God For Us

Luke 15:11–32 NRSV

Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout 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 to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up 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 like one of your hired hands.” ’ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then 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 slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’ ”

Perhaps you’ve heard this parable of Jesus a time or two or two hundred. It’s certainly one of Jesus’s greatest hits. I think I like it most because of the way that it continues to meet with me throughout the various stages and seasons of my life. I tend to find myself in all three of the main characters.

Sometimes I’m the father, welcoming people back into my life with forgiveness for what has transpired between us in the past.

More often than I care to admit, I can be the older brother — taking the self-righteous stance and really needing the gut check that this story and the person of Christ offer me… because deep down I know this:

Most of the time I identify with the Prodigal. The one who walked away at one point. The one who squandered very good gifts. The one who still is capable of taking what has been given to me and misusing or underutilizing it. And I don’t think I stand in front of this room alone in that reality.

It’s tough being the prodigal one. But there’s really good news for us when we are. The grace of a loving father is there. We are always welcomed home. We are celebrated and not shamed when we arrive.

Today we continue in our series called “Good Grace” which is a look at how the activity of God intersects with human life in order to accomplish God’s will of turning disobedient humans into people who reflect the original righteousness and plan that God has for us.

Jesus’s disciples once asked him “who can be saved?” Jesus’s answer was “for mortals it is impossible, but not for God, for God all things are possible.”

What this tells us is that it is God’s action and God’s prerogative that allow for us to come face to face with a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. And that activity, as we discussed at length last week, begins from the moment every person is conceived. The grace of God draws us to a moment in which we are faced with a decision. And that decision is what changes our lives forever.

Through the gift of prevenient grace, God is consistently nurturing us and convincing us that we are in need of something else — of something other than what this world has been offering us. We are shown, often gradually, sometimes abruptly, that we are in need of something different.

The son in Jesus’s story came to this realization while he lay wallowing, starving, in a pig pit in a distant land. He said to himself “I know there’s more to life than this.”

And so he made a decision to make the trek home and throw himself on the mercy of his Father. And what he received was far more than he had wagered.

When we talk about God’s grace in this moment of our own personal faith journey — Often the moment we good evangelical folks call “being born again” or “getting saved” — we are talking about what happens when we are simultaneously faced with the reality of our sin and the God who deeply loves us. What happens in this moment is that we stand at the turning point in our lives.

Having been throughly convinced of our sin, we open ourselves to what is known as Justifying Grace. This is the grace that begins to change us forever when we say “I am a sinner in need of saving, and Jesus I believe that you can save me — I put my whole trust in your grace.”

For John Wesley — the theological founder of Methodism — justifying grace included two separate but equal parts.

Forensics

The first part is what technical theological minds call “forensic justification.” Sounds like a legal term right? Well that’s because it is. And I know that this is about to sound very much like a dehumanization of what happens when we do the most important thing that we’ll ever do… but its just the way it is.

When we are living our lives prior to conversion, in our inherited state of disobedience we are subject to what is called the law of sin and death. And without getting too deep into the weeds here, it means that we are fully liable for the consequences of our rebellion against God. Those consequences are death — Both spiritual and physical. This was what God warned Adam about in the Garden of Eden, and its what they became subject to when they did the one thing God told them not to do.

God is a god of Justice, and God allows humans to accept the consequences of sin, until we ask for help.

So what happens when we repent of our sin and surrender our lives to Christ is that we accept a gift that was given to us.

A lot of things happened on the cross, but the most pertinent for this particular discussion is that Christ became the atoning sacrifice for sin. Christ died to deal with the consequences of sin once and for all for any who choose to trust in his grace.

And what that means is that when we accept the gift, we are freed from the law of sin and death. We become “not guilty.” Justifying grace makes it “Just as if I’d never sinned.” We move from the court room into the family room. Case dismissed and the judge adopts you as their child.

Paul puts it like this:

Romans 8:1–4 NRSV

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

New Birth

The next part of Justifying grace is what we call “New Birth.” New Birth is what I call the transformed life. This happens to us so that we are enabled to fully live out the life of a disciple. This happens to us so that we can live in a way that deeply embodies the theological truth that we are the image of God.

Now, this is all a process that occurs over a lifetime, and thats the subject for another day. But the transformed life, or regenerated heart is one in which our heart is turned towards seeing and loving God and our neighbors in new and unfathomable ways to our old selves.

For John Wesley this was a moment that took a long time to occur from his original forensic justification. The hope is that it happens more quickly for all of us here. But everyone has their own timeline.

The regenerated heart is what kickstarts the rest of our Christian journey. When we encounter Justifying Grace and say “yes” to Jesus we are given the thing that God has been so diligently trying to restore in humanity: original righteousness. And this righteousness comes to us — not because we’ve somehow perfected ourselves — but through the righteousness of Christ. His status as righteous becomes our status. We are restored to our former state. And the rest of our lives is meant to be spent trying to live up to that status that we were freely given. Luckily, we don’t go at it alone.

Justifying grace shows us that God is For Us. God is for us because since the very beginning he has created a means for sin to be dealt with. Through the sacrificial system in the Torah, and in it’s culmination through the sacrifice of Christ we have been granted new life. The law of sin and death has been interrupted by the death and resurrection of Christ.

The scriptures say that in our conversion we die and rise with Christ. The old is gone, and we are made new. But not just made new now for our time on earth now. We are made new for eternity. Jesus didn’t just conquer your spiritual death that comes from sin. Jesus conquered physical death as well. The bodily resurrection of Christ signals a new future for all of us. We will physically rise with him when he returns to live an earthly eternal life.

But For Now

But all this talk of the future might be beyond what really matters in the here and now. You’re like, Pastor, I’m just trying to understand God a little better today.

And I get that. We got into the weeds back there. And there’s a lot more weeds than we even saw. People have been trying to understand and explain the saving grace of God for, well like forever. So here’s the deal.

The son. The son is us. The son is you and he’s me. We are given this gift of life on God’s green earth and in one way or another we blow it. We don’t love one another. We don’t love ourselves. We don’t love God. We run the direction we want to go and we squander our gift on selfish living.

Maybe we lie, cheat, steal, gossip, disrespect people, treat people like they aren’t important. We’ve all got our vices, we’ve all got some cleaning up to do. We all, at some point in our lives, have declared our allegiance to a kingdom other than God’s. To a kingdom of our own making.

But the invitation to come home is always open. There’s nothing stopping us but ourselves. And when we decide to return home, there’s God. Just waiting for us. Running to meet us. And when we fall on our faces and say “father I have sinned against you, please take me back as your servant” we are declaring our allegiance to God’s kingdom. And God doesn’t say simply say “come peasant.”

God says “get the finest robe. Put a ring on their finger and sandals on their feet. Let us eat and celebrate, for this child of mine was dead and is now alive. They were lost, and now they are found. Let’s celebrate. I am for you my child”