Sermon Tone Analysis

INTRODUCTION

-{Luke 15}

-In the summer of 2010 and 2011 I led a team to work with missionaries in Japan.

I want to go back there in the worst way.

I love the people, the culture, and the food.

But I also want to go back because Japan is lost—probably less than 1% Christian in the nation.

~We spent a little less than 2 weeks on the mission trip, so it was a long time.

I was excited to go, and it was a blessing to go, but after such a long time away it was good to get home.

~I remember when I got back from the 2011, we landed in Memphis and got through the concourse, and I got to the point where I could see my family waiting for me and they were excited to see me.

I got past the security area and was waiting for the kids (who were much younger then) to just start running up to me so I would take them up in my arms.

But they just stood there staring at me.

So, wondering why they didn’t run to see me, I kept walking for what seemed liked forever to finally see my family.

-Well, what happened was even though I went past the security people, there was a sign further up facing in the other direction that I could not see that told the waiting people on the other side DO NOT GO PAST THIS POINT with the big red stop sign in it and everything--and my kids were obedient in following the sign (after having been sternly warned by my wife)—but I finally got to my family

-After being away there is nothing quite like the feeling of being in the arms of your family—for children, there is nothing quite like the feeling of being wrapped up in your father’s arms, especially if there has been some distance of time and space in between you.

-As true as that is for us and our families here on earth, it is also very true of us spiritually.

When there is distance between us and God the Father it truly is a miserable time; and maybe that is where you are in your life right now.

Sure, you try and hide or deaden the pain of the separation through other things (be it entertainment or pouring yourself into your job or pouring yourself into your house or family or a hobby or whatever), yet the emptiness is still there, and maybe you are afraid of truly taking a step toward God because you are afraid that He will reject you.

-But I am here today to tell you that God is here waiting on you with arms wide open—God loves you more than you could ever know, even more than an earthly father or mother ever could; and He is ready to accept all who would come to Him

-Maybe you are a Christian who has wandered away; you think that if you get close to God, He’s just going to scold you and maybe turn His back on you like you did to Him—I am here to tell you that His arms are wide open waiting for you.

Maybe you are not a Christian but you are afraid to take the step of faith toward Him because you think He is going to hate you and reject you.

I am here to tell you that God is waiting for you with arms wide open to accept you into the family if you repent and believe.

-To show us this great truth, Jesus told a parable.

This might be the most famous of the parables.

Butt Jesus paints an amazing picture for us of the open, loving arms of the Father.

READ Luke 15:11-24

-What led to this parable (and the two parables before it) is that Jesus was hanging out with sinners, to love on them and to save them.

But the religious self-righteous hypocrites didn’t like that too much so they told Jesus off: “How dare you hang out with those kind of people!”

In response, Jesus tells these parables to make sure they (and we) understand how much God loves people.

-In this parable, the youngest son gives us a picture of ourselves, but the father in the story gives us a picture of our God.

I want to look at three pieces of the picture of the Son and then look at the picture of the Father.

1) The Selfish Rebellion of the Son (vv.

11-13)

-The son in this story tells his father that he no longer wants to be under his roof, he wants to go out on his own and do his own thing, so he asks for his portion of what he would get as an inheritance were he to stick around for his father’s death.

In the Middle Eastern culture, that kind of statement is pretty much to wish your father was dead.

-The son in essence says, “You know what, I want nothing to do with you or any other part of the family.

Give me what is mine so I can go off and live my own life; and I am going to live like you don’t even exist.”

So, the son takes the money and runs; and it says he wastes all his money in what we would consider the party life.

He never got a job, he found him a cool flat in the big city to live in and pretty much went clubbing every night.

He rebelled against his father and lived for his own selfish desires and ambitions

-That is a picture of humanity.

It is the picture of you and me.

We were created by Almighty God, yet because of sin in the world brought in by Adam and Eve, we have a sinful nature that is selfish and greedy and defiant.

-So, by our nature, we live like God doesn’t exist.

We don’t want to answer to God or anybody else.

We want to do our own thing and live for our own self-indulgence—as the prophet said: All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way (Isaiah 53:6a ESV)

-We want our own way and don’t want to have to answer for it.

But living in rebellion against God has some dire consequences, For our life now and for eternity.

Sinful rebellion leads to unwise choices which lead to our downfall.

It happened to the son in the story:

2) The Extreme Desperation of the Son (vv.

14-16)

-Because of the son’s rebellious living, he squandered everything that he had and ended up on the street in skid row.

We talk about people hitting the bottom in their life with nowhere to go but up—he was there.

This son was faced with the consequences of His sinful choices and a famine made it worse and it brought him to the point of extreme desperation.

He was cold and hungry and homeless, and he looked for whatever means necessary to survive.

-So, he agreed to work on a farm—but not just any farm—a pig farm.

To any upstanding Jew this would have been the dirtiest, most vile way to make a living.

Pigs were the epitome of unclean animals (which is so strange, because bacon is so heavenly); but, for any Jew just the thought of working with pigs would make them reel inside.

~Yet the son’s situation was so desperate, he took what he could get.

In the self-loathing and dirtiness of his predicament, it didn’t get any better.

He was still starving, so much so he got to the point that he’d be willing to eat the pig slop if he could.

I can’t paint you a picture any clearer of someone hitting rock bottom.

-That is a picture of us in our sin.

Yes, there is a season in life when sin and rebellion seem like fun—living in our own self-indulgence brings the appearance of happiness, but eventually the novelty of it all wears out, and we find ourselves spiritually starving and worse off than we were before; so as the saying goes: Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay.

-So, possibly to deaden the pain of our guilt and desperation, we plunge further and further into rebellion against God, hoping to get ourselves out of the mess we made for ourselves, but all we seem to do is dig ourselves a bigger hole to get out of.

Some of you are there.

Sure, you can put on a mask like anybody else and fake it that everything is OK, but you are hollow and empty and desperate----you’re asking me now, what can I do?

Do what the son did:

3) The Humble Repentance of the Son (vv.

17-19)

-v.

17 “he came to himself/came to his senses”—this is a Jewish way of saying that he determined within himself that he needed to change course if there was going to be any hope for him.

He realized there was a better way, he needed to turn his life around—that is repentance.

-And he also realized that there was only one person who could help him if his life was to be spared, and that was his father.

But to return to the man whom he pretty much wished was dead would take a lot of humble pie.

-He knew he had completely insulted his father and the rest of his family, but the only way to survive was to go back to the father.

He knew he deserved nothing from the father, so he would confess his wrongdoing to the father, and if the father would just hire him as a worker his life would be a lot better than it is now.

He gave up his claim to be a son the minute he walked away; he had already spent his inheritance, there would be nothing left for him as far as any claim in the family is concerned.

But maybe, just maybe, the father would help him out enough to get back on his feet, then maybe move on to live on his own, for surely the father would have nothing to do with him anymore as far as relationship is concerned.

-But the son underestimated the father, like we all do sometimes—and what he finds when he returns home is:

4) The Open Arms of the Father (vv.

20-24)

-The son made the long journey home, probably rehearsing in his mind over and over again exactly what he would say when he first came face to face with his father.

Finally he made the final stretch, but what he found in his father’s reaction took him by surprise—he didn’t find the scowling, angry, “I told you so” attitude at all.

-You know, if we do something like that son did, in our minds eye we may picture the father seeing the son, kind of crossing his arms, looking at the son with contempt, and saying “well, look what the cat dragged in!

What in the world do you want?”

-I think that’s the picture a lot of us have of God.

If we truly came to God, we think that by word and attitude God would reject us.

I’ve heard it said that we project upon God our ideas of His fatherhood of us based upon our own dads, whether good or bad—so for right now whether your dad is/was good or bad or somewhere in the middle, I want you to completely erase projecting those ideas upon God because God is nothing like our fathers.

God is nothing like any human, He is God not man.

I want the picture here in the parable to shape your ideas of Who God is and how he reacts to people who return to Him.

-Look at what the father did:

~It says that he ran.

He didn’t wait for the son to make it all the way home before acknowledging him.

The father ran hard and fast to accept his son back.

It shows that the father had been looking for the son to come back ever since he left, and the second he caught eye of the boy he bolted toward him to receive him because the father so loved and missed him.

Our God is so desirous for us to come to Him (not that He needs us for anything, because he doesn’t) but because He just so loves us with an everlasting love.

~It says that he hugged and kissed him.

Not some quick arm around the shoulder, peck on the cheek kind of thing.

The father bear hugged him with tears streaming down His face, lavishing him with kisses to show his affection on him.

God desires to lavish His affection on us as well.

-It says he gave him a robe, a ring, and sandals.

These were all signs that the father fully reestablished the boy as son.

He wasn’t even going to listen to the boys speech and he sure wasn’t going to have his boy be some slave in his house.