The Lost Son: Experiencing the Love of the Father Luke 15:11-24

Introduction: We all long to be loved

There is something within each of us that longs to love and be loved.

Think of all the media that is based around the topic and idea of love:

Songs

Movies

TV Shows

Commercials

Internet

Even our political agendas are based upon the idea of how we can better love and respect others, however imperfectly they might be in actually accomplishing those goals.

Jared C. Wilson, a professor from Midwestern Baptist Seminary just released a book called “Love Me Anyway.” He writes: “Love is the most lauded subject in all of music, all of poetry, all of literature. All of life! It is the thing - if you can call it a thing - we all dream of and live to pursue and, once captured, still wonder at its mercurial feeling. Why doesn’t it seem to last once found? Why doesn’t romantic love, for instance, continually surge upward into ever-increasing realms of bliss? Why does love so often… hurt?”

It is what we are all after and can never seem to fully and satisfactorily seem to find. This is what we actually see in the story of the Lost Son.

Dr. Jason looked last week at the love of the Father for his son. The Lost Son always had that love. However, he rejected the love of the Father to pursue his own interests. If we are looking for love, why did the Son not see and recognize the love that he already had at home? And if the Loving Father loves us like he loves the lost son, why do we keep going on this search for love as if we’ve never truly experienced it before.

Wilson continues on by asking the question, “Now that we’ve found love, what are we going to do with it? Want more of it, of course. And when what passes for love fails to satisfy the way we expect love should, we assume we’re out of love, perhaps were never truly in it. Maybe it’s not just ordinary love we need but true love. Whatever that is.”

True love is what the Father has for his lost son and for each of us. However, we have a problem experiencing this love because we are looking for love based on our own definition. And there’s about as many definitions of love as there are individuals on this planet. Because we all try to define love by what we think will satisfy us. And sadly, our own definition of love will always fall short of the kind of love we were made for.

This is the story of the lost son. He had a love he couldn’t experience because he wanted it on his own terms instead of what it truly is.

The Father Loves Even When You Are Unlovable - v. 11-16

We learned last week that the Father is a truly infinitely loving father. However, the lost son could not experience his love at home because he didn’t receive it the way he wanted. So he became a complete and utter unlovable terror to his father. Why the son wanted to leave home and take his inheritance with him we don’t fully know. Perhaps he got tired of his father hounding him about taking out the trash or to go find a job. Whatever it was, though the father loved his son, his son did not experience the love his father had for him.

To continue to love his son cost the father greatly.

Financially - The father is giving up a third of his property to give to this unlovable son. The oldest brother would have received the greater share by receiving two parts and any other brothers would receive one portion. So out of the two brothers, the younger son is asking for one third of the total property of his Father. And this cost was so great, the word for property here in the greek is “bion” from the root word “bios” which if you are familiar with words like biology, you will see that it means “life.” The Father is not just giving up property, he is giving up his very life to his son. And what the son did with this property had to cut the father to his heart. v. 13 says he gather all he had, which indicates that he took this property his father gave to him and sold it turning it into cash. So not only did he no longer want to be at home with his father, he didn’t even want the things his father gave him but simply wanted the cash that came from it to spend as he pleased.

Relationally - But the financial cost is not what hurt the father’s heart the most. No, the real pain was caused by the meaning of the request. The son wasn’t simply asking for stuff. He was asking for stuff that should have come to him only after his father died. He, in essence, was saying he wished his father would hurry up and die, and in fact, he couldn’t wait for him to die so he would just go ahead and grab his stuff and leave.

And yet, in spite of the cost and the hurt the son caused his father, the father never quit loving his son. Long after the son’s departure, the father would wait for the day his son might return. This is true love, to continue to love someone and want their good even when there is no benefit for you. In fact, this kind of love will hurt deeply. This is the kind of love the father has for us. We are all the lost son. We have all told God by our sin that we do not want Him. We simply want His blessings and go on our way and to please leave us alone. We are that unlovable, yet God still loves us. So why didn’t the son and why don’t we know and experience God’s love? Because we try to define what love should look like for us and when it doesn’t come the way we want it, we reject that love. And yet God Himself is the definition of love. 1 John 4:8 “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

So if we are looking for true love, how do we experience this love that the father has for us? We cannot experience it as long as we keep trying to define it ourselves.

Acknowledge Your Sin - v. 17-19

The son goes off and experiences what he thinks life should look like. He took a trip and spent his inheritance in reckless living. Perhaps he made a lot of friends because of his wealth. He was able to experience all the things that make life pleasurable. He finally had the life he wanted, but his father wouldn’t give to him.

Yet, it didn’t take long for his wealth to disappear. And so did all the things that made life pleasing. A famine arose and he experienced total bankruptcy and whatever friends he made were no longer to be found.

Sin promises to fulfill our deepest desires. We might even feel loved and satisfied for a while. But sin can never last forever. In fact, it hardly ever lasts very long. What we thought would be fulfilling quickly dies out. This is where we begin to think, well maybe there’s something better to fulfill me longer. And we keep searching and coming up in vain until we are doing whatever it takes to simply survive.

The son got to the point where he was working for Gentile masters feeding pigs. This is about as low as it goes for a Jewish man. He is completely humiliated and at the end of his rope. He is so hungry now for any kind of love or kindness he was hoping that someone would let him eat with the pigs. The life he thought he wanted ended up empty.

Things get so low that he finally comes to his senses. This hardship is God’s grace! Not everyone gets to the point where they realize that what they’ve been chasing has been empty and fruitless. Some people continue on chasing their worldly desires until they get to the end of their life completely unsatisfied and disillusioned with life. But the son came to his senses. He realized how much better life with his father was than living the life he thought he wanted. His thoughts even went to his father’s servants that they had it better than he did. To live as a servant would be better than to live with the pigs.

What does he do? V. 18 -19 - He acknowledges his sinfulness before God and before his father. He is not asking for anything other than to work for his father as a servant. He has lost the idea that he deserves anything and that life would simply be better in the presence of his father as a servant than experiencing the pleasures of life away from him.

If we want to experience the love of the father, we must first come to admit and acknowledge our sinfulness against God and to recognize we are entitled to nothing, but simply to desire God Himself. Even if we have nothing else, if we are in His presence we have all we could ever need.

Turn Back to the Father - v. 20a

But it doesn’t stop at simply acknowledging our sin. To experience the love of the father, we have to turn back to him. Often we ask the question, why is God so distant from us all the while we never acknowledge the fact that it is us who has put the distance between us and God. God has not left you, you have left God and any distance that there might be is because of our own sinfulness.

The son realizing what he has done has determined to go back home in humility and to ask for his father’s mercy and the ability to sit at his father’s servants’ table.

In these five verses, we actually see a picture of the first four beatitudes that Dr. Jason spent the last several weeks preaching through.

Blessed are the poor in spirit - the son had to come to grips with his own bankruptcy and he could do nothing to help himself. He needed the help of his father if he was going to live.

Blessed are those who mourn - He acknowledged his sin and began to truly mourn and repent of what he had done against his father and against God.

Blessed are the meek - He had to humble himself to go back. He knew there was a strong possibility that he would be ridiculed by his family, his old friends, and his neighbors. In fact, there’s even a possibility that he would be stoned on his way back to the father because Jewish law would have demanded that a child like himself who so dishonored and disrespected his father should be put to death. So he is having to humble himself and receive whatever consequences came due to his rebellious actions.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness - He no longer hungered for what the world offered. He had that and was left empty. He hungered for his father’s provision, even as a servant, knowing that what his father had would be so much better than what the world could offer.

Trust the Father Loves You Because of Who He is, Not Because of What You’ve Done - v. 20b-24

So the son gets up to return home. What happens even as he is still far off? His father sees him and runs to him.

Why does he run? Well, we see the proof that the father still loves his son in spite of all the son has done. This is our story too. Even in spite of all we have done, the Father still loves us too. We cannot out-sin God’s love for us.

But there’s a greater picture of love happening here. Just as the son had to humble himself to come home because he knows what the reaction from the community would be from ridicule to possible death for his sin, the father knows this too.

The father is doing the unthinkable by disgracing himself and running to his son because he knows there’s a chance that the community might rightfully retaliate against the son’s rebellion against his father and rise to stone him.

The father by running to his son is willing to not just humiliate himself by running, something that would be unthinkable in the middle eastern culture, but he was also putting himself in harm’s way because if stones began to fly, he would struck by those stones instead of his son.

Philippians 2:5-8 “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

This is the picture of what Christ Himself came to do. The Lord of glory came running to this earth, taking on the form of a humble servant, humiliating Himself, and placing himself in harm’s way and fully taking upon Himself the full weight and punishment for our rebellion.

And what did the son do to earn this love from his father? Nothing. He couldn’t even finish his statement of repentance to his father before his father started calling for the best robe and a new ring and new shoes to be placed upon him. The father wants to cover him in his best garment and to cover his shame and sin and present him once again as his son.

Before we can experience this love, we must repent and turn to Christ in faith, but know there is nothing we can do to earn this kind of love and grace from the father. This love is there being offered to us in Christ alone by grace alone through faith alone.

Conclusion