Unquenchable Love

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. You see, many people assume that God loves them only when they've returned home and only after they've cleaned up their lives. That is not true. God loved us while we were still sinners, while we were wandering in the far country. We live in a cancel culture.

You offend me, I cancel you. Sin did not cancel God's love for you. Right now, He is looking for you.

Right now, He is longing for you to come home. Welcome to another week of gospel-saturated teaching here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer, pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Today we're visiting one of the most famous parables Jesus ever told, the story of the prodigal son. Now, we all know this story and have no doubt learned many lessons from it, but there's a reason this parable is so popular.

I think it's because we see the biography of all of human history, the story of every single one of us. We've all gone our own way at some point, and then we see a picture of God's extravagant love that is more astounding and more surprising than we had ever dared to hope. So grab your Bible and settle in. We are headed back to the book of Luke for a sermon pastor J.D.

titled, Unquenchable Love. Luke 15, if you got your Bibles this morning, and I hope that you brought them. Luke 15, open them up, turn them on, whatever you got. Luke 15, one of Christian history's most famous paintings is Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son. What many don't know about this painting is that this was actually Rembrandt's second painting of the prodigal son. The first Rembrandt did in 1637 when he was only 30 years old. In that version of this picture, Rembrandt places the prodigal son in a brothel.

The colors are bright. He's got this elated look on his face, a drink in one hand, and a beautiful woman on his lap. If you look closely, they say you can see that Rembrandt painted his own face as the face of the prodigal. And the second version, this is one that Rembrandt painted at the very end of his life. It was in fact his last painting, his last statement to the world about his life.

It is clear that by this point in his life, his view of the story had changed. The mood of this version is fundamentally different. In this one, everything is dark. The colors are muted, and you can feel that the brokenness of the prodigal and the light in the picture directs you to the overwhelming compassion of the father. In the first painting, the focus was on the prodigal. In the second, the focus is entirely on the father. Most interesting to me, perhaps, is the fact that in this second painting, Rembrandt does not put his face on the returning prodigal. And biographers say that that was intentional, and that was because Rembrandt doesn't want you and me looking at the painting saying, oh, look, look, see that one there?

That's Rembrandt. No, he wants us to see ourselves in the story, and he wants our focus not to be on the prodigal. He wants it to be on the compassion of the father. You see, this story is the biography. The one we're going to look at today is the biography of every single person in human history put into a parable. It is the story of our relationship with God.

It is your story. Again, Luke 15. We're going to begin in verse 11. Verse 11 shows you that the story has three main characters. There is a younger son. He's the one that we typically call the prodigal. There is an older son who has a very important role in the story that we sometimes overlook, and then there is the father. A couple of things that people usually get wrong about this story. First, they think the main character is the runaway son, but the main character, as Rembrandt realized, is the father.

The father is mentioned no less than 12 times in a span of 20 verses. Second thing they get wrong is that they think the word prodigal means runaway. That's not what the word prodigal means. Prodigal is an old-fashioned word that means reckless or wasteful.

The prodigal spins and spins until he has nothing left. The word prodigal only appears one time in the story, and it's a reference to the son blowing all of his money. What I'm going to try to show you today is that when you see the bigger point in the story, you will realize that the word prodigal applies just as much to the father as it does to the son because the story is about the recklessness of God's love. As extravagant as is the younger son spending, even more extravagant is the father's love in redeeming. Look at verse 11. Look at verse 11. 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. In this story, Jesus gives you a picture of the anatomy of sin, an analysis of sin.

Sin almost always has three distinctive elements, right? The first is a desire for independence. The son does not want to be in the father's house. The son does not want to be under the father's guidance and care and protection.

He doesn't want to be under the father's rules. For years, I have explained to my own children that the essence of sin is revealed in how you spell the word. How do you spell the word sin? S-I-N.

The middle letter is I. Sin is when I want to be in the center. I want to be in charge, not God. I want to make the rules, not him. My way, my desires, my glory. This boy thinks my ways are better than my father's.

I am the wisest. The second element of sin is a demand for instant gratification. A demand for instant gratification. The son does not want to wait for his inheritance. It's all coming to him anyway, but he wants it now. Quite often, people get tangled up in sin because they can't wait for God's timing.

I've got to have it all right now or I cannot be happy. You know, the writer of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament identifies this, this demand for instant gratification as the reason that a lot of people forfeit eternity in heaven. He uses the Old Testament story of Esau to illustrate that. Esau was the firstborn son of Isaac and he comes in from hunting one day and he is powerful hungry. So his conniving younger brother Jacob offers to give him a bowl of porridge if Esau would yield to him the rights and the privileges of the firstborn.

Now this was a colossally stupid trade. It'd be like trading your entire retirement portfolio for a cold beer, but in an incredible act of insanity, Esau does it and the writer of Hebrews uses this to illustrate what many people do with their eternity, particularly with their desires for sexual immorality. They sacrifice the eternal on the altar of the temporal.

They give away eternal life and happiness with God for a temporary thrill that doesn't last long and doesn't really satisfy anyway. So your second part of sin is this demand for instant gratification. The third element and the most serious element of all is a desire for the father's death, a desire for the father to be dead. The father is an obstacle to the boy's freedom. It's not that he hates his dad as a man, it's just that his dad represents an obstacle to doing things his way and so he wants him gone, right? In saying give me my inheritance, he's like I wish you were already dead. He wants his dad's stuff, but he doesn't want his dad.

You know there are a few things more painful that a parent could ever experience, but every parent knows that there comes a point when it is useless to try to force an adult child to do something that they don't want to do. And so verse 12 with broken heart, the father divided his property between them which leads us to our first point. God loves you when you break his heart. You see the shock of this story to the Jewish audience is that this father does not respond how Jewish fathers in that day were expected to respond. In fact in Deuteronomy 21 the Jewish law said that a boy that did such a thing should be stoned to death. This kind of rejection, this kind of arrogance, pride, ungratefulness, this kind of rebellion the Jewish law says was worthy of death. Even in those situations where the family did not carry through with the sentence, the Jewish community performed a ceremony called the Kezazah.

The Kezazah which literally meant cutting off in which they would declare the rebellious boy to be dead to them and no one in the community would ever speak to them again. The shock of this story is that this father does not respond that way. He lets his son go and instead of pursuing him in anger he opens up his hands and he gives his son the inheritance.

Literally in Greek the word for inheritance is the word bios, his very life. This was more than giving the boy a little money, right? He let the boy go even though it tore his very soul. Verse 13, not many days later the younger son gathered all that he had and took a journey into a far country and there he squandered his property in reckless. There's your word prodigal, 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.

He was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate and no one gave him anything. Number two, God loves you as you wander in the darkness. God loves you as you wander in the darkness. This young prodigal's new life started out swimmingly.

Sin always does. He's in the far country, right? He's away from the father. He's away from the restrictions. He's away from the guidelines where he enjoys now everything that money can buy.

Sin always starts out this way. It's parties and freedom and excitement but then the winds changed which they always do. The money ran out.

The friends left. Then came the brokenness, the loneliness and now this young man who had grown up in privilege and promise is reduced to begging. His new life ends with him taking the lowest job in all of Israel feeding pigs. Pigs were unclean.

They were defiled and there we find this boy sitting in the pen with the pigs dirty, defiled, hungry, so hungry that he's sharing food with the pigs wondering how in the world that he got there. Maybe that's where you are this weekend. Maybe sexual sin has led you to a series of relationships where you can barely even look at yourself anymore. Maybe it's a pornography addiction that seemed to start out harmless enough but now it's got you in a place that you don't even know how you got there. Maybe it's alcoholism or maybe it's drugs. Maybe you've lost your job. Maybe you're losing your family. You're in debt. Maybe you're listening to me right now from prison and that path you chose with all the money and all the excitement and all the thrills it promised so much but it has not led where it promised. The pleasures of sin are real but they only last for a season. Eminem who I typically don't quote a lot during sermons he acknowledged recently, listen to this, you got to be careful what you wish for.

I always wish for this but it's become more of a nightmare than a dream. Or take Billie Eilish, she had the number one album in 2019 at only 18 years old. She said recently in an interview you fame is trash.

Why? She said because the more famous I got the less I enjoyed my life. The Bieber explained recently even I had a lot of money.

Clothes, cars, accolades, achievements, awards and I was still unfulfilled. He wrote a song called Lonely. Some of you probably heard that which explains that journey. Maybe that's where you are this weekend. You're in the far country.

Here's the good news. God loves you as you wander in the darkness. He's never stopped loving you.

You see you should almost read this story in split screen. On one side of the screen is the son and his reckless living. On the other side though is the father who's never looked away. The son doesn't realize it but at that very moment that he is eating with the pigs, the father is looking his direction, loving him, thinking about him.

He's never stopped. You see many people assume that God loves them only when they've returned home and only after they've cleaned up their lives. That is not true. God loved us while we were still sinners, while we were wandering in the far country. You see I got good news for you this weekend. Your sin did not cancel God's love for you. We live in a cancel culture.

You offend me, I cancel you. Sin did not cancel God's love for you. Right now he is looking for you.

Right now he is longing for you to come home. In Hosea chapter 11 verse 7 here's what Hosea or God says through Hosea, my people are bent on turning from me. They're not just doing evil. They're bent on doing evil.

They're addicted to doing evil. All they do is think about how to get away from me. All they do is resent me.

All they do is stay angry at me. So what does God respond with? I'll show you who's God. No, verse 8, how can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I turn you over, O Israel? When you were doing evil, when you were at your worst, God says.

Not just doing evil, but bent on doing evil. When you were addicted to it, it was then that God cried out, how can I give you up? When you were at your worst, that's when he loved you the most. And the miracle of miracles, our sin, did not cancel God's love for us.

It's almost as if it made him love us more. He loves you while you wander in darkness. Number three, God loves you as he brings you back. God loves you as he brings you back. Verse 17, 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 know I will arise and go back 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.

Just treat me as one of your hired servants. And he rose and came to his father. You know, one thing you may not notice about this story, it looks in this story like the son just up and decides to come home on his own, but that's not true. You see, the third, this is the third of three stories in which Jesus talks about God's love for sinners.

The first is a story about a lost sheep. A shepherd, Jesus said, had 100 sheep and one went missing. The shepherd couldn't just cut his losses and rejoice in the 99. He had to go after the one.

Even though it probably would have made better sense just to pay attention to the 99, the shepherd couldn't do that. I read a business book recently that explained that we tend to focus too much on business that we lose, not realizing that usually it would be more profitable to focus on developing what we have left than it is trying to go after what we lost. And I suppose that is usually good business advice, but that does not work when you love the one that you lost.

You have to find it. You can't be happy when it's lost. In fact, the shepherd in this story has more joy over the one that's reclaimed than the 99 that are there, healthy and fruitful and multiplying. That's how God feels about you. Like the shepherd, he is out looking for you right now.

He is calling out to you. The second story Jesus tells us about a lost coin. Same situation, a woman's got 10 coins and she loses one somewhere in her house. Similar to the previous story, she doesn't just rejoice in the nine she has left.

She pulls apart the house piece by piece under the rug and she takes the cushions out of the sofa and she takes all her clothes and dumps out the pockets and checks the washing machine and the dryer until she finds that lost one. You know that feeling when you lose your credit card? You're not content with the other six you have in your wallet. You've got to find the one that's lost. I said desperation.

This woman feels for that coin. The climax of Jesus's trilogy in this is this story about the lost son. The nature of love is that it just doesn't stop.

It can't give up. Several years ago, Rick Langston, who was one of our lead pastors, one of our lead pastors had a younger son, Michael, who just disappeared one day. Nobody knew where he was. He'd been having a tough time in school and he wasn't getting along at home, but then one day he was just up and gone. His parents frantically called around, but nobody had any idea where he was. Rick said he remembered his son talking about wanting to run away to New York City, so he and another one of our pastors, David Thompson, jumped into a car and drove all night up to New York City.

Of course, you realize New York City is a humongous place, so when they got to the edge of the city, they stopped, they prayed, and they split up. David headed over to Times Square and went in Times Square and thought, where would Michael go in Times Square? And so we went into the McDonald's and there sat Michael. He called Rick and he said simply, I found him. I found him.

Rick told me, he said, I never heard three sweeter words in all of my life. I found him. By the way, Mike is now married and he and his wife, Megan, now belong to our downtown campus and they serve as foster parents, so this serves, turns out very well indeed, but the point is this is the desperation that God feels for you when you were lost. He can't be happy until he finds you. Again, you don't see it illustrated as much in this final story, but he is seeking you just like the shepherd goes out looking for the sheep or the woman goes out looking for the lost coin. He puts things into your life to call out to you, to wake you up. Sometimes it's a memory that you can't shake. Sometimes it's a conversation that just comes out of nowhere.

Sometimes it's pain, a broken marriage, a severed relationship, a lonely heart, a failed career. I talked once with a professional athlete here in the area who was one of the most promising young athletes around. He had just signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with a professional team, but he and some buddies had hopped onto some motorcycles and gone out to have some fun. He had an accident where he shattered his leg in multiple places beyond repair.

His contract stipulated that if he hurt himself while riding a motorcycle, his contract would be null and void. That meant that in the space of just a moment, he had lost literally everything. We were sitting together at the Mad Hatter in downtown Durham, and he told me through tears in his eyes, he said, as I lay there in that hospital room, all I could think is why would God do this to me?

He said, my other thought was I can't believe I threw away my entire career for a few seconds on a motorcycle. He confessed to me there sitting there in that coffee shop that he had not been walking with God, but this accident had forced him to rethink some things. And that's when he'd come into our church. That's when I had met him.

So there we sit in the middle of the Mad Hatter in downtown Durham. And I looked at him and I said, Hey man, I don't mean to speak too boldly or presumptively, but I don't think you should interpret this as God's anger at you. I think you should interpret it as his kindness.

Because see, you said, I can't believe I threw away my entire career for a few seconds on a motorcycle, but what if God was waking you up before you threw away your entire eternity for a few seconds in the spotlight? I remember him sitting there saying, I get it. I get it.

I get it now. I understand what God is trying to say to me. And I asked him, I was like, man, do you want to give your life to Christ? He said, here?

I said, why not? And I explained to him how he could pray to receive Christ. And I'll never forget as he reached across that table, kind of unprompted and grabbed both of my hands and started to pray, not in a quiet voice, but I mean the whole place of the Mad Hatter turned into like a little prayer place is this very well known to be professional athlete prayed and gave his heart to Christ.

It was one of the most amazing events that I've ever been a part of, not typical for that Mad Hatter crowd in downtown Durham, by the way. But see, I know that for many of you, that's exactly what he has been doing in you. And maybe this weekend he's put you flat on your back, like we say around here sometimes, so that you would finally be looking in the right direction. Hey, listen, I'm not trying to be too mystical, but you understand that it is not an accident that you were here today. It's not an accident that you are listening.

You might've felt like it was a random invitation, a random invitation from a friend or that friend kept texting you this link and you were like, fine, just to get you off my back, I'll click it. I'll watch it for two minutes. That way I can say, I watched it, but now you're still here and you're still listening. C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. The best one of those is called the horse and his boy. And in that one, Lewis tells a story of a boy running away, but throughout the entire journey, as he runs away from his dad, he hears footsteps, the occasional roar in the distance.

C.S. Lewis said that he was putting into story form in this book, how he, C.S. Lewis, experienced God pursuing him. He said, God was whispering to me in my pleasures, telling me there was something more. God was screaming at me and the desperate feeling that I had in my pain.

Can't you see this happening right now in your life? He loves you as he draws you back. That's what you're experiencing right now is he loves you as he draws you back. God loves you as he wraps you in his arms. It says while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion and ran. God's love is unconditional and unquenchable. That's the main takeaway from Pastor J.D.

Greer here on Summit Life. If you missed any of today's message or would like to catch up on previous messages in this series through the book of Luke, you can find them free of charge online at jdgreer.com. Would you agree that we need a weapon to keep us from falling prey to the enemy? After all, he prowls around like a roaring lion looking for people to destroy.

So what is the most valuable weapon? Well, of course, it's the word of God. And that's why we have to keep putting it into our hearts so that when life cuts us, we bleed the scriptures. This month, we've put together a pack of 50 memory verse cards for you to use as a daily weapon. If you want to carry God's promises in your heart, our new Summit Life memory verse cards can make it easy to memorize scripture. We'll send you the Rejoice Always scripture memory card set as an expression of thanks when you donate today to support this ministry. We're always thankful for our partners in this ministry, those who give one time as well as those who commit to a regular monthly gift. So thank you in advance for your support of this mission.

Ask for your set of the memory verse cards when you give today by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or you can give online at JDGrier.com.

That's J-D-G-R-E-E-A-R.com. Before we close, let me remind you that if you aren't yet signed up for our email list, you'll want to do that today. It is the best way to stay up to date with Pastor JD's latest blog posts. And we'll also make sure that you never miss a new resource or series.

It's quick and easy to sign up at JDGrier.com. You also don't want to forget to follow Pastor JD on Facebook and Instagram for more updates and encouraging content. I'm Molly Bittovitch inviting you to listen again Tuesday as we learn more from the story of the prodigal son and his brother. Every one of us can experience the love and grace of our Heavenly Father who welcomes us back home with open arms. See you Tuesday on Summit Life. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.