What if the God you always imagined isn't the God scripture reveals?

We all carry ideas about who God is.

Ideas shaped by culture, experience, and tradition.

People have tried for centuries to tame scripture.

Every time someone tries to fit him into their existing worldview, he pushes back.

He confronts assumptions, disrupts comfort, and invites us...

to see reality through him.

Encountering the real God doesn't tweak your worldview.

It flips it upside down.

So glad you're here this weekend.

Welcome Rancho.

Welcome West Co.

I've got a lot of news from Africa, but I don't have time.

We're going to get right into the message.

I told you in January that we're about to embark on a few journeys that's going to take us places that we've never been.

This is one of them.

So I'm in Luke 15.

Michael dealt with this in the first part of the series.

I want to read the parable that Jesus tells again.

This is Luke 15, starting with verse 11.

And this is what Jesus said.

He said, a man had two sons.

It's not on the screen.

You're going to have to either follow in your Bible, or if you've got it memorized, you can do that, or just listen along.

Luke 15, 11, a man had two sons.

The younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the share of the estate that falls to me.

So he divided his wealth between them.

And not many days later, the younger son gathered everything together, went on a journey into a distant country, and there he squandered his estate with loose living.

Now, when he had spent everything, a severe famine occurred in that country and he began to be impoverished.

So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

Not a particularly enjoyable job for someone who's Jewish, right?

And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating, and no one was giving anything to him.

When he came to his senses, he said, How many of my father's hired men have more than enough bread, but I'm dying here with hunger?

I will get up and go to my father and will say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

Make me one of your hired men.

So he got up and came to his father, but while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him and ran and embraced him and kissed him.

And the son said to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, I'm no longer worthy to be called your son.

but the father said to him.

Quickly bring out, quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him.

And put a ring on his hand, sandals on his feet.

And bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate.

For this son of mine was dead and has come to life again.

He was lost and has been found.

And they began to celebrate.

Now, before I read the next verse, verse 25, I want to give you a proposition that perhaps this parable all along was really not about the younger son, but the older one.

Now, his older son was in the field, and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing.

And he summoned one of the servants and began inquiring what these things could be.

And he said to him, your brother has come and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has received him back safe and sound.

But he became angry and was not willing to go in.

And his father came out and began pleading with him.

But he answered and said to his father, look, for so many years I've been serving you and I've never neglected a command of yours.

And yet you have never given me a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.

But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with prostitutes, you kill the fattened calf for him.

And he said to him, son, you have always been with me and all that is mine is yours.

But we had to celebrate and rejoice for this brother of yours was dead and has begun to live and was lost and now has been found.

Now, when Jesus tells this parable, one thing becomes crystal clear.

Everything that the people believed about God in Jesus' day was wrong.

Now, the question is, is it possible that everything you believed about God is wrong?

That's pretty daunting, isn't it?

Well, the only way that it's possible...

To know anything about God at all is if God chose to reveal himself to us.

Otherwise, it's all conjecture.

So a few years ago, I was at the International Conference on Missions doing a workshop.

I think Michael was actually with me.

And a young man came up.

This is going back a few years.

And he said, I like your passion, Pastor Jeff, but I don't believe the things you're saying.

I said, okay, all right, hold on.

Let's start with the most fundamental disagreement that you have with me.

What is it?

He said, well, I don't believe in the God that you talk about.

I believe that God created all things, and then he just removed himself, and he let us all do what we're going to do, and at the end, he's going to take us all to a better place.

I said, really, everyone?

He said, yeah, everyone.

Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Charles Manson?

He said, yeah, because at the end, nothing really matters.

We're all flawed.

I said, okay, all right.

How do you know that what you believe about God is true?

He said, I don't, but neither do you Christians.

It's all speculation.

I said, do you know the difference between Christ followers and your position?

He said, there is no difference.

I said, yes, there is.

We believe that God has revealed himself through the person of Jesus Christ and the resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ proves that he's telling the truth.

He said, I don't believe in the resurrection.

I said, I know you don't, but genuine Christ followers do.

And there's your difference.

Our view of God is objective.

It's based on historical reality.

Your view of God is totally subjective based on feelings.

You believe God should be like this, but Christ followers will believe God is like this based on evidence.

I asked him, I said, if I could show you that the resurrection is historical reality, would you then believe in the Christian God?

He said, that depends.

I said, depends on what?

And he said, that depends on whether I agree with this God or not.

Okay, so that's where we are.

It's not just the unbeliever that creates God to his own liking.

Religious people do this as well.

Hinduism, Islam, even Judaism to a degree, create God in their own mind, and they believe this is what God ought to be like, so this is what God is like.

Now let me go back and say what I said earlier.

The truth is, had God not chosen to reveal himself in the person of Jesus Christ, You wouldn't know anything about God.

You may be able to conclude through the created order that God has creative power, that he's powerful, perhaps even he's immutable, unchanging, and omnipotent.

But such a transcendent God would not necessarily be knowable or even discoverable on a personal level unless he chose to be.

Now when we come to Luke chapter 15, Jesus is basically reminding us that every thought the human race has ever had about how to connect with God, East or West, Ancient or Modern, in every ancient religion or secular thought, it has been wrong.

So that when Christianity first arose out of the world, it was not called a religion.

For the first 200 years, it was called atheism.

Did you know that?

The Romans referred to the Christians as atheists because what they were saying about God was so different than any other system of thought.

This passage right here, the most popular parable Jesus ever told, proves that they were right.

The story, and Michael dealt with Act 1 in week 1 of the series.

Act 1 is about the younger brother, Act 2 is about the lost elder brother.

So you have two acts, the lost younger brother and the lost elder brother.

Let me review Act 1 because we can't understand Act 2 without it.

Act 1 begins with a speech where the younger brother comes to his father and he says, I don't want to live under your authority anymore.

I want to go my own way.

I want to do my own thing.

So give me my inheritance now and I'll be on my way.

When Jesus' audience heard that, they would have been astounded.

Because if you had two sons, you gave the older son two-thirds of the inheritance and the younger son one-third.

We're in an age of promageniture where the oldest child receives a double portion.

Because the firstborn is expected to expand the wealth in the family name.

But the inheritance did not take place until the father died.

So when the young son comes to the father and says, I want my one-third now, my estate now, as one historian says, to ask for the inheritance while the father is still alive is to wish him dead.

So what the younger son is saying is, I want your stuff, but I don't want you.

I want your monetary and emotional blessings, but I don't want you.

So that his relationship to the Father has become a means to an end.

Now you need to listen to this.

As we're going to talk about in a moment, religious people are guilty of this as well.

He is saying, I want to live in your house and I want to get your stuff, but I'm not really that interested in you.

Now, let me just say quickly, let me give you a warning.

For some of you, perhaps God is not giving you everything you want because you see God as a means to your ends.

For you, your relationship with God is purely transactional.

If I do good things, God will give me what I want rather than relational.

You're not really pursuing God.

Verse 12a in the text that I read would be astonishing, but 12b would be absolutely shocking because a traditional father in Jesus' day would have never responded like the father does in Jesus' story.

If a younger son came to you and said, I want my inheritance now, you would immediately disown and disavow.

And if you remember a sermon we did years ago, a kazaza ceremony would have taken place.

That is the whole village on hearing this would have gathered clay jars And as the son left the village, everyone have taken their clay jar and smashed it on the ground as a demonstration of, we hope this is what happens to you because you've disowned your father, you've disowned the family, you've disowned the village.

We hope that your life falls apart and your life comes crashing down.

But this is not the manner in which the father responds.

According to the text, it says he divided his property between them.

Do you know the Greek word for property is the word bios.

from which we get the word biology.

In other words, he divided his life between them.

Now, life and land in the time of Jesus are inseparable.

One of my favorite movies, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Delmar says, you ain't no kind of man if you ain't got land.

In other words, your significance, your importance, your position in society is tied to your land wealth.

In the great, what is it, Oklahoma.

There's a line in Oklahoma that says, we know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand.

Notice it doesn't say the land belongs to us.

It says we belong to the land.

Your identity is bound up to the land that you own.

The way the community sees you, perceives you is bound up in how much land you have.

So the son, by asking his father for his inheritance now, is actually asking the father to tear his life apart now.

to lose his standing and significance.

And he does.

Now the hearers in Jesus' audience, as he tells this parable, would have never heard of a Middle Eastern patriarch responding to an insult the way this father does.

The son says, I wish you were dead.

And the father says, okay.

Do you know what the father's enduring here?

That's going to be an important question when we recognize who the father represents.

He's enduring.

Enduring rejected love.

Have you ever loved somebody so much and then they rejected you?

What do you tend to do?

I know what guys do.

I don't really know what ladies do.

But I know what we guys do.

We minimize the feelings that we had for them in the first place.

So if we love someone and they reject our love, we usually say, well, she wasn't really that attractive anyway.

She was moody anyway.

She wouldn't have made a good wife anyway.

You tell yourself whatever you have to tell yourself to minimize the hurt.

But this father maintains his love for his son and endures the painful agony of rejection.

Now, you know the rest of the story that Michael shared with you.

He goes off and squanders everything.

He wastes his life away, finds himself in the mud with the pigs.

He realizes how stupid he's been.

He comes to his senses, and he comes home with a plan, and here's the plan.

Number one, I'm going to confess to my father.

how arrogant and stupid I've been.

Number two, step two, I'm going to tell the father that I have sinned against heaven and against him and I'm no longer worthy to be called the son.

And step three, I'm going to ask my father to make me a hired man.

Now this is where we misunderstand.

A hired man is not the same thing as a slave.

The slave actually lived on the estate, but a hired man lived in the city or in the township.

and learned a craft so that as he learned this skill, he could make money and then pay the father back.

That was his idea.

So what the younger man was doing was very simple.

He had been taught by the rabbis that if you violate the mores of society, then the only way back is to pay restitution, not just an apology.

So the son is coming back now with a plan.

And he's saying, Father, if you will apprentice me, if you'll make me a hired man, Teach me a craft, then I know I can't be your son.

I can't come back into the house or the family, but at least I can work outside the village, outside the home and pay you back what you've lost.

And so he heads home with a plan.

The father sees him far away.

And by the way, I suggest that one of the reasons the father ran to meet him is not only because he loved him and he missed him and was glad to see him come home, was probably to prevent another kazaza ceremony.

Because the whole village, when they heard he was coming to town, they would have gathered again with their clay jars and they would have said, how dare you come back here?

Smash the jars again and said, we hope your life falls apart.

The father loved his son so much, he didn't want to see the son embarrassed, even though the son had embarrassed him.

This is quite a father.

In fact, scholars make an interesting deduction here.

I've mentioned a few times in the past that when I was a little boy, I was playing for the Pee Wee Baseball Championship in my hometown.

It was the Tri-State Containers versus the Norwell Plumbers.

And I played for the Norwell Plumbers and it was the city championship.

We didn't have much going on in little Elizabethan Tennessee.

So the whole town came out for the Pee Wee championship.

And you got the parents in their lawn chairs on one side and the parents in their lawn chairs on the other.

I was the pitcher, my brother was the catcher.

We were up one run, it was the bottom of the fifth.

You only went five innings in those days for Pee Wee baseball.

And all we had to do is get one more out.

The first two outs came easy.

The last out, it was a guy named Thunder.

We called him Thunderbat, Mike Little.

He was the best hitter in peewee baseball, which means he could probably hit it out of the infield.

And so it came to the last pitch of the game.

I was the pitcher, my brother Tony the catcher.

I threw a fastball, probably caught too much of the plate.

Mike Little nailed it, hit the top railing of the right field fence, the right fielder who's not used to seeing balls come out to the outfield.

Picked it up and just threw it up in the air as if he was trying to get out God.

And it ended up at third base.

The runner was rounding third and was so happy that he was going to score the tied run that he forgot to run to home plate and ran into the dugout.

At which point my mother came onto the field out of her lawn chair, picked up the baseball, put it in my glove and said, go tag him out, he didn't touch home plate.

I tagged him in the dugout, the umpire called him out.

The two coaches got in a fight and the police had to come and the rest is history.

The reason I can tell you that story is that's the kind of thing moms would do.

Dad would never do that.

At least then.

Only moms because moms don't care about embarrassment.

They don't care what people think about them.

All they care is that their son succeeds.

Well, scholars say that when the father goes out and kisses the son and runs to meet him, he's not acting like a father.

He's acting more like a Middle Eastern mother.

Like a mother who kisses the son, embraces him despite his failures.

And when the son attempts to roll out his compensation plan, the father won't even hear of it.

The father says, no, Get my best robe.

The best robe is the father's robe.

Get my ring, my authority.

Get my sandals, my shoes.

And kill the fatted calf.

We're going to have a party.

Basically, the father is saying, I'm not going to wait for you to clean up your act or take a bath.

I'm not going to ask you to prove yourself.

Cover my son's nakedness with my robe now, my office, my honor, and prepare the feast.

My son will not earn his way back into this family.

I'll bring him back on my own.

Now, do you know that other religions have a prodigal son story?

Almost all religions have borrowed this story from the Christian idea.

or from Jesus' parable, but there's one major difference in every other story of the prodigal son.

You know what the difference is?

In every other story of the prodigal son, whether it be Buddhism, Hinduism, whatever it is, the younger son is accepted by the father only after he pays restitution.

Now, what happens when the older brother hears about it?

He's particularly upset about the cost.

The big deal is the...

fatted calf.

That's the big deal.

The older brother asked the servant, what's going on here?

Servant says, your younger brother's back and your father gave him the fatted calf.

And he says, you know, my father never even gave me a goat.

And now this wayward son gets the fatted calf.

You have to understand that in the Middle East, people in that time and place almost never ate meat.

It was a delicacy.

Actually, it's still true today.

When I lived in Africa, the lady who kind of attended our grounds and worked on the property at the church, her name was Bertha, and I was learning to fish.

I don't like fish, I don't like to eat them, and I don't like to try to catch them.

But to fit in with the other missionaries, they would take me to a place about an hour north of Ferrari called Chinoy, and we would go bass fishing.

Evidently, the bass fishing was incredible, and so I would go just to hang out with my father-in-law and his friend Del Marshall, and the thought of just throwing a line in the water and waiting for a fish to bite it just, you know, I went for the food.

And so they always brought nice food and snacks, but I caught my first bass by throwing the line in, and the poor bass jumps out of the water trying to sling the hook out of its mouth, and it hung itself over a tree limb.

And that's how I caught, we took the boat over and I got them out of the tree.

But when I bring these fish home, and often I wouldn't catch any bass, I would just catch, what do you call it, carp?

Carp, the scavengers?

Well, when I'd bring those home, I was just going to throw them out.

But Bertha said, please don't throw them out.

And she would take them and they would be frying those things, even carp, in the evening.

Because meat was such a delicacy, even fish.

Now, that was also true.

We have to understand.

that if you're going to kill the fattened calf, you would never do that just for your family.

It is an entire village celebration because it would be too expensive.

Great would be the cost.

So the older brother's saying, father, how dare you use our wealth?

I've obeyed you.

I should have some say in this.

This stuff does belong to me.

In other words, I have some right over your things.

Father, how dare you do this on the younger brother?

He actually insults the father.

Verse 29, do you notice?

He does not say father.

He says, look, the English translation is trying to show you the lack of respect.

Look you, he's humiliating publicly his father.

He refuses to call him father and he humiliates him by not going into the greatest feast his father has ever prepared.

But what does the father do once again?

In the text, he responds with a very tender word.

He says, my son.

It could be translated, my child, actually.

I still want you in the feast.

Now, every other father we would have ever known would have rejected the son then and there, just like he would have rejected the younger son, but not this father.

Most fathers to them at least would have disowned him on the spot.

But this is a father unlike all other fathers.

And of course, if you've read the story, You're sitting there thinking, well, will the family come together?

How will this all be resolved?

How will it end?

And Jesus never tells us.

It's a cliffhanger.

We never know.

But here's what Jesus is trying to tell us.

Three things.

He clarifies the fatherhood of God.

He explains the attitude of sin.

And he illuminates the beauty of salvation.

Now, folks, I need you to lean in.

Let me tell you, the first thing he does, he clarifies the fatherhood of God.

When I was ministering in New Zealand, I had a very liberal pastor say to me, Pastor Jeff, you should not refer to God as Father, because there are many who've had bad fathers and have been wounded by their father, so this is not a good analogy.

And I reminded this person, but Jesus, more than anybody in history, called God Father.

In fact, he was the first person to ever address God as Father.

Every single time he addresses God, except once, He calls him Father.

And still today, people struggle with the idea that God is Father because they say it's too patriarchal.

Fathers are harsh.

They're hard.

They're controlling.

They're ruling.

They're authoritative.

We want loving and merciful, kind and forgiving fathers.

We want a sensitive father, a sensitive God, who longs for relationship and reconciliation.

Jesus Christ is giving us a Father who is unlike any other father.

And basically the reason he's doing this, he's saying, I know a lot of you had fathers that might've been controlling or overbearing or unforgiving or stringent or unkind or unsympathetic, but this is not my father.

For all of his power and majesty, he has a lot of other things, loving, generous, merciful, forgiving, relational, and he longs for your love.

Jesus was the only one to bring together these traits and attributes.

No one else had ever combined the meekness of God with the majesty of God, the power of God with the gentleness of God, the precepts of God along with the forgiveness of God.

So first, he clarifies fatherhood.

Second, he explains the attitude of sin.

He tells us what it really is.

See, the thing about this story is when Jesus talks about the older son, or sorry, the younger son, he was basically giving us a traditional view or understanding of sin.

And the Pharisees, the righteous, self-righteous people, would have been beating on their chest and saying, yeah, yeah, that's what those younger sons do.

That's what those sinners do.

Prostitutes, wild parties, living down in the muck of society, disrespectful to their fathers, rebelling against authority, self-indulgent.

So the religious leaders listening to this, if you look up in the top of the passage, you'll know that Jesus was speaking to two audiences, the Pharisees, the self-righteous, as well as the tax collectors and sinners.

So he's addressing both of groups and telling both groups, you're both lost.

So then we come to this end of the first son, the young son, and these Pharisees would be saying, yeah, they're nothing like us.

They're out and we're in.

But then the second act comes.

And that's why I believe this parable is more about the older son than the younger son.

Because in the second act, Jesus turns the tables.

And at the end of the second act, here's what you're left with.

There are two sons.

One is very, very good, and the other is very, very bad.

But both are alienated from the father.

Did you hear that?

One is very, very good.

One is very, very bad.

But both are alienated from the father.

They're both out.

Because each one wanted the father's things, but not the father.

Your relationship with God, folks, is more about your attitude and your will than it is your performance in righteousness.

Each one used to get the Father, or used the Father, rather, to get what they really wanted.

They didn't love the Father.

They used the Father to get their wealth, status, stuff, health, wealth, prosperity, favor, even blessings.

One of them did it by being very, very good.

The other did it by being very, very bad.

But both are lost.

The bad one is lost in his badness and the good one is lost in his goodness.

And in the end, it's the bad son who gets saved and the good son who is lost.

Can you imagine how that goes against the grain of everything the people in Jesus' day believed about God?

The lover of prostitutes gets saved.

The man of moral rectitude is lost.

And it gets worse because when you see why the good son was lost, he was lost not in spite of his goodness, but because of his goodness.

The older son says, here's the reason I won't go into the feast of the father.

Here's the reason I reject the father's invitation.

He says, I've never disobeyed you.

It's not his sins keeping him from the father.

It's his goodness.

He's proud of his goodness.

His righteousness is his own undoing.

This tells us that there are two people around Jesus when he told the story.

Tax collectors and sinners, Pharisees and teachers of the law.

You have both groups represented in the parable.

One group, sinners, they run off, live any way they want apart from God.

Then you have the religious people, the moral people, they're the elder brother.

And they live or attempt to live a righteous life, but they just do it for the wrong reasons.

This means there are two basic ways that human beings attempt to make the world right, put themselves right, and to connect to God.

It's either moral conformity or self-discovery.

Moral conformity, these people say, I'm going to be good, I'll do right, I'll work hard to be righteous in order to earn the salvation from God.

But the self-discovery people say, I'm going to decide what is right for me, I'm going to find my own way apart from anything or anyone else.

I will be self-determined and self-sufficient.

I'll be my own God, and my own God always accepts me.

Jesus says, you're both wrong.

You're both so lost, and you're both making the world a terrible place.

You think about this.

The older brother divides the world into two.

The good people are in, the bad people are out, and he isolates himself from the bad people.

The younger brother, the self-discovery people, they also divide the world into two.

The open-minded, progressive people are in, and the bigoted, judgmental people are out.

And Jesus says, you're both lost.

Rather, and here's the definitive line, it's the humble who are in and the proud who are out.

It's the people who know they're not good or open-minded, and they know they need sheer grace if they ever hope to get in.

Please listen.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not religion or irreligion.

Morality or immorality.

It's not moralism or relativism.

It's completely off the scale.

It's not halfway or in the middle of these.

It's something altogether different.

Jesus is redefining sin.

There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord, just like there are two ways to get control of the Father's stuff.

One side, or one son, tries to get the Father's stuff by not loving the Father, but by using the Father to get what he really wanted.

He doesn't want the Father.

He just wants the Father's stuff.

He doesn't want the Father's authority over him.

He just wants what he thinks he's entitled to.

This is most of the people in the world.

You think about this.

The arrogance here.

God.

Give me breath, life, and success to which I'm entitled.

If you're really God, that's what you'll do.

But don't come too close as to tell me how to live.

Keep your distance unless I'm desperate and I need you, then you can come give me what I want.

That's the wild son.

But the other son, the older son, tries to control the father by living a very good life.

He obeys the father, not because he loves the father, not because he appreciates the father.

But by doing so, he hopes to get the father's stuff.

The father is a means to his ends.

By the way, this is the most difficult son to save.

How do you save someone who thinks they don't need saving?

Far too many religious people in churches, all in the West especially.

There's an obedience.

There's a righteousness.

They may even believe the right stuff and stand for the right things.

But their pursuit is not God.

Listen carefully now.

Their pursuit is if they do these religious or righteous things, they think that somehow God is a tit-for-tat relationship.

If I do everything he asked me, then he's got to give me a good life.

They're not after God for the sake of resembling God, to love God, to know God, to delight in him.

Don't you see the elder brother is lost, the younger brother is lost, and both bring misery into the world.

The younger brothers bring misery because they live apart from God.

But the older brothers, they're always angry.

Do you know why?

Look at the anger of the older brother in the parable Jesus tells.

He says, I've lived a good life and the young brother is not, and yet the father's blessing him.

I've earned the blessing.

I deserve the father's favor.

God owes me.

The problem is that if you, if your relationship with God is based on your life going well, then there's always going to be an undercurrent of anger because your life is not going to go well.

Life seldom goes well.

And if you think God owes you a good life because of all your religious activity, because you're a good person, you're always going to be angry because you're going to hit difficult seasons in your life.

And if your trust and your allegiance and obedience to God is contingent on your life being or going well, you're going to be a roller coaster of an emotional mess.

I've got a very good friend.

who a couple of years ago, his life took a different turn.

I mean, he had worked hard all of his life and through a series of maybe bad decisions or unfortunate events, he found himself in his 60s almost having to start completely over.

And I watched him.

He didn't miss a beat.

And the reason he didn't miss a beat is because he genuinely loves and trusts God.

Many would have walked away at kind of a tragedy this late in life.

They would have thought, well, what's the use of doing good and being faithful to God if God doesn't give me the things I want and take care of me?

Religious people get angry at God and walk away, but Christ followers have fallen in love with God and know that every truly good thing the Father has belongs to them.

So here's the question.

How can we get to the point as religious people?

How can we get to the point?

Where we serve and obey and do the good, not out of a slave mentality or a duty, although that's part of it, or mechanical or joyless or superiority complex.

We're more righteous and better than other people.

How can we get to the point where we actually do all of these things because we love the Father?

And that's the third part.

Jesus illuminates true salvation.

You know, Jesus says we need three things.

Now, this is the end, and I got to do it in six minutes.

But lean in, okay?

Jesus says we need three things.

The first thing we need is we need the initiating love of the Father.

Have you noticed that both the younger son and the older son, even though they disrespected the Father and shunned the Father, the Father still runs out to meet them and tries to bring them back in.

It's true that you will never come to God as your Father until he first comes to you.

You say, well, Jeff, I've been waiting all my life for that.

No, you haven't.

Jesus said, if I be lifted up, I will draw all men and women to me.

What does that tell you?

That tells me at the point in your life when you start to truly understand the cross and the Father's deep love for you and his mercy and his forgiveness coinciding with his power.

At that point, when you see the Father running out to meet you through the cross and you truly understand the heart of the Father, it will no longer be a mere transaction, but will be...

a relationship.

You need the Father's initiating love, and he's given it to you through the cross.

The second here is important.

You need to learn how to repent for something other than, other than sin.

A Christ follower not only repents of his sin, but he repents.

of the reason he does his good things.

A lot of times the reason we do the good thing is not because we love the heart of the Father, but because we love us.

And we feel if we do the right thing, then God will give us what we truly want, which is not him, but something else.

Folks, you don't think I'm concerned as a pastor when so many...

churches are built on this idea that come to God, he's going to give you everything you want.

You're just an older brother.

God loves you and he'll run out the road to meet you.

Sometimes God has to take away all those things you're pursuing until he's the only thing left.

But the reason Jesus tells the story has been intriguing to me.

This is it right here, and this is one of those, I hope, aha moments for all of you.

Why does Jesus tell this story?

He tells the story to show you what the older brother should really be like.

See, if the older brother was really a righteous older brother who loved the father, what would the older brother have done?

Because he knew that the younger brother, being away from the father, broke the father's heart.

The younger brother or the older brother then said, he would have come to dad and said, dad, I know your heart is broken.

I'm going to go out there and I'm going to find the younger brother and I'm going to bring him back to the house.

Do you know why the older brother's mad?

Because when the younger brother comes back, guess what the older brother loses?

One third of the wealth.

When he comes back in, the older brother just lost a third of his wealth.

And that's why he's mad at the fatted calf.

Or not at the fatted calf, but he's mad at the idea of the fatted calf.

That's why the father has to say to him at the end, son, everything I have belongs to you.

A true elder brother would have gone out and brought the young son back in and said, dad, even if it costs me some cash in my wallet, your heart is so important to me, I'm willing to give that up.

Jesus is trying to show us that we do have an elder brother, and he's the best elder brother ever, and his name is Jesus Christ.

And Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ doesn't just go out, pursue us at the cost of his wallet.

He left heaven to come to earth at the cost of his life.

The heart of the Father was so wounded because you and I are away from him that the true elder brother gave up everything to please the heart of the Father so that those who were apart from God could be brought back in.

I told you earlier that the only time Jesus didn't call God Father, one time, one time, on the cross, Jesus was stripped naked so that you and I could be clothed.

And on the cross, he said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

He does not call him father because at that moment, he was not being treated as a son so that you and I could be.

On the cross, the older brother paid the debt that we know we owe.

Jesus had everything the father had, and yet he gave it up to bring us home.

When you see that, when you begin to see that, you'll repent not only of your sins, but you'll repent for the reasons you do the good.

That we are hopeless without an older brother who will come and bring us home to the heart of the father.

at the cost of his own life.

So if you're here this weekend, do you really think Christianity is just another religion and is like all other faith systems?

You are sadly mistaken.

Following Christ is about realizing what's been done for you, that you might be unconditionally accepted.

Did you know that?

Did you know that you are unconditionally accepted before God because of your older brother and what he did for you on the cross?

Do you know that?

Now, of course, if you love God, you're going to try to obey him, but not because you're trying to earn something, but because you're grateful for something that he's already given.

And when you fall in love with him, when you truly fall in love with him, you know what you're going to do?

You're going to give him your life.

You're going to give him everything.

Why?

Why?

Why would you do that?

Because you can't lose everything the Father has belongs to you.

Father, I am grateful for the truth of your word that sometimes takes a lifetime to truly understand.

So, Father, I pray that eyes would be open right now.

I know there are some that their relationship with you is superficial at best, merit-based at worst.

I pray that our eyes would be open.

Other than through Christ, we have no hope.

The true elder brother has come.

He has left heaven to come to earth.

He's been stripped naked so that we could be clothed.

He has given up his life so that we could gain ours.

I pray that our heart would be changed, that we would never be self-righteous again.

We would never be so proud again that we think somehow we've earned favor.

And as a result, we would fall in love with a father who is unlike any other father, who pursues us through the cross, and who gives us an elder brother, who gives up his life so that we might find ours, so that we might inherit everything the father has.

And he has it all.

We are thankful in Christ's name and everyone said, amen.