs 13:15. The prodigal son learns in the far country that the way of the sinner is hard. And that raw heart-breaking reality became a wake-up moment and a turning point in his life.
Look at verse 17, “But then he came to himself and said, ‘Many of my fathers hired servants have bread enough to spare and I perish with hunger. I will arise and go to my father.”
Like Saul. He came to realize he had played the fool and sin had made him look foolish. 1 Samuel 26: 21.
I like this phrase. He came to himself.
He got his right mind back. He started thinking straight. He started to understand the nature of sin and the penalties attached to it. He started to understand the consequences of his rebellion. He started to understand the glory and wonder of his father’s love that he had spurned.
There’s a kind of insanity to sin where it not only separates you from God, it separates you from your best self.
He comes to himself. The word there means to awaken from a trance or a coma.
This young man had been anesthetized by the enemy. He had been lulled into sleep, so to speak. He was not awake to the danger he had put himself in, to the hurt he had caused his father, to the shame he had brought to the family, to the sin he had committed against God. He was not awake to that. Until now.
See, repentance is a change of mind, at least initially. It leads to a change of heart, which leads to a change of behavior.
But initially, repentance is a change of mind. You start to think differently about sin, the world, the flesh, the devil. You start to think differently about Christ and who He is and the glory of what He offers. That’s what’s going on here.
I love it.
This young man wakens up to what he has done and he begins to think through what needs to be done next. “You know what? I’m going to go home. I realize how blown it. Things can go back to normal but I’m going to offer myself as an indentured servant to my father. I’d rather be a servant in my father’s house under his authority than in the far country doing my own thing.” Well, this guy has wakened up a lot.
But his hardship and his heartache has done that, hasn’t it?
I had a friend I visited a couple of years ago back in Northern Ireland who got to not a good place spiritually. He wasn’t a prodigal in the truest sense of that, but he was not living in victory. He was not at a good place and he told me that the change came and the turn came when he was reading a little book by Spurgeon called Around the Wicket Gate.
It’s a book about how to reach people with the gospel and there’s a chapter in it called On Raising Questions and Spurgeon challenges people regarding the gospel to be careful about raising questions and align those questions to get in the way of the clear answer, which is Jesus.
In fact, Spurgeon says this, “To reason against one’s own life is a sort of constructive suicide of which only a drunken man would be guilty. To argue against your only hope is like a foolish man sitting on a bow and chopping it away as he sits on it.”
And that little image, I’ve got the page in front of me of the man sitting on the branch sawing it, the one he’s sitting on, that’s what the Lord used in my friend, Dana’s life, that every time he read his Bible, he raised questions. Every time, he thought of a good thing or a hopeful thing, he argued against it.
Until one day in his depression, in the mess of his own making to some degree emotionally, he just said to himself like the prodigal son, he said, “Dana, stop being stupid.” And he opened up his heart and his life in a new way to the grace of God and the goodness of God.
And that’s what happens in the life of the prodigal to some degree. Just sitting there amidst the Swell and smell of the pigs.
Stop being stupid. Go home.
And that’s exactly what he does. He repents, he returns.
We’re not going to get into the depths of this, but in terms of repentance, there’s three elements to that. Admit, quit, commit.
He admits his sin. “I have sinned.” When he gets… He says to himself, “When I get to my father when I tell him I’ve sinned against heaven and against you, I’m not worthy. I own what I did. No whitewashing, no excuses, no blame shifting. I admit I’m the problem and I’ve committed the sin.”
Quit. He says in verse 18, “I will arise and go to my father.”
He’s leaving the far country. The disobedience is stopping and the obedience is starting.
He quits. The lifestyle has brought such a ruin. He comes in humility and brokenness and submission to his father and offers himself, “Make me one of your servants. I’ll accept that.”
So the old man comes to himself in brokenness and sorrow, then he comes to the father in repentance and confession, seeking mercy, then he comes clean and seeks to be obedient.
The prodigal son surrendered his delusions. He uncovered his sin so that God might cover it. He didn’t play hide and seek with God or with his father. He stopped running and he started returning.
That’s what needs to happen. That’s the path. That’s the issue. A turning point in your life, sir, requires a turning back toward the God you abandoned in arrogance, rebellion, and idolatry.
And the beauty is despite your bad decision, you’ve got one good move left. No matter how many bad decisions, you’ve always got one good move left. Return.
You’ve probably seen the movie Blindside. Sandra Bullock won a 2010 best actress award at the Academy as she played and portrayed Leigh Anne Tuohy in the movie The Blindside.
The movie or the film chronicles a Christian family who took in a homeless young man and gave him a chance at reaching his God given potential. His name was Michael Oher. Not only did he dodge a hopeless and dysfunctional background, he would later become the first round pick for the Baltimore Ravens in 2009 in the NFL.
It’s a good movie. June and I have enjoyed it.
During a fundraiser, Sean Tuohy told the story of how the transformation began and it all started with two words.
In the movie, this happens at nighttime but in real life, it happened in a cold November morning. As the Tuohys were driving down a road, they noticed a young man that shriveled in shorts and a T-shirt. And as they went by him, Leigh turns to Sean and says two words. Turn around. And they turn around and the story unfolds as I have described it.
Can I tell you this morning those two words can change anyone’s life? Turn around.
And that’s what’s going on here, which brings us to the younger son’s reception. The third act of this drama is the amazing response of the father in graciously, joyfully receiving the son back home.
This is the good part of the story where the son returns and is received by the father.
I have a friend in Northern Ireland who’s now with the Lord, an old pastor called Jim Smith, and he was known to be long-winded.
I like to hang out with long-winded preachers. Maybe it’s rubbed off.
But the story is told that he did an extended series of sermons on the parable. Man, I’m doing a one-off and I think that’s how you preach this passage, but he did a series where he spent weeks on the young man’s story in the far country living in a riotous and profligate manner.
It was so long that at a deacon’s meeting, one of the deacons said to him, “Pastor, it’s time to bring the boy home.”
And this is the time we’re out in the story. The boy comes home. The boy comes home.
And what happens has shock value to it when we get into the background quickly.
This parable not only shows us that God permits U-turns but He takes pleasure in U-turns.
As we look at the father, remember a picture of God, a few things jump out and I think we’ll just end here.
We were maybe going to get to the younger son’s rejection by his brother, which remember if you go back to verses one and two, the young man is a picture of the tax collector and the sinner whom God receives despite their rebellion if they’ll come back in repentance seeking His mercy.
But the older brother is a reminder and a warning to the self-righteous. Religion can be just as great a danger as rebellion if it leaves you trusting in yourself. If it leaves you not thinking you need the grace of God just as much as the next guy, but I’m sorry, we’ll not get there. Let’s just finish on this note. The younger son’s reception.
Here’s a picture of the father, a picture of God. “What manner of love,” says John, “the Father hath bestowed upon us.”
Let’s see the manner of that love.
Here, I want you to see the father’s emotion. He looked and looked longingly for his son, verse 20, “And he arose and came to his father and 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.”
That’s beautiful.
The word saw means to peer deeply, to investigate thoroughly.
In fact, Erwin Lutzer, who I mentioned earlier on this text, says, “The original Greek text, a long way off is the same word as the distant country.”
The father’s eyes were searching the whole landscape longing for a sign of the son’s return.
Here’s a point. It’s beautiful.
The son may have left the father’s farm, but he had never left the father’s heart. He was constantly seeking, looking, hoping for the return of the son.
The son of man has come to seek and see if that which was lost.
God’s looking for you this morning, seeking you out, speaking into your life, calling you to repent for there’s mercy more than your sin.
I want you to see his embrace. He runs and embraces him.
This was against all custom by the way. That’s the shock factor. This may not hit us the way it would’ve hit the original reader or listener, but this was against all custom.
Grown men don’t run in that culture. That would be undignified. That would be unbecoming. Their robes were long. If they were run, they’d have to gather them up. All was the danger that there be exposed their underwear. It’s undignified.
Just as the son’s asking for his inheritance is almost unheard of, this picture of a father running towards a rebellious son. Unheard of. Reckless. Prodigal-like behavior on the part of the father. He threw caution to the wind and abandoned himself to the moment.
I love that. We’re going to come back to that.
There’s a recklessness to God’s love for us, which brings His emotion, His embrace.
Finally, his excitement. His excitement. The son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight and I’m no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to the servants, “Go get a robe. We put it on him. Go get a ring. We’ll press it on his finger. Go and get him some shoes and go get that fatted calf that we have been fattening for a big occasion. This is a big occasion. We’re going to make merry. Tell the neighbors we’re going to have a party tonight.”
Here’s what strikes me.
The father didn’t make him squirm. He didn’t sit him down and give him a lecture.
I think I’d be tempted to do that. I’d like to rehearse with him all the pain he caused me.
But in the New Living Translation actually verse 20, it says that he was filled with compassion or filled with love.
I find that striking that this man had maintained and retained his love for his son to a point where none of it had drained away. Despite the hurt.
That’s a beautiful picture and it’s certainly a picture of God, of how God’s love for us is constant and brimming over and ready to go to work as soon as repentance opens the door.
He didn’t even allow him to finish his confession. Remember what he rehearsed? “I’m going to go say to my father, ‘I’ve sinned.’ I’m going to tell to my father, ‘I’m no longer worthy to be your son. I’m going to offer myself to be one of his hired servants.” He didn’t even get to finish his confession. The father didn’t make him squirm. He never got to the willing to be the servant part.
There’s an overwhelming expression of the father’s lavish love. There’s an excitement here. There’s no penance, there’s no price.
This is an act of redemption and reconciliation that’s so wild and outlandish that the older brother in his jealousy and arrogance thinks that his father nigh is irresponsible.
But the father’s unperturbed. He throws a bash and they have the biggest party in the neighborhood they’ve had in years.
Can I remind you as we move towards a close that God’s not a reluctant giver? God’s not a reluctant giver.
In fact, Tim Keller and other writers talk about the prodigal father.
The word prodigal can mean extravagant, extreme.
And they say when you really get down to this story, the real prodigal is the father. His love and the expression of his mercy is extravagant. It seems wasteful in the case of a son like this.
I love that thought.
You and I have got a prodigal father. His grace is outlandish. It’s amazing grace as John Newton.
Erwin Lutzer says, “Those of us who know we have sinned recognize the stench of pigs on our clothes. We hate not only what we have done but who we have become. We think our sin is too great to be welcomed back.”
And the point of the story is no, it’s not. Where sin abounds, grace, God’s unmerited favor much more abounds.
David the adulterer, murderer says in Psalm 51:1 ask God to forgive him. But notice the language. I love it.
It talks about God’s multiplied mercy. “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.”
My friend, if you are the recipient of God’s love, outlandish, He spurred not His own son, but delivered Him up for His all. Ought you not to love Him better? Serve Him more? Profess Him with a greater passion?
And my friend this morning, if there is a stench of the pigs on your clothes to a point where you don’t think God would receive you back, Jesus told the story so you might know it that that’s not true.
The gospel is not for good people, it’s for bad people. It’s for those who are willing to repent and return and enjoy the Father.
Let me close with this.
In his book, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Church, Dean Merrill tells the story of a pastor preacher who was in Honolulu one night. He was there for a period of ministry and woke up in the middle of night, couldn’t go back to sleep, and so he went down to a 24-hour diner and drank some coffee.
And while he was there, he noticed several women coming in, laughing loudly, talking loudly, and it became clear that these ladies were streetwalkers. Prostitutes. They had ended their night’s work and they were in for a bite to eat and something to drink.
The preacher overheard the name of one, Agnes, and her friend mentioned that the next day she would have a 39th birthday.
So after the ladies went home, this preacher had an idea and he went to the proprietor of the store and he said, “You know what? If these ladies come back tomorrow night,” and the guy said, “Well, they come back almost every night.” He says, “Let’s throw a party for Agnes. I want you to go and get some balloons and stuff and a cake and I’ll pay for it. Tomorrow night will surprise her and put the word out for others to arrive.” And so that’s exactly what happened.
The next night, around the same time, the streetwalkers come in and the surprise unfolds when everyone to Agnes’ great surprise shout, “Happy birthday.” And then the proprietor’s wife comes out with the cake, the candles, and the sparkles and there’s a lot of cheering. Before they could cut the cake, Agnes who was by this point crying, asked, “Could I keep the cake? Can I take it home to my apartment for a couple of days? Just I want to keep the cake.”
It was a messaging of the fact that it had been a long time since anybody had loved her or treated her with any kind of respect. It was an awkward silence that filled the room as Agnes darted out the door with her cake under her arm.
The preacher decided to pray and he prayed for Agnes that God would bless her on her birthday and bring peace to her life and save her from all her trouble.
At the Amen, the diner owner said, “Hey, you didn’t tell me you were a preacher. What kind of church do you preach at?” To which the preacher replied, “I preach at the kind of church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 in the morning.”
What happened next was a poignant moment as the man squinted at the preacher and announced, “No, no you don’t. There’s no church like that or I would join it.”
But there is a church like that, founded by a gospel that’s for tax collectors and sinners and the self-righteous, the prodigal sons and the older brothers. For worse sin abounds, grace does much more abound.
Lord, we thank You for Your word. Broad and deep challenging. There’s a familiarity to this story and yet there’s a depth we miss. There’s a shock factor. It washes over as we quickly tell it and move on. Help us to ponder, help us to pause, help us to chew on the text of Luke 15:11 to 32 and marvel at outlandish prodigal nature of Your grace toward us.
Help those who are still in the far country to awake from their coma, from their slumber, their sleep to the danger their end, to the emptiness of the world, to the destruction that comes at the end of a road marked by self-will, but help them to awake to how great Your mercy is and how warm Your welcome will be.
Lord, help us as those who are saved by Your grace not to become elder brothers, where we stand over people and judge them mercilessly, where we have forgot what it’s like to be lost. Help us to be the kind of church that truly portrays the marvel of the gospel, that one and all are welcome, those who think they’re clean and don’t need to repent, those who think they’re so dirty they’re not welcome, for we pray and ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.