Do let me welcome you, once again, if you are visiting with us tonight; we are particularly glad that you are here this evening. We are beginning a short series of messages looking for our search for significance and security and satisfaction. Three of the big desires of our hearts; things for which we are all looking. Now it may be that after our time together tonight, thinking about the first of those, our significance, it may be that you find you have some questions. It may even be that you have more questions afterward after I’m done talking than when you arrived. That’s great if that’s the case! We would love to invite you to join us after the service to come and be with us for a light meal in Lowe Hall. Whether you are a Christian or whether you are not sure at all what you believe, bring your questions. There are no, “no-go” areas. You can ask anything you like. I should insert a disclaimer: you can ask anything you like, I just can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to answer your questions, so please be kind. But do come along and join us. If you go out this door to my left and then take a left, you’ll find your way easily enough after the service. Alternatively, as we said at the beginning of the service, you might want to indicate your desire to ask questions or speak to a minister or find our more by tearing out the perforated panel in your bulletin and you can complete that. There are baskets at the exits as you leave and you can drop it in there and let us know and we can get in touch with you that way. But we are so very glad that you are here tonight and we do want to be good hosts to you.
And so as I said, we are thinking about our search for significance. I think it is a universal quest of the human heart to look for meaning and purpose, for a reason – we’re all in search of significance. Viktor Frankl, that’s a name you may or may not know, I’m not sure – he was a Jewish psychotherapist who was interned in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War. His harrowing and hopeful memoir is called, Man’s Search for Meaning. And he recounts the horrors and brutality of life in the camps. And yet in the midst of it all, he notes again and again, the enduring quest for meaning that kept so many people alive in these most desperate of circumstances. He said, “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz. However, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Israel on his lips.” We are strange creatures, aren’t we? With the capacity to do terrible things that leave us despairing, and at the same time we remain inveterate seekers after meaning, purpose, even in our darkest moments. We’re all searching for significance. We want to know why we matter, what we are for, why we count.
And as we think about that tonight, I want to invite you to please to take a Bible – you’ll find them in the racks in front of you in the pews or maybe under your seats if you’re sitting in one of the rows at the front – and turn with me to page 874; page 874, to Luke’s gospel, chapter 15, verses 11 to 32. Here is one important place where Jesus interacts with the ways that we try to find significance for ourselves. It’s the very familiar parable of the prodigal son. Even if you’re not much of a church-goer, you’re probably aware of at least the outlines of this famous story. Before we read it together, it’s our custom before we read the Scriptures to pause and ask for God’s help as we pray. Would you bow your heads with me as we pray together?
O Lord, we pray that You would come to us and by the powerful work of the Holy Spirit take the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, and do a miracle in our hearts, the supernatural work of illumination and inner transformation, bringing each of us – whether for the very first time or anew – back to Jesus Christ, in whom God comes running to us to bring us home. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.
Luke chapter 15 at the eleventh verse. This is God’s Word:
“And he,” that is, Jesus, “said, ‘There was a man who had two 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 younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, 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 here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am 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. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am 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 my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ 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. 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.’’”
Amen, and we thank God that He speaks to us in His holy Word.
You’ll find it useful to keep your Bibles open to the passage that we read so that we can refer to it as we go along.
Now there are three characters in this familiar little drama, aren’t there? There’s the younger brother who takes his inheritance and squanders it. There is the older brother who stays at home working for his father. And there’s the father himself, who has to deal with his two boys and who does it, as we’ve seen, with such remarkable tenderness and generosity. And we’re simply going to look at each of those in turn.
The Way of Self-Discovery and Self-Expression
Let’s think about the younger brother first. Notice what he says to his father. Look at verse 12 with me. Look at what he says to his father. “Father, give me the share of property that’s coming to me.” Now even in our culture, we have some sense of how inappropriate that request must have been. Don’t we? But in Jesus’ day, this is a stunning thing for a younger son, or any son for that matter, to say to his father. Now as the younger son, he wasn’t the primary inheritor of his father’s estate. Jewish custom dictated that he stood to receive only half as much as his older brother, so he would receive a third of the estate. And neither of them, neither he nor his big brother would inherit except on the occasion of their father’s death.
But the younger brother isn’t interested in waiting for that day to arrive. Is he? He wants what’s coming to him right now. It’s not hard to imagine the pain those words would have caused a father to hear. His son is telling him that he wants his father’s stuff more than he wants his father. And if you’ll look at verse 12 again you’ll see the father’s response. We’re told that he divided his property between them. Now his property, in the original Greek, is “τὸν βίον” – literally, his “life.” He divided the results of the accomplishments of his life with them. This isn’t some clinical business transaction, you see. At least it wasn’t for the father. But the younger brother used the products of his father’s lifetime of labor as nothing more than commodities with which to enrich himself. As far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing in the father’s property of the father’s life making them sacred to his memory in any way. In fact, he doesn’t seem focused on the father at all. He’s focused only himself.
And so when verse 13 explains that the younger son soon gathers all that he has and within a few days leaves home for a far country, we’re not really all that surprised. Are we? He wasn’t content to live in his big brother’s shadow or in the embrace of his father’s care any longer. He sets off to find himself for himself. He seeks his significance in something of a voyage of self-discovery and self-expression. But as verse 13 goes on to tell us, he squandered his property on reckless living. And again, the vocabulary that’s used is really very interesting. The word for squandered suggests that he was throwing something to the wind. Imagine liquidating all your assets, getting a big pile of cash, climbing up to an upper window and throwing all the money out the window for the wind to blow wherever. That’s something like what he has done with his property and with those assets. And the particular wind that blew the younger son’s inheritance away, Luke says, was the wind of reckless living. The word he uses this time has moral overtones. In fact, when the older brother offers a word of commentary to his father later in the story about this younger son, he will say that this son of the father, his little brother, has devoured the father’s property with prostitutes. So the younger son doesn’t simply leave home to forge his own path; he leaves home and he goes off the deep end. Doesn’t he?
The Devouring Nature of Pleasure
Here's a picture of one approach to finding significance for ourselves. The younger brother wants to go it alone. He wants to be a self-made man, to stand on his own two feet, to find himself. So he asks his father, almost literally, to tear his life apart for him and he leaves. And then he begins to spend as if he could find himself in his pleasures. But pleasure, as his big brother, will later put it and as he soon discovered to his great hurt, and as perhaps you yourself may have come to discover, pleasure when we try to use it as a tool of self-discovery, is really nothing more than a devourer. A devourer! And so when famine strikes, he hits rock bottom. Look at verses 15 and 16. It’s hard to imagine Jesus painting a more effective, shocking portrait of abject desperation than this one. Isn’t it? The younger son went, we are told, and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country who sent him into his field to feed pigs. A Jewish man feeding pigs. That’s bad, right? A Jewish man feeding pigs. And Jesus says he gets so desperate that he was longing to be fed with the pods the pigs ate. But no one gave him anything.
So here’s a man who set out to find his significances, purpose, and his identity, by self-discovery and self-expression. He’s been given everything and squandered it. And when he hits rock bottom and has nothing, no one will give him anything. He had been given everything and squandered it. When he hits rock bottom and has nothing, he discovers that no one will give him anything. And so here he is now, longing to fill his belly with pig slops; unclean, desperate, and utterly, utterly forsaken by everyone. He set out to find significance and here he is in the muck of a pigsty, the very embodiment, and picture of insignificance. That’s one strategy. It proves to be a fatally flawed strategy for the younger brother. Doesn’t it?
The Way of Personal Effort
There is another strategy for finding our significance. If the first method is the way of self-discovery and self-expression, the second method is the way of personal effort. Maybe you’ve tried this one on for size. They’re actually two versions of it in the story. The first of them you’ll see in verses 17 to 19. Look there with me please; verses 17 to 19. The younger son hits rock bottom until one day, Jesus says, he came to himself. He sort of snaps out of it and comes to his senses. He has a moment of stunning realization. And look at what he tells himself. “How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger? I will arise and go to my father and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.’” Clearly, and at long last, the son realizes how wrong he’s been. He plans to confess his sin without qualification or hesitation. He knows that in his culture the way he’s treated his father and the shame that he’s brought on his family has left him without any status or standing. He’s lost his significance in the community and in the family. He is no longer worthy to be called the father’s son.
And he’s quite right about all of that. Evidently, there has been a deep and real change of heart here. Hasn’t there? And yet, as all of this dawns on him, he now swings from one bankrupt strategy for establishing his own worth and meaning and value all the way to the opposite but equally bankrupt strategy. The clue to what’s really going on in the younger brother’s heart at this point doesn’t come out terribly clearly in our English translation, but in the original, the word for “hired servant” brackets this whole section at the beginning and at the end. “The hired servants have all they need,” he says to himself. “Make me like one of the hired servants,” he plans to say to the father. He started with an attempt at self-expression and self-discovery, and when that failed, he tries self-reliant effort instead. He wants to serve as one of the hired hands working his father’s fields. He thinks, you see, he thinks he can work his way back. Having lost his status as son, by reckless self-indulgence, he thinks he can earn back his status by personal effort.
And of course, now, this has also been the older brother’s strategy from the get-go. When his brother comes home and everyone else is celebrating when he discovers what’s happening he is deeply offended. He won’t join the party; he stays outside in the cold, sulking in the shadows. When his father finally comes out to find out what’s going on, look what big brother says. Look at verse 29. Verse 29, he says, “Look, look you! These many years I’ve served you. I’ve never disobeyed your command. You never gave me a young goat that I might celebrate with my friends. When this son of yours came home, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him.” You can sense the disrespect and the frustration in those words, “This son of yours!” “Look,” he says to the father, “this son of yours – you seem to be rewarding him after his wild living. I’ve been slaving for you!” That’s actually the word he uses. “I’ve been slaving away for you all these years. You never so much as acknowledged me. My status has been ignored,” he says. “Less than a hired hand!” He feels like a slave. “I’ve never disobeyed you. I’m the good son! You seem to reward him, not me. He gets the party! What do I get?”
The Principle of Quid Pro Quo
Now you see, don’t you, you see how the younger brother and the older brother actually share so many assumptions in common at this point. They’re both operating, aren’t they, on the principle of quid pro quo. Some of us try to establish our significance like the younger brother did at first by self-discovery, self-expression. Others of us, I’m sure, have found out the hard way just how bankrupt that approach can be. And so we’ve tried, like the younger brother, we’ve tried the opposite approach. We think that by our good works, by our moral effort, by a little dusting of religion here and there, judiciously sprinkled around our lives, we can earn and achieve back our status before God. But then there are still others of us, at least in our own eyes, we are good law-abiding church folks who never did rebel. But just like both brothers, no matter which category you find yourself falling into, there’s always the danger of thinking that our status, our significance with God, rests on our obedience. We think our significance is still the fruit of something we do.
The Failure of Human Strategies
But whatever your strategy, the big point of Jesus’ parable is that none of them work in the end. None of them work in the end! And it’s at that point that we need to think about the third character in the story. We need to think about the father. Look back at verse 20. The younger son, at this point in the story, the younger son is on his way home. He has his speech all prepared; he’s going to confess his sin, remember, see if his father will let him earn back his status over time; try and work off the shame he has accrued to the family name. He’s going to be a hired servant. Maybe, eventually, he can hope to be called a son again. That’s the plan! But look what actually happens. While he’s still a long way off, his father saw him and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And as the son tries to compose himself and he pulls out his scribbled down speech in trembling hands, all he manages to get out is the first few lines. “Father, I’ve sinned against heaven and before you. I’m no longer worthy to be called your son.” And the father cuts him off. Notice this carefully! He cuts him off before he can get to the part about being a hired servant. The father just starts talking over him at this point, telling his servants to dress him in finery and let’s throw a party.
The Father’s Unconditional Love
Now Jesus loves to tell stories. If you’ve read through the gospels, you’ll have noticed this. Jesus loves to tell stories that upset the applecart. Everybody listening is expecting the father to give the wayward son the cold shoulder. Maybe a lecture about getting his comeuppance and learning his lesson would be in order at this point. No one, no one expects a patriarch like this in ancient Jewish culture to do what this man does. When he sees his lost son, away in the distance, he hikes up his robe so you can see his skinny legs and he sets off running. How undignified. That’s now how a distinguished, Jewish father ever behaved. Dads in those days, fathers, mature men, did not run. He doesn’t care. This dad does not care. He throws all decorum to the wind, he runs out to meet his son, and while the prodigal is fumbling for his speech, his dad is kissing him and hugging him and giving instructions to his servants about how he is to be treated. The best robe, that’s the father’s robe, the best robe to cover his filthy rags, still stinking like pigs. Shoes for his bare feet; he’s been walking these miles from the far country back home on. A ring for his grubby hands. What does it mean? What has happened to the younger son? He has been reinstated and a great celebration ensues. “Let’s celebrate!” he says. “He was dead; now he’s alive. He was lost; we found him again!”
Extravagant Grace!
The son, he was expecting to work for every morsel of recognition and significance and restored status. Instead, he receives it all, free, at once, as a gift. It’s astonishing! So astonishing, in fact, that many of Jesus’ first hearers would have identified quite readily with the perplexity and frustration of the older brother later in the story when he learns about the party going on for the prodigal son. “God doesn’t treat sinners that way, Jesus! Don’t you understand that! No one believes that – not sinners; not the religious elite for that matter! No one believes that this is how God behaves! No, your significance has to be earned.”
God Comes To Us
That’s exactly how the elder brother felt about it, to be sure. He was outraged, but notice won’t you, how the father treats even him. Just as with the returning prodigal, it is the father, not the son, who takes the initiative. Verse 26, while he’s busy pouting and sulking outside while the party goes on at home, his father came out to him and entreated him. God responds to good sons and bad sons the same way. Neither of us, whether you’re a good son or a bad son, neither of us come to Him. We’re trying to make it on our own; figure out our own strategy. Find our own significance our own way. Neither of us comes to Him, but He comes to us. He comes to us! And look what the father tells his firstborn. Verse 31, “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have 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.” The father is teaching the older brother the same lesson the younger brother has learned. It is the lesson of grace. The older brother has access to all the father had, not because he earned it, but for free. Both sons are alienated from the father in the story. Aren’t they? The younger son goes far away and he loses everything. The older brother stays at home and does what’s expected, but both of them dishonor the father. Both are at a distance from him. And the father comes after both.
And he comes after both with the same message – your status, your significance has nothing to do with how good you’ve been. It’s hard for us to get our head around, isn’t it? Good religious folks, most of us, that our status has nothing to do with how good we’ve been and everything to do with being rightly related to the Father. He says, “I take all the initiative to put it right. I come after you. I pursue you.” The bad son and the good son – the father pursues them both. God comes after the religious and the irreligious among us with the same message of hope. You can find your significance, but not in anything you have done or could ever do. Not in yourself at all, but in the embrace of the Father alone.
Now in the context of the gospel of Luke as a whole, Jesus’ central message in this parable becomes really very clear. If the father in the story represents the God of Israel, pursuing and coming after sinners with extravagant grace, in light of the storyline of the Gospel, we need to understand how He does that. How is it that the Father, God, the God of Israel pursues sinners? He does it in the person of Jesus Christ. Our status and our significance as beloved children of God are free to us, but it comes at God’s expense. You see that even in the story, don’t you? It is the father’s robe, the father’s ring, his shoes, his fattened calf carefully prepared for some day of great celebration now immediately spent in a party for the returned son. It’s all at his expense that the son is reinstated and his status given. We don’t pay, is the point – God pays to give us our status as His beloved children. How is it that God pays? He pays personally in Jesus Christ at the cross that His robes might cover our filthy rags and the stench of our sin and waywardness might be blotted out. He does it by coming to us Himself in Jesus and bearing the brunt of the cost at the cross. You don’t need to become a hired servant or slave obediently in the Father’s field in order to earn some morsel of personal significance or standing before God. He pays! He bears the cost! It’s free to you in Jesus!
Now before we close, I do want you to notice that while the younger son comes home, we really don’t know what happens to the older brother. Do we? Jesus sort of leaves us hanging, looking for a few more verses too, “Tell us what happens, Jesus? What happens with the older brother? Does he take the father’s instruction and join the party or does he stay out in the cold?” I think part of the reason Jesus ends the story the way that He does is because most of His hearers were elder brother types. You know, the religious, obedient, hard-working, earn my own status by my religious performance types. And His question implied in the way the story ends for them is actually the question He’s asking all of us here tonight. The question is, “Are you going to stay out in the cold and in the dark or will you come in and join the celebration? Are you going to stay out in the cold and in the dark or will you hear the invitation of God in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to come back into the embrace of the family, to receive your significance and status, your identity, your meaning, your worth, not in anything you have done but in Him alone as a gift for free as you trust in Christ. Don’t stay out in the dark, in the shadows, in the cold. Won’t you come in and join the celebration? Let’s pray together!
Our Father, there may be prodigal sons and daughters in this room tonight, and so we pray for them, that they, like the younger son in the story might come to themselves, might recognize the bankruptcy of trying to find their significance, their purpose, in the way of self-discovery, how bankrupt it really is. But grant that like the younger brother and the older brother, they and we with them might learn also the bankruptcy of finding our significance, our worth, our identity in the things that we do – in seasoning our lives with a bit of religious performance in the hopes, like a hired servant, or a slave laboring in the fields, in the hopes of earning something from you. Help us to see how empty that approach is also and instead, won’t You come after us, come out to us, as You did to the two sons in the story and invite us in and bring us home and give to us our true significance, not in ourselves at all but in Your embrace alone. Won’t You do that please? Grant that we all might come in from the dark and join the great celebration, have been lost but now found at last; have once been dead, but now by Your grace, at last, made alive. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.