Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: Luke chapter 14. This will really be the ending of our "Discovering God" series. This will be a very brief 15 or 20 minutes tonight, and that’s all we will have before you go home. It is my prayer, because it's been my prayer for myself, that your minds, your understanding, and how you embrace your thoughts about God—your internal life about God—would find a new ally in this series of messages.

I’ve given myself more things to think about, more things to embolden my faith. I've been a grace guy; I’ve taught the grace of God. It's the only message I've really known. I’ve been blessed to be brought up in a grace-based ministry, so it’s the only emphasis I’ve ever known. Studying the historical setting of these parables and these stories that the Lord gave just took grace and put it on steroids. It became extravagant.

When you look at the Prodigal Son from a historical setting and some of these things that we've covered, they are explosive in revealing the extravagance of God's mercy and grace. The recipients, the people hearing these stories, were people just like we are. They were in a culture. They had their norm and their frame of reference. They filtered things through their culture, through the lens of their worldview, just like we do.

When the Lord comes and starts teaching these things, it was absolutely contrary to their worldview and their culture. We've brought that out. I used Kenneth Bailey's material and others, but that was my main source in the Prodigal Son and the different stories. Jesus didn't just tell a nice story; he went overboard. He went extravagant on it.

He made sure that those people with the sensitive cultural, religious ears who were hearing these stories just couldn't process what he was saying because it was too radical. We know it's good, but we don't see how radical it is because we're just reading an English version, westernizing a story from 2,000 years ago. When you frame it in the culture of the day—the father running towards the son, lifting up the robe, revealing his ankles, Zacchaeus climbing a tree—these things make these stories really explode.

Tozer has a quote that says, "Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God. God will conform to the image of the one who created it." I'm going to create my image of God. I'm going to base my view of God, my worldview of God, and how I filter him through my own image. I can filter him through my earthly father. I can filter him through my sin, through my religion, my self-righteousness, or whatever by my wounded spirit.

I can create my own view of God and basically determine God's thoughts. Who said this is how God thinks? I do, because this is how I would think if I were God. I filter him through myself. God must be absolutely over me or that person. Why do I say that? All because I would be over that person or over myself.

We attribute thoughts to God that God doesn't have. Isaiah 55 says his thoughts are way above our thoughts; his ways are way above my ways. This God that we create will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges. I create the mind that will develop my God.

My God will have levels of truth because I have a Bible. Unless I take my thoughts and filter them right through the word of God, knowing what the word of God teaches me about God—how he thinks, his values, his priorities, his character, his nature, and all the things that we learn so consistently here—I will filter my image of God through something man-made by myself. That’s going to be different for all of us.

I know with me, I created an image of God in my mind that paralleled my earthly father. I didn't have a bad father. I didn't have the best father. He was never abusive; he wasn't mean. But he was indifferent, critical, and never pleased, as so many were from that generation of the Depression years. When I understood I have a heavenly father, I thought, "That's how God has to be." I didn't really verbalize it that way, but deep down, that's how I thought.

In my case, if I got a C, why didn't I get a B? If I got a B, how come I didn't get an A? If I got three hits in a baseball game, how come I didn't get four hits? There was never any encouragement for what I did accomplish; it was just a finger pointing at what I didn't accomplish. I thought that’s how God is.

I had these victories in my life, but I had these areas of non-victory, and I just assumed that God was as disturbed with my areas of non-victory as my father was. Indeed, we know through some of these teachings that God is not like that at all. A God begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God.

The last thing we want to look at is in Luke chapter 14: the banquet guest and God. Verse 16: "A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. And at the time of the banquet, he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, 'Come, for everything is now ready.' But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, 'I have bought a field; I must go out and see it. Please have me excused.' And another said, 'I have bought five yoke of oxen; I go to examine them. Please have me excused.' Another said, 'I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.'"

The servant came and reported these things to the master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, "Go out quickly to the streets and the lanes of the city and bring in the poor and the crippled and blind and the lame." And the servant said, "Sir, what you have commanded has been done, and there is still room." And the master said to the servant, "Go to the highways and the hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet."

Banquets historically were a big event. You would usually invite a semi-closed circle of friends. Sometimes it would be open to a bigger public circle, and that all depended on the purpose of the banquet. It wasn't something that was taken lightly. What we would call a block party was something that was normal in that culture. The whole village would come out and there would be dancing, but somebody would have to foot the bill. Somebody would have to organize it and get the food.

This was a banquet that was offered usually to close friends and family. It was not casual. If you were invited, you went. If you said you were going, you showed up. You didn't take it lightly. There was a great honor in throwing the banquet, and there was a great honor attached to being invited to the banquet. We westernize this and think, "What's the big deal? They're having a dinner and some guys couldn't make it, so they didn't come."

It was a big deal back then. It's not a big deal to us because that's how we live our lives, but when you got that invitation, it was a great honor and you were expected to be there unless there was a real reason why you couldn't be. The fact that the man putting on the banquet invited you was significant all by itself. These three key guests bowed out for three different reasons. The Lord was giving a parable here.

The first guest had bought some land and he had to inspect it. This is the equivalent of saying, "I just bought a house I've never seen; I have to go check it out." Not many people buy houses they've never seen. It’s absurd what the Lord is trying to bring out. The excuse the man had didn't happen. This was an obvious snub. He's basically saying, using an excuse, "I just bought a house." You just bought a major purchase and you don't even know what you bought, and you want to go check it out? It was an obvious snub.

He just didn't want to go. It didn't happen then; it doesn't happen now. Another excuse was someone who just bought five yoke of oxen. It's the same ridiculous excuse. You would not buy an oxen team without watching them work together. You could get some oxen that are really good beasts, but if they don't work together well, you're defeating the purpose of having the oxen team. It’s like driving a car; you wouldn't buy a used car or a new car without taking it for a test drive. It's the same thing. It's a ridiculous excuse, like buying a used car unseen. It’s another obvious snub.

These weren't guys with legitimate excuses; these were like slaps in the guy's face. No, we don't want to go to your banquet, and I'm giving you a lame excuse. You know it's a lame excuse, but you have no real social thing to do but to let us slide on it. The third excuse: "I just got married and I'm busy with my new wife."

The language in this is actually pretty crude when you look at the Hebrew. This was the crudest and the rudest reason yet. There was a lot of subtle innuendo here. It was a crude snub and an offensive snub that was purposed to show great disrespect to the host. You have three friends and they backed out on three different occasions for three ridiculous excuses.

The host could retaliate by exposing what the guests did and basically selling their reputation. He could go behind their back. When we get offended, we have a tendency to do this. We want to go behind the person who offended us and say, "You know that person? This is what they said to me, or they did this to me." We can turn at least a few other people's opinions about the people that hurt our feelings or the people who treated us so disrespectfully.

That has gone on for 2,000 years and will go on until the Lord comes back. But he didn't do that. What they did was so socially on the edge that this man putting on the banquet could have exposed what they did and brought some social pressure down on them. They would have probably paid socially for what they did. But he didn't do that. There was a seeming collusion of the guests that is insinuated in the language. The three guests knew each other, were going to the same owner, and they colluded together to all bow out of this.