The Prodigal Son
Download MP3Scripture I'll be reading tonight is from Luke chapter 15 verses 1 through 10. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes crumbled saying, this man receives sinners and eats with them. So he told them this parable. What man of you having a 100 sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the 99 in the open country and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?
Speaker 1:And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors saying to them, rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost. Just so, I tell you, there'll be more joy in heaven over 1 sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman woman having 10 silver coins, if she loses 1 coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it. And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors and saying, rejoice with me for I found the one coin that I lost.
Speaker 1:Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.
Speaker 2:In verse 11 to 32. And he said, there was a man who had 2 sons. And the younger of them said to his father, father, give me the share of property that is coming to me. And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the young son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country.
Speaker 2:And there, he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself, he said, how many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish you with hunger?
Speaker 2:I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants. And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.
Speaker 2:And the son said to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. But the father said to his servants, bring quickly the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet, and bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this is for this my son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.
Speaker 2:And they began to celebrate. Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, your brother has come and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has received him back safe and sound, but he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, look, these many years I have served you and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat that I might celebrate with my friends.
Speaker 2:But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him. And he said to him, son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad for this your brother was dead and is alive. He was lost and is found. This is the word of the lord.
Speaker 2:Pray
Joel Brooks:with me. God, we ask that you would honor the reading of your word, that there would be a freshness to it. We ask that you'd open up our hearts and our minds to receive this word. Lord, I pray for me that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But, Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us.
Joel Brooks:We pray this in the strong name of Jesus, Amen. I actually preached on Luke 15. I think it was either a second or third week of our church. It's when we were in our living room and there was just a handful of you there. And I'm gonna give the same introduction that I gave then.
Joel Brooks:And that's that I might preach, actually I know I will preach better sermons, but I will never preach a more important one than the next 2 weeks looking at this story. Up to this point in Luke, we've seen Jesus over and over. He is attacking 2 groups. 2 people, different groups with different world views, and we've called them the irreligious and the religious. And he consistently has been passionately arguing against them.
Joel Brooks:The irreligious view is that there is no God and you could do whatever you want. It doesn't matter. And then there's the religious world view and that, no, you need to live a good moral life and earn God's favor. And that's how you can earn salvation. And God, Jesus has been consistently chopping that view down and saying, no, those way to relate to God, to come to God through me.
Joel Brooks:He gives them the gospel. Not religion, not your religion, but the gospel. And it's here in Luke 15 that you see this probably more clearly than any place else in scripture. Jesus here, he gives us this radical new way of understanding what does it mean to be lost? What does it mean to be saved?
Joel Brooks:How do we relate to God? Luke begins chapter 15 by telling us that sinners and tax collectors were drawing near to Jesus. And don't think of a tax collector here as like, you know, a dishonest IRS agent, you know, stealing money from you. That's not how they view them. The Jews of this day, they viewed tax collectors as traitors.
Joel Brooks:These were people who had switched their allegiances and decided to now work for Rome. They were they were now working for the Roman government. The very government that was oppressing them. The very government that was killing them. And so, if you were a Jew and you met a tax collector, you would think, you are responsible for the murder of some of my friends, some of my families.
Joel Brooks:You justify murder. There was a absolute hatred towards tax collectors. Then you have sinners here and and sinners, you know, today everybody says freely, we're sinners. It had a different connotation then. To be a sinner meant you were really bad.
Joel Brooks:You cannot come into the temple and worship. You were not allowed to come in and make sacrifices. To be a sinner, would be you're a prostitute. You were you were a drug addict. You were you were something along those lines that, no, I'm sorry, but the church doors are not open to you.
Joel Brooks:The problem here, at least according to the Pharisees, was that the tax collectors and the sinners were the ones flocking to Jesus. These these despised evil people were all around Jesus and Jesus was eating with them and when you ate with somebody in this day, that was a sign of acceptance. And they kept saying, now, wait a second. These people don't even belong in church and yet they're following you around? And this is Jesus was receiving them.
Joel Brooks:Look at verse 2. It says in the Pharisees and scribes grumbled, saying this man receives sinners and eats with them. And now this word receive there, it sounds like a passive term. You're just taking somebody who comes to you, but actually it's a very active term in scripture. You find this earlier in Luke chapter 2 when Simeon, he is translated as waiting for the Messiah and every day he went to the temple and he waited.
Joel Brooks:He eagerly was looking. He was receiving the Messiah. Or Anna the prophetess, when she went and says that she was eagerly waiting for the redemption of Israel. That's the same word. So when the Pharisees say that he is receiving these tax collectors and sinners, what what they're saying is he goes after them.
Joel Brooks:He goes to where they are. He goes to the street corners and he looks for them. Every day he is pursuing them. He's not just sitting there waiting for them to come and, you know, grace his presence. He goes after them.
Joel Brooks:Searches them out. And we see this receiving here immediately in the end of these two parables. Right after this, we get a picture of what receiving looks like. The first parable is of a man losing his sheep. Look at verse 4.
Joel Brooks:Verse 4 says, what man of you having a 100 sheep if he has lost one of them does not leave the 99 in the open country and go after the one that is lost until he finds it. And when the woman later in the next story, when she loses her coins, it says, she turns on her lamps and she looks diligently for it. That's what it means to receive as you are going after. You're looking diligently and so you find what you have lost. And this is how Jesus pursues sinners.
Joel Brooks:He pursues them with all of his effort. It's his mission to find them. He came to seek and to save that which was lost. And so don't ever think that you are a sinner who's gone too far. That, you know, I've just done so much that Jesus would never come looking for me and even if he did come looking for me, it would be to judge me.
Joel Brooks:That's not what happens. When when this person is found, there is a party. There's an absolute time of rejoicing. More joy over 1 sinner that repents than of the 99 who don't. Now, before trying to, you know, leave here, muster up all of your strength to go into the world and be like Jesus, and pursue tax collectors, and pursue sinners, I think first you need to just sit and marvel at that.
Joel Brooks:Marvel at the Lord we worship, That he pursues us with with such passion. Come to grips with that. Come come to adore that and have it change your heart. Let's look at the most famous parable. What we would call the parable of the prodigal son.
Joel Brooks:It's actually a story about 2 sons and a gracious father. You need to remember that there's those 2 groups. There's 2 groups. There's the tax collectors and sinners, and then there's the Pharisees and the scribes. And these are the 2 groups, the irreligious and the religious, that Jesus is addressing when he gives this parable.
Joel Brooks:And those two groups of people correspond to the 2 sons. Obviously, the prodigal son who goes off and wastes all the money, he's representative of the irreligious people. And then you have the elder brother who stays and he represents the very religious people. He's the Pharisees. He is the scribes.
Joel Brooks:And actually, this parable is more about them than it is about the religion the irreligious person. It is more about the the person who lived in the Bible Belt, grew up going to church, and is a very good moral person. That's who this parable is for. And the people who heard this parable, they didn't leave all misty eyed thinking, Oh, wow. What a gracious God.
Joel Brooks:They left furious when they heard it. It shook their world because Jesus is calling them lost. Now in many ways, I feel like I've been studying this passage in-depth ever since I had Natalie, our 4 year old now. And watching Caroline and Natalie grow up together. Caroline is 7, the first born.
Joel Brooks:She's responsible. She does what she is told. She's a rule follower. She is respectful. At night, she gets a sheet of paper and she makes a to do list of everything she is going to do the following day so she can maximize her day.
Joel Brooks:That's Caroline. Then there's Natalie. Natalie likes to, I'll say this graciously. She likes to bend the rules, Stretch them to the limits. She she has to be forced to do things like clean up toys, and and when she might clean up a toy, and then she doesn't do anything else.
Joel Brooks:She's lazy in that regards. She doesn't really listen to us. And usually, Caroline will go and put up the rest of the toys, and and then Caroline will come to us and tell us how good she was for doing it and how bad Natalie was for not. The story that always stick sticks in my mind is the best example of my 2 kids is something was broken in our house, and I got both kids to come forward. And I say, Caroline, tell me what happened.
Joel Brooks:And so she gives me a very detailed explanation of how this item came to be broken and a very rational explanation of why she was not to be held responsible. And I said, okay. And I said, Natalie, will you tell me what happened? And she looked at me and she goes, nah nah nah nah nah nah nah. And then she was off.
Joel Brooks:And, I was like, what it what a difference in the 2 kids there. You could see those family dynamics here. You you could see them that at least the the roots of them here and they they grew into something far more evil. But you've got that older brother, the rule follower. The one who works hard.
Joel Brooks:The one who's respectful. Then, you have that passionate, 2nd born, wild, lazy, wants to get out of there. The bottom line is with these 2 brothers though, they actually both are in rebellion. They both are self centered and they both hate their father. I want to look at the younger son this week, and we're gonna look at the older son next.
Joel Brooks:Look at verse 11. And he said, there was a man who had 2 sons, and the younger of them said to his father, father, give me the share of property that is coming to me. And he divided his property between them. Now in this culture, if a father had 2 sons, the older son would get 2 thirds of the inheritance and the younger son would get a 3rd. If you were a daughter, you got nothing.
Joel Brooks:Sorry. It was a very man dominated culture here. And and so the the older son had the 2 thirds, the younger had a 3rd. And when the younger son says, can I have my inheritance now? He's asking for a third of all of his father's possessions and properties.
Joel Brooks:To ask for your inheritance now was very disrespectful. This never happened. What the younger son is essentially telling us that is, I wish you were dead. I I wish you would quit living so I could go ahead and get my inheritance now. And as you expect the father at this point to slap his child across the face, which would be deserved, be expected, and to say, get out of here.
Joel Brooks:But instead, you get the first surprise of the story. The father doesn't. The father gives him what he asked for and he divides his property between them. Now, every commentary points this out that the word for property here is actually bios, where we get the word life. That's actually what it means is life.
Joel Brooks:There's another word that he could have used for property, but, but he doesn't. The father divides his life out between them. If I went to my mom right now and I said, hey, mom, I want my inheritance now. I mean, it'd be pretty disrespectful, even more so in this day, but it'd be disrespectful now. And then if my mom decided, okay, fine, I'll give it to you.
Joel Brooks:She would say, but there's, there's a problem. I mean, your inheritance is tied up in the house. It's tied up in the cars. It's, it's, it's tied up in the furniture. It's, it's in my retirement.
Joel Brooks:I'd be like, I know, but I want a third of it now. And that would mean she'd have to sell the house. She'd have to sell her furniture. She'd have to she'd have to, liquefy her assets. Basically, the life she knew would be over.
Joel Brooks:She wouldn't have her home. She wouldn't have any of that. That life that she wants had grown comfortable with because that all be gone. And it's exact same here. That's why they say he divided up his life.
Joel Brooks:At this point, the father's life was fractured. Having to get rid of the home, having to get rid of some of his property, having to get that money so so he could give it to his child. And then the son takes it and goes off, not caring about the, the carnage he has left behind. And he goes off and he, waste all of the money away. The term prodigal, according to my dictionary on my computer, means spendthrift.
Joel Brooks:Extravagant to a degree, bordering on recklessness. And he is a prodigal son. He goes off and he wastes all of this money away. And eventually, he finds himself broke. He finds himself working in a pig sty, longing for pods, which nobody knows what the heck pods are, but he is longing to eat these pods.
Joel Brooks:And there's no worse job if you're a Jewish male than having to work with pigs. There's no more unclean profession. And so finally, he wakes up. Actually, it says he came to his senses. He came to his senses.
Joel Brooks:Now, nobody can just decide, hey, I'm gonna come to my senses. That's not something that you just muster up and say, alright, today I'm gonna come to my senses. Coming to your senses is something that has to happen to you. It's something outside that hits you. You know, a smelling salt that wakes you up.
Joel Brooks:Somebody slapping you across the face. Something that wakes up and you're like, okay, okay. You come to your senses and then you can respond. And any person who has come to Jesus realizes that God had to basically slap them. God had to wake them up.
Joel Brooks:There was an outside influence. They didn't just suddenly muster it up to come and follow him. And that's what you see here. And then he decides I'm gonna go back to my father, and I'm gonna say, I have sinned against heaven and before you. What you see here is both a vertical repentance, I have sinned against heaven, and this horizontal repentance and against you.
Joel Brooks:And both of those things are necessary for real repentance. And in that order, you have to realize first you have sinned against the Lord and then you have sinned against a person. And this is his After King David committed adultery and murder, he he wrote a very famous Psalm, probably his most famous Psalm. Actually, take that back. Psalm 23 is pretty famous.
Joel Brooks:This second most famous Psalm, Psalm 51, in which he says this, I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you, god, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. And you read this and every time I read this I think this. I'm like, you're you're against God alone? Tell that to Bathsheba, who you raped.
Joel Brooks:Tell that to Uzziah, who you killed. You certainly sinned against them. But King David, when he's writing this down, he goes, no against you and against you alone I sinned. Because he realizes that the root of those horizontal sins was at first he had, he had violated this relationship. Before he ever committed adultery, and raped Bathsheba, he had already given up on the love of his life and God.
Joel Brooks:He'd already committed adultery there. And he knew that's where his transgression lied. The other thing was the the the killing and the raping, that was just a manifestation of the sin he had already committed. A few months ago, I had somebody come to my office and they confessed that they were having an affair. And, actually, it said that the affair just ended, And, this this married woman whom he was having an affair with broke it off.
Joel Brooks:And he said, you know, I'm I'm confessing this to you. I'm repenting of this, but one of the things he kept saying is, like, I'm so scared of when I'm gonna meet this husband again. When I meet that husband, I'm terrified of what's gonna happen. It's like, you know, I've I've I've emailed the husband. I've tried calling the husband trying to to tell him how I've wronged him, how I've sinned against him and he said, but he said, I can't sleep at night.
Joel Brooks:It it consumes my every thought. What's gonna happen? Because one day we are going to meet again. And I looked at him and I said, do you know what your problem is? Your problem is you never repented.
Joel Brooks:So, what do you mean I haven't repented? Yes. I have. I said, no. You're you're trying to repent this way before you've repented this way.
Joel Brooks:You've sinned against God. Your creator is who you've sinned against. You realize that that sin put Jesus on the cross. I tell you, once you have dealt with God, once once you have felt the shame of your sin and at the same time the acceptance of God coming from his forgiveness, once that has truly gripped your heart, you're not gonna fear meeting that husband. You need to repent to the Lord.
Joel Brooks:The prodigal son here, he knew that it was against god primarily that he had sinned and that this had manifested itself and how he had acted with his father. He doesn't make excuses. He doesn't say, God, if you had to live with a jerk brother like that, you'd wanna get out of the house too. No. He just says it's sin.
Joel Brooks:Jesus forgives sins, but he does not forgive excuses. In verse 19, this younger brother plans on telling his father, I am no longer worthy to be called your son. This is true. He's not. He's actually lost his inheritance.
Joel Brooks:He's already told his dad, You're as good as dead to me. He's no longer a son. Even when he comes back and there's rejoicing, his father tells the older brother, says, your brother was dead, but is now alive. So he is seen as dead. He has lost his sonship here.
Joel Brooks:Slave. A slave got to live in the house. A hired servant did not. It was just a day, you would just hire them for the day to come in and do the task of a slave, but then they were on their own for shelter and for food. But, he's thinking, I need to ask my father for that.
Joel Brooks:And what I think is going on here is, he's becoming religious. He wants to now work for his dad's approval. He wants to start paying back this debt that he owes. So that's what I need to do. I need to start working.
Joel Brooks:I need to turn my life around, you know, Start doing good. Show my dad that I I am. I'm responsible, and I'm gonna start paying off this debt. And he approaches his father just like a religious person person approaches God. God says, no.
Joel Brooks:You're approaching me like I need something. You cannot earn my affection. I give it freely. Well, he's coming home and his father sees him, in a very undignified way runs after him. Patriarchs of a family don't run like this, but he does.
Joel Brooks:I know that there's a number of you who have siblings, who I guess you would call a prodigal, who have caused your family lots of pain. Maybe it's through, you know, some alcoholism, or drug addiction, or just really stupid choices. They have hurt your family. They always make horrible decisions, and they've gone off. When that person comes back knocking on your family's door, do do you ever does it ever even cross your mind that they're coming back to repent?
Joel Brooks:It doesn't cross my mind. Every time they come back, I'm thinking they're coming back because they need me to bail them out. They're coming back because they need money. That's that's all they ever want. That's what the track record says, and I'm certain that the father was thinking that when he sees his son coming back in all those ragged clothes.
Joel Brooks:Here, he's coming to ask for more money, to ask me to bail him out. But, the father doesn't care. He runs and embraces him anyway. More than that, he says, get, get my best robe and put it on him, which would have been his robe. And then he says, get, get a ring and put it on his finger.
Joel Brooks:Now the ring would have had the family emblem on it, the family seal. And so what you're doing is you're restoring sonship there. Says, go kill the fatted calf. And the Pharisees and scribes, they would have they'd have been outraged when they heard this. They'd have been absolutely furious.
Joel Brooks:I mean, the father should at least make sure that the guy's changed his heart. Should should at least, you know, make sure he's turned over a new leaf. Make sure he's at least sorry and then you should even make him pay. You don't just welcome the person back. You're just you're just making the problem worse.
Joel Brooks:Yeah, and not only the Pharisees would have been shocked, but the sinners, the tax collectors, they would have been equally shocked because the father doesn't make the son grovel at his feet. He doesn't want to say, I told you so. I always knew you'd come crawling back here. He just simply accepts him. Before he even knows anything about the son.
Joel Brooks:He does not wait for his son to show that he has pulled his life together before he embraces him. When the father kills the fattened calf, that means he is throwing a extravagant feast and party. The entire village comes when he killed the fatted calf. There was going to be a huge party, and I'm sure the Pharisees blood is boiling as I hear this. Now notice with all 3 parables, they all went in basically with a party and rejoicing.
Joel Brooks:Every one of these, you know, you have, the lost sheep come back, there's rejoicing. And you have the lost coin and there's rejoicing, and there's all this rejoicing here. But here, there's something different. There's a difference in this story than the other ones, and I don't know if you you caught it. There is rejoicing in this one as well, but in the other stories, someone went out to find who was lost.
Joel Brooks:When when the sheep was lost, says that, you know, the the shepherd left in 99 and went looking all over and would not rest until he found the 1. Puts that 1 on his back, comes back, big old party. When the coin is lost, lamps are lit, woman's looking everywhere, would not rest until the coin is found. Here, you have the prodigal son go off and no one runs after him. He's just off.
Joel Brooks:There's, there's nobody out looking, you know, from town to town trying to find him. There's nobody going to the pigsties trying to find him. There's none of that out there. There's this obvious part of the story that's that's different that's missing. The elder brother should have been the one who was doing it.
Joel Brooks:He was the one responsible for his younger brother. He should have been the one out there looking, but he doesn't. Instead, you know, he's, he's home too busy burning CDs or you know, doing whatever it is. Getting rid of the the presence of his, you know, immoral brother. Good riddance.
Joel Brooks:Being all self righteous. The the elder brother knew, if he comes back, it's gonna cost me. We'll look a lot more at this next week, but if he comes back, it's gonna cost me. The, the, the robe that was put on him, you know, says it would as likely his father's robe, but you know what? That's really his robe because the inheritance has already been divided.
Joel Brooks:Everything that's left in that household is is his or will be his. The rain put on his finger, that's the elder brothers. Restoring them back to sonship means he now gets another third of the estate that comes out of the older brother. His blood is boiling because he knows when his younger brother comes, it's gonna cost him. A fatted calf is expensive.
Joel Brooks:Jesus, I think as he was telling the story, people would have been, they would have noticed that. They would have wondered at the difference. And then, they would have looked at Jesus and they would have seen, you're who the elder brother was supposed to be in the story. You're you're the son of the father who actually went out to bring back the lost. That's who you are.
Joel Brooks:You're the one who pursued us at all costs. And, actually, for you to bring us back into a relationship with the father would cost you severely. Cost your very life. Jesus gave his life as a ransom to get us back. Jesus allowed himself to be rejected He's He's what the older brother should have been.
Joel Brooks:You know, I I asked a question weeks ago. If sinners, tax collectors were so drawn to Jesus, why is it that they are not drawn to his church? I think this story gives us the answer and we'll look at it more next week. It's because we are much more like the older brother than we are the Lord. People like being around Jesus because Jesus knew how to party.
Joel Brooks:He knew how to give joy and acceptance. We like to cast stones and give judgment, pat ourselves on the back, think we're doing so well. But all the while, we are just as self centered, just as distant from our father as this prodigal child. Pray with me. Lord, teach us what repentance is that we have sinned against you, you alone.
Joel Brooks:Teach us what it means to come to you and to be your child. When we look at this younger son, we certainly see that it was not his bad works that kept him from you. That wasn't it? You pursued him despite his sin. When we look at the older brother though, it was his good works that kept him from you.
Joel Brooks:So, god, we come to you not offering anything good. We come to you with empty hands, knowing that we have no righteousness on our own. We come to you like the prodigal, and we ask that you would clothe us with your coat. Dress us with your righteousness. Put on us a ring of sonship purely by your grace.
Joel Brooks:And we pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.
