Experiencing God’s Love: Luke 15:11-32: The Two Sons and the Waiting Father

Everyone knows what a loser is. A loser can’t seem to accomplish anything worthwhile. Whatever he does is a disaster. No one respects a loser, and he can’t respect himself. He’s constantly in trouble and can’t change his life no matter how much he wishes he could.
Jesus came into the world for the “losers.” Would it surprise you to know that he also came into the world for the “winners”?

LUKE 15:11-32: THE TWO SONS AND THE WAITING FATHER

INTRODUCTION:

A number of years ago when we lived in Mt. Pleasant I conducted a Bible study in the state prison there.
The most enthusiastic member of our study was in inmate named Jim.
Jim had been a career criminal. That was the 9th time he had been locked up. He had a rap sheet with 45 crimes listed on it. But that was just a fraction of the thefts and burglaries and other wicked things he had done without getting caught.
Jim had enjoyed his life of crime. With it came the admiration of his criminal buddies and the excitement of an eventful life.
But finally Jim hit bottom.
Because he was drunk so much of the time, he kept getting caught. He screwed up his first marriage, then his second. He had let down his three children. He had broken his mother’s heart.
He decided to quit drinking and to quit thieving. But try as he might, he couldn’t. He was trapped by his evil habits.
He thought of all the pain people were going through because of him, and he realized that the whole world would be better off if he had never been born.
Jim was a loser and he knew it. He became despondent.
He tried to kill himself and couldn’t. He tried again and failed again.
He tried to hang himself in his cell and passed out.
When he came to, he was in the psychiatric ward of a Davenport hospital. An elderly lady in a nurse’s uniform was sitting in the room knitting. He was on suicide watch.
Jim thought to himself: To try to kill yourself is weak. To try to kill yourself and fail is worse than weak.
In his desperation, Jim looked up at the ceiling and said, “God, if you are real, do something with me. I quit. If something doesn’t change inside my head, inside my heart, then I’m just going back to the joint and kill myself.”

Jim says that there was no lightning flash, no angels. But it just seemed like a load had lifted off him.
Jim says, “I just gave it up. It didn’t belong to me any more. I was not responsible. I wasn’t going to try. I wasn’t going to do anything. I just mellowed out.”
And that was the beginning of Jim’s new life as a believer.

He said to himself, kind of sarcastically, “If I’m going to be a man of God, I need to find out about it.” He started praying—just talking to God. God began talking to him—not in an audible voice he could hear in his ears, but something he knew in his heart.
He told God about all the different people coming into the prison claiming to represent God and said, “How am I to know who’s real and who isn’t? How can I tell the fakes from the real?”
And God said, “Just read the Bible.” Jim began reading, and in three days he had read the New Testament—Matthew through Revelation. It was a thrill. It made sense.
He was so thrilled about his newfound faith that he used to wake his friends up to tell them about his discoveries in the Word. He couldn’t understand why they weren’t as excited as he was. Then the Lord told him, “Hey, this is for you, not them.”

Jim didn’t want to go to the prison chapel because most of the inmates that hung around the chapel were child molesters, murderers, square Johns, and snitches, people with no friends anywhere else.
But God told him to go. He started going to Bible study. That’s when I met Jim, in Bible study, about three months after he had met Jesus.
We had a great time studying the word together. Jim was hungry to know God. He was upfront about his faith. His fellow inmates called him a “Jesus freak,” but he didn’t care.
Some of them listened to him and believed.

Jim has been out of prison now for many years. He has worked steadily, he is active in his union, he has been active in his neighborhood association, he is a good husband and a good father. He is busy serving in his church. For many years he visited the jail in Minneapolis every Wednesday to conduct Bible studies, one with the men and another with the women. He and his wife, Ginny, have welcomed several homeless ex-offenders into their home for extended stays. Ginny told me that one of the women they had kept and is now living on her own, told her a few days ago: “When I stayed with you and Jim, that was the first time I ever experienced unconditional love.”

I told you the story of my friend Jim because it’s the story of a loser who found Jesus.
Jesus told a story like that. It’s in Luke 15, and I’m sure you’ve heard it.

Read: Luke 15:15-32.

I. First, I want to talk about the younger son, in the story, the one people call the “prodigal son.”

A. It was a shameful thing this boy did. He disgraced his father and his family. We don’t read anything about his mother, but she must have been weeping in the background.

It’s like he said, “Dad, I can’t wait until you die to get my hands on my inheritance. Just give it to me now and I’m outta here. I want to get away from you and Mom and do some livin’.”
Now the incredible thing is that the father said, “Okay,” and gave him the money he would have inherited.
That doesn’t seem reasonable to me, but it’s a story, and Jesus told the story this way to make a point.

B. The foolish young man headed into the far country to have a good time, far away from his father and any responsibilities.

And you know how that worked out. He had his good time—until the money ran out.
He sampled every pleasure he craved—no doubt wine, women, and song.
And he had lots of friends—until the money ran out.
And after that, famine came to that land. There was nothing to eat and no decent work to do.
And then the foolish young man hit bottom—the absolute bottom.
He finally found a job feeding hogs.
For a Jew, this was really the limit. Pigs were unclean animals. The Jews didn’t eat pigs. They didn’t have anything to do with pigs.
It was such a lousy job that he didn’t even get enough wages to buy food for himself. He wanted to eat the pods the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.

C. By this time the old home place didn’t look so bad any more. In fact, it looked mighty good.

He said to himself, Far better to be a hired servant at my father’s farm than to starve like this.
So he swallowed his pride and set out for home.
He had his speech all ready: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.”
That would be as much as he could hope for. But it would be like heaven compared to starving with the pigs.

D. Now comes the amazing part of the story, the part everyone likes.

In spite of the shabby way he’s been treated, the father never stopped loving his wayward son.
He sees the boy a long way off, trudging up the road.
Forgetting his dignity—and forgetting how the boy has hurt him—the father runs down the road embraces him and kisses him.
The son begins his speech, but never finishes it. The boy never gets to say, “Make me as one of your hired servants.”
He is interrupted by the father who says, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet, and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

I don’t understand the father. It seems to me that the father should at least wait for an apology, for some expression of remorse, for his son to promise to straighten up and fly right.

But the father just welcomes him—no strings attached.
Jesus tells the story this way to illustrate the overwhelming grace of God.
Some people say that it isn’t the story about the prodigal son; it’s the story of the prodigal father.
“Prodigal” means lavish, wasteful, extravagant expenditure. That’s what we see in the father in the parable. The prodigality of the father in the parable represents the extravagant grace of God to us poor sinners—sinners like Jim, and like you and me.

II. But the story doesn’t end there. The most important part comes after the party for the younger son gets under way.

A. The older son, we read, was in the field, and as he drew near the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the servants and learned that his brother had returned from the far country and that his father had killed the fatted calf and thrown this homecoming party for him.

And the older son was angry. And I, for one, can understand his anger.
This younger brother had insulted his father, disgraced the family, and wasted part of the father’s wealth. And the father just welcomes him back with open arms! It’s not fair, is it?

When his father came out, he expressed his anger and refused to go in.
The older son said, “Lo, these many years I have served you and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid that I might make merry with my friends. But when this son of yours came—he doesn’t say ‘my brother’—who has devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf!”

His father remonstrates with him: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

B. In a way, this older son was just as estranged from his father as the younger son had been when he was in the far country.

He had worked like a slave, but he had never enjoyed his father’s companionship.
It appears that he had never asked his father for anything, not even a little goat to make a party for his friends.
The father had loved this son as much as he did the naughty one, but this older son had never learned to love his father.
If he had loved his father, he would have rejoiced with his father when his brother returned.

C. Jesus doesn’t say what happened next. But I know what I hope happened. I hope the older son accepted the rebuke from his father, said he was sorry, and went to join the party.

I hope the older son learned to love his father and his brother.
If that happened, the father would have received two sons back from the dead that day.

APPLICATION:

I said that the older son was, for us, the most important part of the story. For Jesus’s listeners that day, the older brother was the point of the story because the people Jesus told the story to were religious people. They were the Pharisees and scribes, the “good” people, the respectable people, the admired people.

These scribes and Pharisees had been criticizing Jesus because, they said, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”
They resented the welcome Jesus gave to the sinners, the disreputable people of his day—the losers like my friend Jim.

When Jesus told this story he was inviting his critics to see themselves in the older brother.
He left the ending open, so that they could respond to the Father’s love and come to the feast, if they would.

Whenever I read about the scribes and Pharisees in the gospels I think, I myself am a lot like those people.
I was raised in a believing home.
I have gone to church at least once a week for 80 years.
I read my Bible. I pray. I try to help people. I give money.
And I’ll admit, I sometimes feel superior to people who don’t do these things.
I have to keep reminding myself that I am a sinner too. I need Jesus just as much as anyone does.

We can do a lot of good things and be blind to our sins of self-satisfaction and self-righteousness and feelings of superiority.

I had a friend who told me she didn’t believe in forgiveness. She didn’t believe that she was a “sinner.”
She said, “I’ve always done the best I could. If that’s not good enough, that’s just too bad.”
She spoke the truth. She was, by ordinary standards, a good person.

But Jesus said, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

And until we take our place with the sinners, Jesus can’t be our Savior.
Because, whether our sins are big, prominent ones like my friend Jim’s, or little, inconspicuous ones that only God can see, they are still sins.
And God doesn’t look at sin like we do. What we call little sins, are the most serious in God’s eyes.

People who do big sins like lying, cheating, and stealing are aware of their sins.
People who are proud and judgmental, or bitter and complaining may not be aware of their sins.
Anything that draws us away from God, anything that keeps us from loving others as we ought to love them is sin.

The first lesson from the story of the two sons is that no matter how far we stray from our Heavenly Father, he is always waiting, ready to welcome us home.
And the second lesson from the story is to make sure that I am loving God and enjoying the love of my Heavenly Father and the companionship of my Savior and to make sure that whatever I do is for love of Jesus and not because it makes me feel that I am better than other people.

The thought I want to leave you with today is that, winners or losers, we are all sinners, and we all meet Jesus at the foot of the cross.