Hey guys, welcome back to week seven of our restored series. I'm really glad that you're still with us in this and I really hope that you're thriving in Christ and growing in your relationship with him and that every day you're getting more and more of a sense that he really, really loves you, that he was really serious about you becoming part of his family again and being back in the house and I hope you're excited about that and today we want to dig in a little bit more about that and talk about what it's like to really begin to trust God enough to live as one of his children and we'll get into family dynamics in the next few weeks together because how we were raised and what kind of family we grew up in has a tremendous impact on how we tend to view God and it's natural to us to have a mistrust of God and I'll share a story from my firstborn when he was little.
I walked into the room before dinner one night to call him to dinner and I could just see the top of his head on the other side of the mattress in my room. Now we'd been playing together all afternoon, wrestling, tickling, doing all the daddy-son kind of stuff together and you know we were like friends. It was fun. We had a great day together. I walked in the room though and he was behind the bed and I could just see the top of his hair and I heard the sound of wrappers, you know the kind of crinkly wrapper thing and I kind of wondered if maybe he'd gotten into the candy before dinner which he knew he wasn't supposed to do.
So I just walked around to the side of the bed and I saw him there and he didn't see me yet and I noticed that his face was covered in chocolate. So I just called his name very gently and boy he panicked. He jumped. He spun around. He slammed into the wall because he was trying you know just such a panic and then he broke down crying. So I pulled him close and I hugged him and we reconciled quickly. But I remember standing there in the doorway looking at him and thinking I'm the last person in the world he wants to see right now.
He's doing something he knows wrong and if he sees me right now he thinks what's about to happen hammer's gonna fall. He's in trouble now and you know we didn't really he was a very easy child to raise. He didn't really need a whole lot of discipline in the corrective way that is. But I just knew he won't want to see me right now because he's doing wrong. And isn't it amazing how we're just we're almost born with that that feeling that if I do wrong the last person I want to see even if they love me even if they're for me not against me is the one who's now going to hold me accountable for what I did.
And if you look back at the story in the Garden of Eden which we will look at there was Adam and Eve and God told them you know they only had that one rule in the garden don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They ate from the tree and was the first thing they did. They hid from God. They covered themselves with fig leaves and instead of responding to his voice like they did every day when God came for his daily walk with them they hid from him. And ever since then it's like all of humanity has been in this hide-and-seek game with God when we blow it especially when we know that we've done wrong.
And how quickly we turn to God and come back to him instead of hiding from him is an indicator of how much we've come to know how much he loves us and how merciful he is and how his heart is always to restore us to himself. So let me address one thing first and then we're going to look at the parable as we call it the parable of the prodigal son which as I'll share I don't think it's properly named that but it's a story of the heart of the father and I want to share with you something about this lie that we can believe as sons and daughters of God now that before we knew God before we really came to Christ and gave our lives over to him. All of those things that happened before our moment of truth, well that was easy for God to forgive because we didn't know any better, right?
We were outside the family, we were addicts, we were whatever we used to be. But now that we've come to Christ and we have Holy Spirit in us, all the things we've been looking at together, well now it's worse. If I sin now it's even worse than it was before I came to know Christ and I want to assure you that nothing can be further from the truth. Here's what it says in Romans. I'm in chapter 5 and I'm going to begin reading here in verse 6. For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man someone would have even to die.
But God demonstrates his own love toward us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So that's the obvious part, right? Yeah, we know that while we were in sin, we needed a Savior. Now he goes on and he says, but much more than having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him. For if while we were enemies of God, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, much more than having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. I know that was very wordy and the book of Romans is kind of wordy that way, but here in a nutshell is what Paul is saying to us that, yeah, God was merciful and while we were caught in our deceit and we were dead in our sins, Christ died for us.
But do you think that now that you're one of his sons and we delight in him and he delights in us, do you think now all of a sudden he's back to being that God of wrath who's going to take you out to the woodshed every time you make a mistake? No, no, no. Now that we've been reconciled to God, there's this celebration in God's heart that my son's back home again. And of course, I'm not going to drive him out of the house. Of course, I'm going to receive him. So what we want to train our hearts to do as we get to know God is how to run to him when we blow it instead of running away and hiding every time we blow it.
If you've ever played hide and seek with a toddler, you know what it's like. I mean, they'll hide behind a coat with their feet sticking out the bottom and they're giggling and shaking behind the coat. You can't find me, you know, and it's kind of like that playing hide and seek with a toddler. Well, it's about like that playing hide and seek with God for as full grown adults. And I want to always say, what's the point? We already know God knows where we are. God knows what we did. God knows our substance.
In fact, he knew what we were going to do to blow it before we had a chance to blow it, before we even premeditated our sin or whatever we've done wrong. God already saw that. And God saw all of what we did before we came to Christ. And God knew all of what we would do after we came to Christ. And he still said, I choose you. I want you to be a son. So let's look at the parable, as we call it, of the prodigal son. I think the better name for it would be the parable of the loving father or the parable of the merciful father.
And it comes in Luke chapter 15. And at first, I want to just make sure we understand who Jesus told this parable to, because that'll be important as we look at it this week and next week. It says, the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble about Jesus saying, this man receives sinners and eats with them. So the Pharisees had categories of people. You were either a sinner or you were a child of God, a saint of God, whatever they called them back then. And so they kind of divided all of humanity up into two categories, one bad, one good. And unfortunately, we've done a lot of that in the body of Christ and in the church and some of the way that we teach things.
But I hope to show you today that Jesus really was trying to correct their mindset by telling this parable. So we have two sons. First, he told a parable of a lost sheep, then about a lost coin. And then he tells the parable of the prodigal son, which we'll read now. He said this, I'm in verse 11. He said, a man had two sons. The younger of them said to the father, father, give me the share of the estate that falls to me. So he divided his wealth between them. Now remember that for a minute.
We had two sons, an older one and a younger one. The younger one asked for his inheritance, which by the way, was every bit as offensive then as it would be today, maybe even more so. The son was saying to the father, I wish you would die already because really all I value about you is what you have to give me. So can I just have it now? Do I have to wait until you're dead before I can have your stuff? We do treat God that way sometimes, don't we? When we only love God because he blesses us or because he gives us things.
And that's what this younger son had. At least he had the courage to say it out loud. And so it says he divided his wealth between them. So both sons got their inheritance at that moment. The father in effect died in that moment. And his sons got the wealth of the estate divided between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered everything, went on a journey to a distant country. He squandered his estate with riotous or loose living, which meant he had prostitutes. He had, he was getting drunk. He was doing all the stuff that, you know, many of us did before we, we came to the father.
When he had spent everything, then a severe famine occurred in that country. He was impoverished. So the money ran out. Now there's a famine. Now he's down to nothing. He's hit rock bottom. And if he didn't think it could get worse, it says that he went and hired himself to one of the citizens of that country. And he sent him into his fields to feed swine. Now that in particular to a Jew, which is all of who was hearing this parable in the first place, would be especially demeaning because pigs were viewed as unclean animals.
You couldn't eat pig. Can you imagine living in a place where you weren't allowed to eat bacon? That was the world before Jesus. One more thing to thank Jesus for while we're at it today. So he's feeding swine and he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating and no one was giving anything to him. So he was so hungry and so destitute that he's even willing to eat pig food at this point. Then he came to his senses. You had that moment. I had that moment.
He came to his senses, almost like waking up out of a dream and go, what am I doing here? And he said these words to himself in his heart. He said, how many of my father's hired men have more than enough bread, but here I am dying with hunger. I'm the son of a wealthy man whose servants are eating better than I'm eating. What am I doing here like this? So he says this, I will get up and go to my father and I will say to him, father, I've sinned against heaven and in your sight and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. There it is.
Make me as one of your hired men. So because of his misunderstanding of his father's heart and what it meant to be a son of this father, he was willing to say, well, I guess I blew it now and I'm out. I'm unsunned. I'm no longer a member of this family, but at least I could be a servant of this father. And by the way, of course, we know the father represents God. So he resigned in his heart. In other words, I'll just be a servant of God because I don't deserve to be called his son anymore.
So he got up. He came to his father. A long road back home. He's rehearsing all of these words that he's going to say. I've sinned against heaven and in your sight. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your servants. He probably said it over and over again because, you know, working up the courage to say that when he would see his father, who for whatever reason he thought would meet him with folded arms, saying, I know what you did. You squandered your inheritance.
Shame on you. You're going to have to pay a price if you want to come back in my house. That's what he thought the father would say. But it says this, while he was far off, this father saw him, felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. You know what that tells us about that father? And this for me, by the way, the moment I came to Christ was somebody was preaching this parable. And he paused at this moment and it felt like he was looking right at me.
It was a big church full of people. It felt like he was looking right at me. And he said, you know what that means? It means he was looking for him. It means that his heart was longing for this reunion. All those days, years, months, however long it was that he was away, the father was looking down the road, eagerly hoping and praying that his son would come back home again. Though he knew what he would be doing with that money, he still looked for him. He ran, he embraced him, and he kissed him.
The son couldn't take it all in. The son at this moment, what's happening right now? I can't receive this kind of love. It's too much. It's not just, it's not fair. I've got to be able to pay a price for this thing. So he goes and he starts his spiel. Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Now you remember his rehearse speech included, make me as one of your servants. But it was like the father heard his son say, I'm no longer worthy to be called your son.
And he cuts him off. He said, no more of that. You came back home. You've owned what you did. And I can see that you're contrite about it. I can see that you're brokenhearted over what you did as much as I am. No more of this. Talk about you not being my son. He smacks his hands together and he says to his servants, quick now, bring out the best robe, put it on my son, put shoes on his feet and put a ring on his hand and kill the fatted calf because we're going to have ourselves a feast tonight.
Can you just, well, you can imagine because you've had this moment, right? The prodigal son at that moment, as we call him is absolutely stunned, dumbfounded. You mean, I don't have to work off that debt that I owe you. You mean, I don't have to become a servant in your house. You know, what's amazing in all of this, you know, it says that the father divided his wealth between his sons, but he still had a house full of goods. That's the beautiful thing about our father. He never runs out of stuff.
And as we learn in this parable, he never runs out of love either. It turns out we, we haven't sinned so bad, fallen so far, gone so astray that the father says, you know what? I'm all out. I've given you all the love I have to give. I'm sorry. I have nothing left for you. It never happens that way with him. He actually always has more. And so he goes and he says to all of his servants, this son of mine was dead and has come to life. He was lost.
And now he has been found. Now let's celebrate. Now here's the word of correction for the Pharisees that were there. Remember I shared with you how the Pharisees were saying he brings these sinners in and he has dinner with them and he, he treats them like, like people for goodness sake. Doesn't he know what loathsome sinners they are and how the wrath of God's upon them. And this parable was given to them to correct them. And he, he on purpose says, refers to him as this son of mine. The world's not divided into saints and sinners.
The world's divided into sons. Some of whom have found their way back home. Some of whom are lost and dead in their trespasses. They've gone astray. The father doesn't view them as these wrath, objects of wrath, these creation, these creatures that are just there. And I can't wait to take them out to the woodshed. He views everyone who's not in his house, all humans as my son who I miss. And I've got a fatted calf for you when you come home. Now we've all come to enjoy that, but I just want us to capture something about the father's heart here.
He was already a son and he went astray. Now that you've come to Christ and you know that you're a son, just know the father is always ready to receive with arms open wide. Maybe you'll have a season. I pray not. Maybe you've already had a season seven weeks in together where you've kind of strayed a little bit from the path that you got set on. Don't hide from God. Don't be ashamed enough that you are so ashamed that you keep a distance from him. He's eager to restore you, eager to welcome you back home.
Come back with a broken and contrite spirit. Offer that to him and you're immediately restored into the house. The doors never shut on us. The doors always open wide. And here's the reason why we think otherwise sometimes is because of the older son. The older son represents the religious spirit. He actually represents the Pharisees in this parable. Before this parable, Jesus told the parable of the lost sheep. And that simply is one sheep went astray. He left 99 to go after, find the one and bring him back home again. So how loving that shepherd is to go after the one and bring him back.
Then he tells another parable of a lost coin. A woman had 10 coins. One got lost. She turned the whole house upside down until she could find that coin and bring it back to herself. So both of those only about how God loves what he's lost and is eager to bring it back to himself. First half of this parable, one of the sons went astray. The father couldn't wait to embrace him and bring him back home again, welcome him back into the father's house. But he adds one extra thing on here.
And this is what's important. And it'll kind of lead us into what we'll talk about next week as well. This older son who represents a spirit of religion, which gives the wrong idea about God, that God's a God of wrath, that God's a God of black and white, that God's a God where you either serve him or you're going to die and he's going to get you for what you did. And sometimes the church has preached God that way. We've made God out to be everything, but that he's not. The one who is that way is the enemy of our soul, the devil himself. He's the accuser.
He's the one who said, eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, make the world about black and white, right and wrong, instead of about a loving God who just wants sons and daughters in his family. So the older son was out in the field when this party starts and he came to the house, he heard the music and dancing. And it says he called one of the servants over and he asked him, what's going on? And the servant said, your brother has come and your father has killed a fattened calf for him because he's received him back safe and sound. Now the older brother, instead of being excited that his little brother came back home again, it says he became angry and he wasn't willing to go in.
So his father came out to him and began to plead with him. And he answered his father and said to him, look, for all these years I've been serving you and I've never neglected a command of yours, which probably isn't true. Nobody's perfect. But he goes, and you haven't even given me a little goat so that I could have a party with my friends. But now can I stop here and point out something? Remember what I shared with you earlier? It says when the younger son asked the father for his inheritance, he divided his wealth between the two.
You know, it's even more. So the older son did get something from the father. Like it would have been half the estate, except in Jewish law, which everybody knew at the time, the firstborn son or the older son got twice as much as all the others. It's called a double portion, which means that he didn't just divide it evenly between the two. The older son would have gotten two thirds of the estate when the younger son got one third. So the older son, believing a lie, so you didn't give me anything. And all I do is work for you.
You see what he thinks? He's a slave in his father's house. All I do is work, work, work. And man, you throw a party for this boy who just squandered everything. He goes on and he says, but when this son of yours came, notice not when my brother came back or the son of our house came back, your son. I am disconnected from him. I want nothing to do with him. Maybe you came to Christ as one who is rejected by the church because of your sin and maybe it was, you know, you were legit.
Maybe you were an addict or you were an offensive person or an angry man or a woman or whatever it was. And people rejected you because of that. Because instead of seeing you as a son who had gone astray and wandered from the house, they saw you as a threat because they didn't understand the father's heart. Maybe that was you. I hope that you can forgive and put aside the older sons. Because remember, the father came out to the older son and appealed to him here. He didn't just leave him out there and said, fine, you want to miss the party, miss the party.
He came out to try to appeal. This was Jesus appealing to the Pharisees present and saying, guys, come and join the party. And here's what he says to him. The father said, son, you have always been with me and everything I have is yours. Don't believe the lie that I wanted servants. You're my son. My whole house belongs to you. You can have a party every night if you want. I never run out of fatted calves. I never go dry. My wealth is inexhaustible as my love. And you've always had the option if you wanted to.
But instead, you treated yourself like a servant in this house. And now you're offended because I want to show love to another son of mine who wants to come back home again. He said, we had to celebrate and rejoice for this brother of yours. This brother of yours, not brother son of mine, but brother of yours was dead. And now he's alive. He was lost. And he's been found. Today, what I want to communicate is that when we misunderstand the father's heart, we live at a distance from him. So you'll find yourself, all of us find ourselves in one or the other of these brothers.
And sometimes we go back and forth between the two. So maybe you find yourself identifying more with the younger brother who kept a distance and went far away from the father because he wanted to just squander his inheritance and do his own thing. And out of shame came home because he was desperate, but didn't understand the father's eager to welcome me back. Maybe you find yourself a little bit more like the older brother. Maybe you were raised in a church which had kind of a dead religious spirit about it. Maybe that was your history. And you find yourself more interested in what can I do for God than how can I be with God right now?
How can I relate with him like a loving father? How can I enjoy life in the father's house? Whichever one you find yourself today, just know that this father that Jesus embodied in the prodigal son's story is the father that we have in heaven. He's always eager to be with us. He's always eager to be intimate with us. He's always eager to welcome us home. I pray you really enjoy your times of devotion this week and really search your heart. The goal for this week is to begin to retrain our heart and how not to run away from God when we blow it, but how to run right back to him again.
He's the safest place. He's the best place. He truly is a friend of sinners and he always loves it when his sons come back home again. May you find peace in that knowing that you have peace with God through Christ and that the father himself loves you.