The Bible's Best Dad

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, happy Sunday to you, and Happy Father’s Day as well. It’s good to have you here in person with us.

I’d like to highlight a few announcements listed in your bulletin.

Thank you to everyone who helped with our vacation Bible school this week. We’ll be telling you more about that next week, but it was very successful. So thank you to everyone who volunteered. We appreciate all of your time and hard work.

The men’s group will not be meeting tonight but will meet again next Sunday the 26th. They’ll also be having a men’s prayer breakfast on the 26th at 8 a.m. All men are invited.

During the month of June, the WMU is going to help Love INC’s ministry to families in Waynesboro, Staunton, and Augusta County. We’ll be collecting some paper products, and you can leave those back there at the church entrance or in Randal’s Sunday School classroom.

I’d like to remind you of our called business meeting after the service today as well, where we hope to fill a very needed position of Family Ministry Coordinator. If you’re a church member, please stay behind for that.

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Heavenly Father, Today we ask You to bless our earthly fathers for the many times they reflected the love, strength, generosity, wisdom and mercy that You exemplify in Your relationship with us, Your children.

We honor our fathers for putting our needs above their own convenience and comfort and for teaching us to show courage and determination in the face of adversity. May the love and selflessness they showed us be returned to them in all their relationships, and help them to know that their influence has changed us for the better.

We pray that our fathers who have passed into the next life have been welcomed into Your loving embrace, and that our families will one be day be reunited in your heavenly kingdom.

For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.

Sermon

I was looking through the Bible this past week for someone to talk about for Father’s Day. There are a lot of options, everyone from Adam to Abraham to Jesse to Joseph.

But I realized that none of them, aside from Joseph maybe, really embody the perfect Dad. And even with Joseph, we don’t have enough interactions between him and Jesus to really use him as a guide.

And we need a guide, don’t we? We need the model of what a good father is, whether it’s because some of us are fathers or because we all have fathers. Some of those fathers are wonderful, some of them aren’t so much. And none of them are wonderful all the time. I speak from experience here, with my own two children.

It’s tough to be a dad. It’s tough to know what to do as a father when you’re also something other than a father, you’re a broken and sinful man too.

Then I remembered one of Jesus’s parables. Not just a parable, but THE parable. The most famous parable he told.

It’s known as the parable of the prodigal son, but that title is misleading. It could be better called the parable of the prodigal sons, plural. And even better, it could be called the parable of the loving father.

Turn with me to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 15. We’re going to be looking at two passages of scripture today, starting with the first two verses:

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”

Now skip down to verse 11. We’ll be reading through verse 32:

And he 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.’”

And this is the word of the Lord.

I can’t emphasize enough the power this parable has had down through history. This was Jesus’s preferred way of teaching the general public. He would tell them a story, and in that story there would be profound spiritual truths that were often hidden unless you really thought about them.

And all of these parables were centered around common daily life. That’s what made them so unique. Everyone could understand the surface of what Jesus was talking about, because his stories were about things all of them did. They all plowed fields. They all fished. They all understood the financial system of the time.

But this one here? This one is different than all the rest.

The story of the prodigal son is found only in Luke, and this parable is much more detailed and much longer than the others. In fact, it almost has the flavor of something that really did happen, rather than a story Jesus told in order to share a larger truth.

We feel that when we read this parable, don’t we? This parable just feels different. It strikes us as different, just as it must have struck the people Jesus was talking to at that time.

And the reason why is pretty simple — it’s because we can all see something of ourselves in at least one of these three characters, either the brothers or the father. And if we’re wise, if we really know ourselves as much as we think we do, we can see ourselves in all three.

But for the first part of this sermon, I want to focus on these two sons. We’re meant to compare and contrast them in the way that Jesus wants us to, and what Jesus is saying with this parable is something pretty earth shaking.

He’s saying that up until that moment, everything the human race had ever thought about how we should connect with God has been wrong.

He’s saying that every religion has it wrong. Every secular authority has it wrong. Every philosopher has it wrong. All of them.

And Jesus says that he’s come to shatter all of those false ideas about God, because some of those ideas came close to the truth and some were just completely false, but he is the truth, and he gives that truth right here in these words.

It’s easy for us as Christians — especially since most of us grew up with Christianity and especially since in our nation our laws and the fabric of our society has been influenced by Christian thought — it’s easy for us to forget just how radical a thing Christianity is.

Because Jesus, and the faith that Jesus brought into the world, upended everything. He turned everything on its head.

In fact, did you know that when our faith first rose in the world after the resurrection and the great commission, Christianity wasn’t called a religion at all. It was called an anti-religion.

The Romans even went so far as to call Christians atheists, which in part explains why the early church was so persecuted.

Why would the Romans, who were pretty liberal with religion and who had a god for just about everything, say that these people, these Christians, were atheists? One reason: because what Christians were saying about God was so completely different than what every other religion said.

This story tells us what was so different, so let’s get into it.

This parable is told in basically two acts: there’s the story of the wild and worldly younger brother, and the religious older brother.

Act 1 begins with a speech in verse 12. The hunger brother comes to the father and says, “Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.”

Now let’s stop right here, because right here is where the crowd gathered around Jesus would have gasped. Right here is where people would have been astounded.

In that time, a family’s future generations depended upon the inheritance that would be passed down from father to son. In this case there were two sons, so the eldest would get two-thirds of the inheritance, and the youngest son would get one-third.

But here’s the thing: that only happened when the father died. That’s not the case here, is it? That’s why everyone hearing this story for the first time would have gasped at this. Because it can mean only one thing.

The only reason a son would ask his living father for his inheritance was because the son wished his father was dead.

This son is completely rejecting his father. He’s saying, “I don’t love you, I don’t like you, I don’t respect you. I don’t recognize any control or authority you have over me. I don’t want you, father, but I want my stuff, and I want it now.”

But what’s even more unheard of is the second half of verse 12. It’s what the father does.

Again, in that time and place, a father would be completely within his rights — and even be expected — to disown his son right then and there. Kick him out of the family, out of the house, out of his life, likely with a good deal of violence.

But that’s not what the father does, is it? What’s the father do instead at the end of verse 12?

“And he divided his property between them.”

Amazing, isn’t it? But here’s what I want you to notice. In verse 12, the word “property” is used twice, once by the son and again by the father. But those two words aren’t the same in the Greek.

The Greek word that the son uses is _ousia_. It means goods, possessions, property. Stuff.

But the word the father uses is _bios_. It’s the Greek word that we get the word “biology” from, and it literally means “the present state of existence.”

To understand why the father uses that word, you have to understand the connection that people had to the land in that time. You see this all through the Old Testament. When people in the Old Testament talk about the land, it’s always “the land that we belong to” rather than “the land that belongs to us.”

A person’s identity, especially if that person was a man, was completely defined by the land he owned. To the point where if you lost part of your land, your standing in the community community became less.

This younger son wants his inheritance, his possessions, his goods. But to get it, his father has to give up his identity, to tear his bios, his very body, apart. Because in order for the son to receive his inheritance, his father would have to sell off a third of his land.

And the father does it. The father endures the worse thing that a human being can experience, the rejection of love.

And he doesn’t get mad. He doesn’t turn to hate. That’s how we often act when someone rejects our love, isn’t it? Because we think if we hate someone, if we’re mad at them, then that will take some of the sting out of their rejection.

The father doesn’t do that, though. He just takes the pain. He endures the agony of that rejected love and gives the younger son exactly what he wants.

And what does the son do with his inheritance? First, he goes into the far country, as it says in verse 13. And there he gives himself over to reckless living.

The King James adds that he lived with harlots, with prostitutes. In the Greek, that phrase for “reckless living” literally means “Living without saving anything.”

It’s living for the moment without regard to the future. It’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. It’s the son saying, “Now I’m defining my own truth, and I define it by whatever makes me happy.” And as a result, the youngest son squanders everything.

Verses 14-15: 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.

It’s a natural consequence, isn’t it? The young son has to have this moment when he pauses to wonder where it all went wrong. He had the perfect plan, he had everything laid out. But when you give yourself over to self-centeredness and you let go of all conduct that remembers God, recklessness is the only thing that can follow.

And now here at the end, the only thing the youngest son wants, the only thing he knows can save him, is if he goes home again.

But how can he? Because the son knows now what he’s done. He knows how wrong he was. He knows what he’s cost his own father.

Then he comes up with a plan in verses 18-19:

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.”’

Now a hired servant wasn’t the same thing as a slave. The son isn’t saying that he wants to be his father’s slave. Slaves worked on the estate, but the hired servants lived in town. They were professionals, they were craftsmen, they worked and earned their wage and had their own homes and their own lives.

What this son is doing is trying to buy his way back into his community. He can’t do that just by saying he’s sorry. He has to make restitution.

So he wants to go home and ask his father to make him an apprentice to one of the hired men. He knows he can’t be a son anymore, but he still wants to pay his father back.

He makes the long journey home from the far country, and in verse 20 we get one of the most beautiful scenes in all of scripture:

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.

Here again, the people hearing this story from Jesus would have gasped. Because the father was a patriarch, and patriarchs did not run. Children and women would run, but never men. Never fathers. Because to run, you’d have to pick up your robes and bare your legs, and that was beneath a man’s standing. It would be too embarrassing.

But this father runs. He runs to his son. He shows emotion. He kisses him. The son is worried that has father will never accept him, but the father runs to the son and grabs hold of him and says I’m never going to let you go.

The son tries to share his plan. He says in verse 21, “I’ve sinned against heaven. I’m not worthy to be called your son.”

But the father won’t hear it. He tells the servants in verse 22 to get the best robe, and listen: what’s the best robe? It’s the father’s robe, isn’t it? The best robe would be the father’s best robe.

The father is saying, I’m not going to let you earn your way back, my son. I’m going to bring you back. I’m not even going to wait for you to take a bath. I’m going to cover your rags and your filth with glory.

It’s a wonderful scene, isn’t it? But now we have a problem, because there’s the older brother.

And where do we find the older brother in verse 25? He’s out in the field isn’t he? He’s working. He’s doing what he’s supposed to.

He asks a servant what’s going on with all the music and dancing. When he finds out the youngest brother is home, he’s furious. And really, it all seems to revolve around this fatted calf, doesn’t it? That seems to be the real issue between the father and the eldest son.

Look in verses 29 and 30:

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!’

What’s the big deal here? Well, in that time you almost never had meat for a meal. If you did, then it was an occasion when you invited everyone in town. And the most delicious meal you could prepare, and the most expensive food you could make, was to kill a fatted calf.

The older brother is saying to his father, “How dare you waste your wealth like this? Wasn’t I the one who stuck around? Who worked all this time? I should have some say in this. I have a right over your things too, don’t I?”

He even insults his father in verse 29. He says, “Look.” LOOK, he says. It’s the same thing as the oldest son saying, “Hey, you idiot.”

He’s humiliating his own father right here, and this is after already humiliating his father by not going inside to the party and instead making his father come out.

But again, how does the father respond? Because listen, at this point he has every bit as much right to disown his oldest son for the way he’s talking as he did to disown his youngest son for demanding his inheritance.

But what’s he say? “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. Come in with me. Let’s celebrate. Be welcomed. Share in my joy.”

Does the family come together again? Do the brothers heal their differences? Do they all live happily ever after?

We don’t know. Jesus ends the parable right there. And he does that because the point of this parable isn’t the end. The point is that he’s highlighting just how radical Christianity is through these three main characters: the sons, and the father.

First, he’s telling us something extraordinary about the father. The father in this story is God. Jesus was the first person to address God as Father. All through the Gospels, every time Jesus talks about God, he uses the word “Father.” Every time but one, and we’ll get to that in a minute.

In this story Jesus is defining what he means as father. Fathers are hard and harsh and mean. They rule with an iron fist.

Jesus is saying God isn’t like that. He isn’t like any father of that time. God is loving, God is generous, God is forgiving. Jesus is saying I know a lot of you never had fathers like that, but I do, and you can too.

Jesus brought together both power and tenderness in God. Both meekness and majesty. That’s the first thing that’s so amazing about this story. No one had ever described God that way.

Here’s the second thing: No one had ever described sin this way either.

We understand that the younger brother sinned, don’t we? It’s the classic sin story — he gets greedy, and then he decides to go off on his own and do his own thing. He goes into the far country, away from his father, away from God, and because of those choices, he suffers greatly.

We understand that. And at some point in all of our lives, we’ve lived that.

But there’s more, because there are two sons here.

The younger son is reckless and bad, the older son is responsible and good. But listen — they both want the father’s things but not the father.

Both of them use the father to get what they really want, which is status and wealth. It’s just that one of them does it by being bad, and the other by being good.

You see? Both of the brothers in this story are lost. The bad son is lost in his badness, and the good son is lost in his goodness.

And at the end of this parable, the bad son has been saved, but the good one is still lost. He says he won’t go to the feast. He won’t take part in the joy. He rejects the father because he’s never disobeyed his father. He’s proud of his goodness.

Why would Jesus talk this way? Why would he come down just as hard on the good son as the bad one?

Look back at the first two verses of chapter 15. Who is Jesus talking to?

There are two groups there, the tax collectors and the sinners, and the Pharisees and teachers of the law. The people who live any way they want, and the people who are ruled by the law.

These two groups of people are the two brothers in this parable, and the two brothers represent the two ways people try to make themselves right with God.

There are the ones who say I’m going to find my own truth. I’m going to define what’s right and wrong and what God is and isn’t. I’m going to discover my true self. That’s the younger brother.

And then there are the ones who say I’m going to work hard. I’m going to submit to all the laws. I’m going to follow every rule. I’m going to live my life by doing what’s right. That’s the older brother.

Both brothers say theirs is the right way to live. Both try to control God, one by going off and living any way his wants, the other by being very religious. But Jesus says both brothers are lost.

The older brother says it’s the good people who are on the right side of God, and the bad people who are on the wrong side.

The younger brother says it’s the open-minded people who are on the right side of God, and the bigoted people who are on the wrong side.

But Jesus says it’s the humble people who are on the right side of God, and the proud who are out.

That’s why the older brother is just as lost as the younger one. He’s doing all the right things in this story: he stayed behind, he’s in the fields working, but he’s still lost because he’s being so responsible and so good just to get what he wants.

That’s what religious people do. They obey God to get things. Jesus says you have to be a Gospel person, because a Gospel person obeys God to get God.

You see? We’re so lost in sin that we can’t even do what’s right for the right reasons.

Which brings us to the last point: The reason Jesus uses this parable to talk about God and sin in a new way is so he can talk about salvation in a new way.

Because look at the father here in this story. Look at God. The father doesn’t wait for his youngest son to come into the house. He runs out to greet his son. To embrace his son. Doesn’t matter what the younger son did, the father still loves him. Still kisses him.

And speaking of kissing, notice in verse 20 that it’s the father’s kiss that brings the son’s repentance, not the other way around. It’s not that the son earns his father’s forgiveness by repenting. No, the son repents only because he understands that the father’s forgiveness is freely given.

That’s what Jesus says is so amazing about salvation — the only reason you can find God is because God first seeks you.

But here’s salvation too — Jesus goes after the older brother as well.

It’s not just the sinners in that crowd he’s talking to, he’s talking to the religious people too. And he knows it’s the religious people who are going to kill him. Why? Because the gospel is just as offensive to the religious people as it is to the non-religious people.

The older son? Pharisee. All his holy living is just an act to get what he wants out of God. I’m living my life right, I do all the religious things, so God owes me all my stuff. That’s the older brother.

But what does the father do to the older son? He runs out to him with as much urgency as he ran out to the younger son.

Because they’re both just as lost. The youngest son went bad for all the wrong reasons. The oldest son went good for all the wrong reasons.

And Christ came to save both. He came to save all. Because we can’t do it ourselves. We’re so messed up that even the good things we do are for the wrong reasons, because they’re almost always selfish in some way. We want to curry favor with someone, or we want to curry favor with God.

The oldest son, the Pharisee, the religious person, was really just as bad.

And don’t think that being Christian and religious are the same. They’re absolutely not.

Jesus proved that here. He says the difference between a Christian and a religious person is that a religious person only repents of what he does wrong. A Christian, on the other hand, repents not only of what he does wrong, he repents for all the wrong reasons he did what was right.

We can’t save ourselves. That’s the whole point of this parable. We have to rely on God to save us, and the only way we can truly rely on God is if we understand the cost he had to pay to bring us home.

Look at verse 31. What’s the father tell the oldest son? “All that I have is yours.” What’s that mean?

Well, the younger brother had spent every bit of his inheritance, hadn’t he? So that meant that everything that was left was the oldest son’s. The father’s robe that he put on the youngest son? Technically, that robe belonged to the oldest son. The ring. Even the fatted calf.

You see? The younger son could only be brought back into the family at an enormous cost to the older brother. Because being saved isn’t free. Someone has to pay.

Who paid for us to be saved? The father in this story gave up his life, his bios, to get his son back. The father in our story did the same thing. It was the only way.

I said before that in the Gospels, Jesus refers to God as “Father” every time but one.

The one time he didn’t was when he was on the cross. He doesn’t call out “My Father, My Father.” He calls out “My God, My God.”

Because in that moment he was not being treated as the child of God, and the only reason he wasn’t being treated as the child of God was so we could be.

We’re all younger brothers. We’re all older brothers. Every single one of us is the prodigal son. We squander the grace of God by trading it for worthless treasure, or we squander it by thinking that our good works will earn us a spot in heaven.

But Jesus paid the debt that deep down we all know we owe. He had everything the father had, but he shares it willingly with us.

To the degree you see that, you change your motivation to be a Christian. It’s no longer, “I’ll do these good things so God will love me.” And it becomes, “I’ll do these good things because God loves me.”

Let’s pray:

Father on this day that we honor our earthly fathers, we look to you as our Heavenly Father. The father that grieves for us when we turn away, and the father that runs to us as we return home. The father who has patience with us in our pride and our sin. The father every single one of us needs. Thank you, Lord, for being that father for us. And help us each day to model that same love, that same patience, that same unending grace that you give us. We may go to our own far countries. We may sin and think you owe us everything because of our good works. But even in our ignorance, there is your love. Thank you for that, and thank you for all the fathers both here in this world and waiting for us in the next. For it’s in Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.

Business Meeting

I’m about to call to order a special business meeting of the church. If you’re not a member of this church and you’d like to stay, you’re more than welcome and I promise it won’t take but a few minutes.

If you’d like to go, however, then that is entirely fine and we’ll see you back here next week.

So, those who wish to stay, please be seated. I will call this business meeting of Stuarts Draft Baptist Church to order.

Will someone make a motion to approve the position of Family Ministry Coordinator to be filled by Jesyka Rowzie (for a yearly salary of $11,720)?

Is there a second?

And is there any discussion?

Will all those in favor of approving this motion please raise your hand?

All those opposed?

The motion is carried.

Please stand for the benediction:

Now may the God of peace who raised Christ from the dead strengthen your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty rest upon you and dwell within you this day and evermore. Amen.