2016-04-03 Luke 15:11-24 Two Kinds of Prodigal (3): When God Lets Go

TWO KINDS OF PRODIGAL (3): WHEN GOD LETS GO (Luke 15:11-24) 2016-04-03 Read Lu 15:20-24 – John Bunyan was a nonconformist in 17th century England who was jailed for 12 years for preaching without a license. Other nonconformists, like the Anabaptists, were also thrown into prison in those days. So there they are in prison, not knowing whether they would live or die the next day, so what do they do at night? Debate theology, of course! The Anabaptists said to Bunyan, “You keep assuring people of God’s love. If you keep pressing God’s love, people will do whatever they want.” Bunyan’s famous reply was, “No – if you keep assuring God’s people of God’s love, they will do whatever God wants.” Well, I’m with Bunyan, Beloved. Can people take advantage of grace? Not if they really understand how holy God is, how far we fall short of His glory and how far He has reached to save us. That brings us in our study of the Prodigal sons to the 2nd major player – the Father. We’ve seen the rebellion and repentance of the younger son. Now we come to the father who represents, of course, God the Father. In this story, Jesus breaks all bounds of human fatherhood and presents an image of a father that goes beyond anything His culture or any culture expected of a human father. His is a whole new paradigm of fatherhood. This father’s love dazzles! It’s like Hosea 11 where God describes Israel as a prodigal child, then says in 8b-9: “My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. 9) I will not execute my burning anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not a man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” What a picture of the heart of God. This is God as first responder. Eventually, God must judge sin. His holiness requires it. But his first response reflecting His heart is to urge people to repent, turn to Him. We suffer when we do not. We learn here 8 things God does for us – each showing a different attribute or characteristic of God. I hope by the time we finish this study our trust in and love for God as Father will change our lives. Here is His patience urging rebellious children to turn to the blessing of His arms. How’s He do it? I. The Father Let’s Us Go (Patience) 12 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. The phrase, “And he divided his property between them,” tells us a lot about God – mostly that He gives people the right to choose against Him – to go 1 their own way – to choose sin over Him. That should strike fear in our hearts. God gives us enough rope to hang ourselves. The freedom to choose is both a blessing and a loaded gun. And we think our ways are better than God’s commands; if we find His ways onerous and take our pleasure where you find it – if our theme song is “I Did It My Way” – then we need to consider three things this passage shows us about God’s letting us go. A. He Lets Us Go At His Expense Look at the request: “Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.” Isn’t that interesting? This rebellious young man couldn’t even leave the home without his father’s help. He’s asking Dad to finance his rebellion! Jesus included this because He wants us to see a fascinating aspect of running from God that people seldom consider. When we neglect or deny or run from God – we’re playing with house money. We can’t rebel against God on our own nickel. No one can. Everything we are or hope to be comes from Him. How did you get life in the first place? You say, “Mom and Dad.” And it’s true they were human instruments, but David saw beyond that to the ultimate source in Psa 139:13, “For you (God) formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” Jer 1: 5) “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” Every person who ever lived came into this world already in debt to God for life. We are not some accident; we are the product of an infinitely creative and loving God. Gen 2:7: “then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Life’s a gift from God; every move we make’s at His expense. What about your job, your living? You say, “I got an education and worked hard to get what I have. You can’t drag God into that?” Really! So who gave you the health to succeed while someone else, thru no fault of their own, suffered a debilitating illness? Who gave you the mind to get thru school? Who gave you the raw ability that you have honed to create whatever success you have had? Who placed you in America where the opportunity is unlimited instead of Bangladesh where you’d be lucky to be herding someone else’s goats? Whose money have you been playing with? Jas 1: 16 “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. 17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” It’s intriguing that those who devise sophisticated intellectual arguments denying or betraying God do so with a mind He gave them. Naturalism can’t 2 explain a self-conscious human mind. People regularly render moral judgments regarding right and wrong without once acknowledging that this insistent, internal sense of how things ought to be – this “sense of oughtness” – is completely unexplainable by the naturalistic evolutionary processes they claim resulted in man. They accuse God of evil while holding to a system in which evil has no meaning. How can this be? They’re playing with house money – rebelling against God based on intuitions He has placed in them, but for which their naturalistic beliefs have no explanation. God explains our sense of right and wrong easily in Rom 2:15, “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.” Why do we know right from wrong? Because God gave us a conscience! Ironic? You can’t leave God without God’s help any more than the prodigal could leave home without Dad’s help. But we’ll account for our choices. C. S. Lewis once said, “There are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” How many people will use the freedom God gives to destroy themselves in the end. B. He Lets Us Go To His Shame That should give us pause. When we rebel against the Father, we shame him. This young man certainly did. Note he insists: “Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them.” By law in Deut 21:17 the eldest son would have received a double portion. Thus, this boy was asking for 1/3 of his Father’s holdings. But the holdings were in land! To provide inheritance early meant selling land and dividing the proceeds. It was a shameful thing the prodigal was asking his father to do. Everyone would know of the rebellion. The whole family would be disgraced. The Father could rightly have disowned this son. But he would not go there. He suffered the shame of meeting his son’s outrageous request. The father’s shame is amplified by Luke’s choice of words. 13) “Father, give me the share of property (οὐσίας – a general term for property or wealth) that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property (βίος – life!) between them.” We get our word “biology” from βιος. Luke is telling us Father and son see things completely differently. To the son, it was all just cash on the barrelhead – things to be used. To the father, it was his life – not in a bad way, but in the sense that his mission was tied up in that. Kind of like the R&H musical Oklahoma!: “Oh, we know we belong to the land / And the land we belong to is grand.” It’s not the land belongs to us, but we belong to the land. This father’s identity was tied up in his land, and the son, without 3 thought or shame, asks for it to be torn away from his father, cashed out and divvied up. It all pictures a greater Father who has borne the shame for a wayward race of people, doesn’t it? Heb 12:2, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Imagine the shame to both Father and Son as Jesus hung on that cross, naked, condemned, bearing the sin of all who would ever believe. Yet Jesus went willingly – despising the shame. “Despising” means “to disregard or consider of little importance” compared to something greater. Even the shame of our sin, Jesus considered of little account so that He could forgive all who would ask. But what of the prodigals who will not return? Heb 6:6 says of those who will not repent, “they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.” Those who will not repent, perhaps thinking they do not need to repent, shame the Father continually. How? Their actions say Jesus didn’t need to go to the cross. They’re saying the Father erred in sending Him. God gave His own life through His Son and they say, “But I don’t need you!” Thus, they are crucifying Him again and again – just as the prodigal ripped the life out of his father by selling off the estate. I like how D. A. Carson puts it. He says when a God who has not only made us, but made us in His own image, and then died to save us from the rebellion that we continually perpetrate – when that God is faced with a creature who says, “No, I will declare my own good. What you declare to be evil, I will declare to be good. What you say is good, I will declare evil” it is a tragedy. Carson says, “What is so wretchedly tragic is God’s image-bearer standing over against God. This is the de-god-ing of God so that I can be my own god.” The creature who was made to glorify its creator God is instead in active or passive rebellion disgracing God. Glory has been traded for shame. So why does God put up with this shame? C. God Lets Us Go For His Purposes Why did the Father let the prodigal go? Because he hoped for his return. We see that in v. 20 where we are told that when he actually did return, “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” Dad let him go hoping for the development of a relationship based in love. He seeks repentance. 4 And so our heavenly Father lets us go with an expectation as well. Rom 2:4, “Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” Why is God patient? Why does He not wipe us out as we pile up offense after offense against His holy character? He’s hoping His kindness will lead to repentance. He intends His patience to bring us to the foot of the cross to find forgiveness and peace. That is His holy purpose in letting us go – that we might turn to Him voluntarily from a heart of love and gratitude. But letting go opens the possibility of rejection, right? There is only one way to the Father. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except thru me.” One way to a relationship with our Creator. But there are a million ways to go to run away, and when the Father lets us go. He is simply giving us the right that we insist upon to go to hell in the manner of our own choosing. It’s a scary thing to be let go by God. His purposes are always good; ours, not until we are ready to turn to Him. II. The Father Longs for Our Return (Goodness) “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” How did Dad know he was coming a long way off? It can only be because he had been watching intently the whole time. Every chance he had, he was watching. And then one day he noticed a traveler. The father probably looked away at first, the man looked so old, dirty, stooped and unkempt. But something about the way the man walked drew his eye back. That gait was familiar and so he looked intently as hope began to build in his heart. And soon he knew. There was little to identify the boy, but there was no mistaking the way he walked. And so the father began to run to him. What does this tell us? It tells us the Father longs for lost sinners to turn to Him. He longs for those who have messed up everything to turn to Him. He longs for those who are doing quite well but still have a severe emptiness inside – an emptiness that only He can fill – to turn to Him. The day will come when He must and will judge those who reject His love. But that is not where His heart is. Ezekiel 18:32: “For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD; so turn, and live.” Turn, repent, live! This is His heart– this desire for the return of those He has created in His image, coming to Him because they love Him and want Him. Peter reminds us in II Pet 3:9 that the Lord is “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” That’s His desire. That is His heart, and yet He will not force 5 Himself on anyone. We must come of our own volition and heartfelt desire for home, just as the prodigal is coming. Conc – So our first two lessons about the Father. He lets us go, in the sense that He allows us the freedom to reject Him and choose our own way. But He longs for our return and sometimes sends famines and hardships intended to focus back on Him. More than that, at great pain and shame to Himself He has paid the price for our return – payment has been made for the sins of all who will turn to Him. But we must choose. On August 28, 1982, 20-year-old PFC Joseph White, stationed in Korea, ran across the minefield of the DMZ, heading to North Korea as fellow soldiers pleaded with him to turn back. An official investigation determined that he defected “for motives that are not know,” tho soldiers who were stationed there at the time reported that as a result of a dispute with his Sgt., his freedom to visit his Korean girlfriend had been pulled. They believed he may have gone AWOL to be with her. When the Army released its official report confirming the defection, his parents appeared at a press conference near their home in St. Louis. Wiping tears father said he accepted that his son was indeed a traitor but then said this, “He has lost his credibility in this country, even with me.” But then his father’s heart showed thru as he continued, “But I still love my son, and I want him back.” I want him back. Multiply that by a million times and you just begin to glimpse the heart of God. He wants us back from the empire of darkness and sin and evil. Everyone who rejects His Son has lost all credibility. They have shamed the Father and the Son. And yet – the Father still loves you and wants you back. Rom 5:8, “But God shows His love for us in while we were still sinners (in a state of defection), Christ died for us.” He paid for our return if we will only accept it. Joe White never made it home. Reports indicate that he died within three years of his defection. Don’t let that be you. Come home to the Father while you can. Let’s pray. 6