Amazing Love (Part 4 of 7)

The parable, most of us know as the prodigal son, tells the story of a young man who wanted to live his life his way.

His poor choices led to some humiliating circumstances that forced him ultimately to return home. But how would his father respond? Today on Truth for Life weekend, Alistair Begg teaches how even our worst decisions can lead us back to the amazing love of the Father. We're gonna read together from Luke 15, a story of fatherhood.

Luke chapter 15 and verse 11. Jesus continued, There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, Father, give me my share of the estate. So he divided his property between them. Not long after that the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, How many of my father's hired men have food to spare?

And here I am starving to death. I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, Father, I've sinned against heaven and against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son.

Make me like one of your hired men. So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son through his arms around him and kissed him. The son said to him, Father, I've sinned against heaven and against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. But the father said to his servants, Quick, bring the best robe and put it on him.

Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.

So they began to celebrate. Amen. Let's ask God's help as we study the Bible together. Father, we're totally dependent upon your help now to study the Bible. We can neither speak, nor hear, or understand, or respond apart from the wonderful, convicting, convincing moving of your Spirit. So this causes us to take our eyes away from everyone else except you and from everything else except your Bible. Meet us, Lord, we pray, just where we need to be met. For Jesus' sake we ask it.

Amen. Well, if you've kept your Bible open there at Luke 15, you will notice from the opening verses that Jesus is addressing a crowd that comprises two distinct groups of people. One group is listening to him, the other is really there to criticize him. The group that's listening is made up of tax collectors and those who are referred to as sinners.

They're intrigued by the words of this Galilean carpenter. He doesn't sound like the average synagogue sermon. And so they're following along, because they sense that the things that Jesus is saying are things that they need to hear.

You may be here today, and that's exactly how you feel as we anticipate studying the Bible. The rest of the group is made up of the religious orthodoxy of the time Pharisees and religious leaders. They were not actually there to listen as much as they were there to complain, and the reason for their muttering is because they were opposed to what Jesus was doing. Jesus was actually welcoming sinners and eating with them. And from their perspective, if he really was a rabbi of God, if he really was the holy man that he determined himself to be, then he clearly wouldn't be doing that.

They actually have the wrong end of the stick, and some of you may be here today, and you actually have the wrong end of the stick as well. Do you think that Jesus came in order to get together a religious club—people who were outwardly very interested in religious things, who were good, moral, upright people doing their best, paying their taxes, and attending at least once on a Sunday? Therefore, you should prepare to be completely overwhelmed by what actually unfolds in this passage. Jesus, in recognizing the group that has surrounded him, determines that he will tell them three stories—all of them about lostness. First the story of a lost sheep, then the story of a lost coin, and then the story of two lost boys. The pressure, if you like, is building from story to story. He is making one point and emphasizing it effectively. There is joy when the shepherd comes back with his sheep.

There is joy when the lady discovers her coin. Therefore, he says, you would imagine that there is joy in heaven when the lost sinner repents and is brought back to the fold of God. This third story that we've been looking at has introduced us to these two sons.

The first boy has done a bunk. His departure from his father's house was apparently a planned exit. There is no indication that he woke up one morning and, in a fit of passion, determined that he was just going to take off. Rather, that he had premeditated the event, he had waited for the right moment in order to say to his father, I'd like to have what I would normally have when you die, but I wish you were dead now, and I wish you'd give me what I ought to have when you die, because, frankly, I want to leave you behind. I want to turn my back on you.

I want to do my own thing. Every indication as well is that his departure was not only planned but he was going to view it as being permanent. That's why Luke is careful to tell us that he got together in verse 13 everything that he had. In other words, he didn't leave anything behind so that he'd be able to slip back for the weekend. No, he got together everything that he had, and he got it as far away as he possibly could. Gathered up all of his possessions and set off for a far and a distant country.

And he went out with a spring in his step, apparently, and we're going to discover that he came back, dragging his tail behind him. In fact, the story of how his plan ends in disaster is recorded for us there in verses 14 through 17. In 14, after he has squandered his wealth in a kind of riotous excess, he finds out that he's absolutely helpless. There's a severe famine which falls right at the time that his money has run out, and he began to be in need. He was in need of help. He was helpless. In verse 15, his helplessness led to humiliation—the humiliation of a Jewish boy feeding pigs. Anybody with a job feeding pigs is not necessarily a bad job, but it wasn't a good one given where he'd come from. As a result of this, he was also hungry, because he, in verse 16, actually longed to eat the pig food.

But nobody in his hunger came to give him anything at all. And then in verse 17, we discover that he became homesick. In fact, the whole story could be summarized as the young man who was sick of home, who became homesick, and who was home.

In fact, you may like just to keep that in your mind as a framework under which to make this study. The young fellow was sick of home, and now we find him homesick. He's lost his wealth, he's lost his freedom, he's lost his self-respect. And the fact that he recognizes his circumstances to be significantly worse than that of a day laborer serves as a barometer of the depths to which the young man has sunk. Sitting in his predicament in the pigsty, he figures out that the people that his father hires on his estate on a day-by-day basis—not people who were on the salaried positions, not the folks who were there as hourly workers, but people who just came by and stood outside the estate on a daily basis in the hope that the foreman would come out and say, I'll take you, you, you, and you—these individuals, he said, are far better off than I am today in this dreadful and sorry circumstance. In his soliloquy, which is there in verse 17 and following, he repeats the word father three times. You realize that this is a description of him sitting there talking to himself? He speaks to himself, and he says, This is ridiculous. How many of my fathers hired men who food to spare?

I starve to death. I'm going to set out and go back to my father, and then I'm going to say, Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. And the prodigal determines to go back to his father not primarily because he is tormented by a guilty conscience but because he is driven by the prospect of mercy. He could have lived with a guilty conscience. He could have sought to absolve it in a number of ways.

It would have been possible for him to admit the fact that he'd made a hash of things. It would be possible for him then to live out the rest of his life saying, you know, I once lived in a wonderful place. I once lived in a lovely relationship with my father. But I turned my back on my father, I went off in my own way, and that's why you can see I am where I am today.

That's why I'm in this sorry predicament. It makes one thing, doesn't it? What if there had not been a father to whom he could return? Or what if the father to whom he could return was a father who would simply treat his boy as his sins deserved? After all, there was no one to blame but the boy himself. Nobody can come to the story of these two sons and explain it as is often explained in terms of the poor background and the difficulties that he faced and the circumstances that he had to endure, and as a result of all of this, this is why the fellow down here in the pigsty is a victim.

No! What we have in the pigsty is a boy who made bad choices, who decided to set out on his own, who made friendships with the kind of people that really weren't friends at all, and who found himself eventually flat on his tail in a circumstance that was so different from that which he had known in his father's house. What a tragedy it would be if that were the end of the story—that he lived helpless and hopeless and humiliated, and then he just died. What if the consequences of sin were irremovable? What if sin was sin forever? What if there were no solution to sin? What if there were no heavenly Father to whom the prodigal boy, the prodigal girl, may return? What possible comfort could there be for this boy unless he has a waiting, watching, seeking, loving father?

Is there any comfort in the story of sinners if the sinner is unable to come home, if he finds no reception, if he is unhealed, unrestored, and unforgiven? You wonder why it is that men and women in contemporary society find themselves with such an experience of angst—worried, perplexed, overwhelmed, unable to fill the God-shaped void within their lives. It is in the simplicity of the words of the little song where the sparrow sings to the robin, and the robin says to the sparrow, Why do you think human beings are like this? Why do you think they're so crazy?

Why do you think they run around and worry about everything? And the sparrow replies to the robin. He says, Well, presumably, because they don't have a heavenly Father, such as cares for you and me. The robin and the sparrow realize that God provides for their needs. But they look on humanity, and they say, Look at these frantic and frenetic individuals!

And their assessment is, Well, presumably, they have no heavenly Father. You see, the real breakdown in this story—and we need to be careful so that we don't miss this—is not the breakdown in this young man's circumstances. It's not even the potential breakdown in the young man's health. It's not that the young man's hopes and dreams have been shattered. It is not that the relationships that he established have actually been fractured and are now almost forgotten.

The real breakdown in the story is the fact that his relationship with his father has been severed as a result of him turning his back upon his dad. One of the customary errors of our day is to listen to men and women—sociologists and psychologists and those who apparently know—explain the predicament of life on a peculiarly horizontal plane. Well, the reason that I am the way I am is because of something that happened to me in relationship to him or to her. The reason that I am the way I am is because I have unfulfilled hopes and dreams that are yet to be realized in my existence. The reason that I am not yet what I might be is because of all of these horizontal factors.

What the Bible says is no. That while these horizontal issues are real issues, the foundation of all of our dilemma on this plane is on account of a broken relationship on the vertical plane—that we have lost the stabilizing influence of our lives as a result of sin. And what has happened in our lives, says the Bible, is that our relationship with a God who has made us our Father in heaven has been severed. And so the man's experience now—everything is fractured as a result. Try and picture him in your mind's eye. Jesus is telling a story.

He's describing the circumstances. He is a young man, and he's in a pigsty, and he longs to eat pig food. You've got to imagine the people going, Eat pig food! Who would eat pig food?

Well, presumably it is possible to get so hungry that we might consider it. His physical loneliness with his money gone and his friends gone and his brutal circumstances merely serves to confront him with his existential aloneness. Because his real aloneness is not the aloneness of the pigsty. It's not the aloneness of the absence of friends. It's not the aloneness as a result of circumstances turning sour. His aloneness is an aloneness that is posited on the fact that he told his father that he could keep it—could keep his house, could keep his love, could keep his care, could keep his advice, could keep his interest—and he would go it on his own, if we'd had the chance to interview him seven or ten days prior to this, if we had caught him in the corner of one of his parties, as he played the host to all of these friends that he'd managed to put together. If he had been honest, he would have told us then, you know, actually, it's a strange thing, but I feel alone here tonight.

I'm surrounded by all of this and by all of this gaiety, but I feel alone. But maybe it's just this party. It's not a very good party. Tomorrow's party will be a better party. And as he walks home in the early hours of the morning, he's saying to himself, I don't know why I feel the way I feel.

Why do I feel as though a blanket is down over my head? After all, we did everything we wanted to do with everyone we wanted to do it with, and we did it as many times as we want, and nobody interfered, and certainly not my father. This was supposed to be fantastic! See, maybe marijuana's not good enough now. Maybe we're gonna have to go to ecstasy. Maybe ecstasy won't fill it. Maybe we're gonna have to go to cocaine. Because, you see, the devil's story is always, there is always one better fix. There is always one better party.

There is always one more buck to be made. There is always one more rung on the ladder that says to you, the reason you feel as you feel, miss, the reason you feel as you feel, sir, is because you have not made it there. If you will go there now, you will discover that it is over here that the answer to that sense of lostness is to be found.

And that is contemporary wisdom. Well, some of you are here this morning, and frankly, your circumstances are just a thin disguise for the fact that you're living in a cul-de-sac, you're living on a dead-end street. You're surrounded by your family and your friends, and you're alone in the world. Nobody knows the sense of ruination, the sense of waste that you feel. And sometimes you are amazed at yourself at the kind of things that you even contemplate. Driving your car so fast through these country roads, because somewhere in the back of your mind you said, Maybe I'll just drive it right off the road.

What's such a lovely car? I don't care. It means nothing to me. Such a lovely relationship. It is irrelevant to me.

Such a super opportunity. It means zero to me. Why? Because, like the boy in the story, we closed the door in our father's house, we walked out, and we said, Stick it.

You can keep it. Well, he's in a predicament, isn't he? I mean, this story is quite a story. You can imagine that the Pharisees are going, I don't know where this one is going to end. That the sinners are hanging on as every word. Boy, this is a beauty, one prostitute says to the other. I don't know what happens to this kid, but there's maybe gonna be something in this for us, you know. There may be an end to this one that we're really gonna like.

Don't let's stop listening now. Meanwhile, the Pharisees pulling his cloak over. Pathetic story. I hate this story. Jesus said, Don't worry about that.

Let me just get on here. Because the disaster of his futile plan is more than met by the discovery of his father's love. And we saw last time that when he came to his senses, when he came to himself—and we talked about how we meet men and women who are apparently looking for themselves, and looking for themselves in all the wrong places, and looking for love in all the wrong places—when he came to his senses, he realized that he'd been away from his father's house, but he hadn't been away from his father's heart. And so, verse 20—and I love the phrase, he got up and went to his father. So he got up and went. This is the second time we're told that he'd gone up and gone. Initially, he got up and went away from his father's house, and his request on that occasion was, Give me. Now he's getting up again, and he's going back to his father's house, and his request on this occasion is, Make me.

There's all the difference in the world in the request. Give me. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. You exist to give me.

Give me. There are plenty of people who are going around saying, Give me to God. God is a cosmic principle. God is a figment of my imagination. God is a provider of health, wealth, and happiness. God is wherever I conceive him to be, and I go to God regular, and I say, Hey, give me.

But have you ever come to God and said, Make me? Now, you can imagine that as he rehearses his speech going back up the road, he has only a mind that is full of questions—probably his eyes down rather than his eyes up. And then look at this. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him. We might anticipate that the father would seize the opportunity to give him the I told you so speech—to make his son stand in his tattered, smelly outfit—while he let him know that this is the kind of thing that happens to a boy who does this. But none of that is there.

Right? Look at the story. While he was still a long way off, what we have presented here by Jesus is the father's wonderful readiness to forgive. The son could never have dreamt what a surprising reception was waiting for him.

Indeed, the verbs help us, don't they? There in verse 20, but while he was still a long way off, his father saw him. Saw him! How did he see him? Because he was looking for him. Why was he looking for him? Because he wanted to find him.

It's elementary, my dear Watson. It is a wonderful picture. What a great story, an encouraging story, about a father who is ready to forgive.

You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life weekend with a message titled, Amazing Love. When you listen to Truth for Life, you're going to hear God's word taught with clarity and relevance. We know that the lessons from Scripture are as meaningful today as they were when they were first written, and Alistair helps us connect the dots as he teaches us verse by verse so we can apply the Bible's instruction to our everyday lives. Today's story about the lost son is a perfect picture of God's forgiveness, and as we move closer to Easter and think about the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross, we come face to face with its cost. But did you know that forgiveness is just one of the outcomes of the cross? That's a topic that is explored in a book we are recommending today. The book is called The Cross in Four Words, and it explores all that God accomplished through the death of Christ at Calvary. Because of the cross, we can enjoy freedom, justification, and purpose along with forgiveness.

All of these things can be traced back through the key stories we read in the Old Testament. This book is quick, it's easy to read, and yet at the same time it's exceptionally insightful. You can find out more about the book when you visit truthforlife.org. I'm Bob Lapine, thanks for listening today. Next weekend is Palm Sunday, so we're going to take a break from our series in order to hear a special message from Alistair on Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. I hope you'll join us. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.