Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): God loves you! 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: So far, in Luke 15, there’s one story and it's important to understand that the people listening to Jesus were the Pharisees. That was his intended audience, the Pharisees. The religious people, the people who went to church, the people who had an outward form of righteousness who if you looked at them in society, they'd be some of the most respected, well-versed, looked-up-to people because they were pillars of society. They were respected. They were full of knowledge and information and such.

Now, these folks as well as most of the folks in that day made quite a huge blunder when they came to think about who the Messiah was. They saw the Messiah in Palestine at that time as somebody who was going to come and deliver them from Roman tyranny. To them, that was the Messiah. "We have it all together, God, as long as you can get the Romans out of here. That's the only thing we need you to do, get the Romans out of here. We're doing okay for the other stuff, but the Romans are cramping our style and we want you to come be the Messiah and send this political leader to drive the Romans in almost a military way, drive the Romans out of our homeland."

And this is what the Pharisees ascribed to as well as really everyone ascribed to that mentality. Now, here's the actual Messiah, Jesus. He comes and he says, "Look, you guys are missing it." He tells the disciples this, "I didn't come, I'm not here about the Romans. I love the Romans. I'm here to deliver you from something far greater than the Romans. I'm here to deliver you from sin. That's why I've come because that's your tyrant. That's what's repressing you, oppressing you. That's what has you in bondage. It's sin. It's not some government. That's a piece of cake."

So, the Pharisees in a sense were like, "Well thanks, Lord, but I think we're good. We can do that ourselves. I can pull myself up by my religious bootstraps and use some good old-fashioned willpower and probably conquer most sin in my life. If you take care of the Romans, I'll take care of sin." I'm being a little facetious here, but this is who Jesus was talking to. These men disdained failure. They disdained weakness. They studied God, they taught about God, they hid God's word in their hearts, but they didn't know God.

They didn't know who he was. Their god was self-made and their god was a god of a system, a behavioral system that had no heart attached to it. So, Jesus comes along and he teaches this parable to the Pharisees. In verses one and two of Luke 15, if you could see it there, he's talking to the Pharisees. He wants them to hear something. He goes, "I'm going to show you who God is with these three stories about a lost coin, a lost sheep, and as we've been discussing last week and this week, the lost son."

If you really want to discover who God is, then I will show you something that will blow your mind, he's basically saying. Hebrews 12:15, "Look after each other so that none of you fails to receive the grace of God." Understanding the depths, my friends, of God's nature, his gracious nature, is essential if I'm ever going to find the freedom of the spirit. Now, I'll just say this, I've been walking with God, I got saved in 1977. I've been a grace-based ministry, my training, I've been a grace-based preacher since 1985. I'm just scratching the surface.

I don't know anything and I'm not trying to be humble. I'm not trying to be falsely "Oh, he's such a humble guy." No, I'm not. I'm just learning the depths and the scope of how magnificent this God of ours is and how magnificent and amazing his grace is. Let's start with a few definitions I gave you week one. I didn't really give them to you much last week, but let me just review it. Grace is to receive something without earning it or deserving it. Once given, grace does not need to be recompensed or paid back.

Dwell on these things, think about these things. I'll get you a copy of these. We put a copy in the program, I think, week two. Grace sees nothing of greater or lesser value in the recipient. It's the same for everybody. In other words, I look at whether it be a homeless person or a Wall Street person the same way. I don't see any more or less value in anybody. Grace is never withdrawn if it's not appreciated, acknowledged, or embraced.

Now, that sounds sort of quaint, but how many of us really live there? Know what that's saying? Maybe you've done, maybe you've said this, maybe you've thought this. I have. "I did this, this, and this for that person and they didn't appreciate it. They never even acknowledged it. They never gave me a thank you or a thank you card. I'm never doing that for them again." Oh, I got you. Grace. I've done it. "They didn't appreciate. I did this. I didn't have to do that. I just did it for them and they didn't appreciate it." That's how ungracious I am.

If I were saturated with the grace of God, it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter if they acknowledged me or didn't acknowledge me. It wouldn't matter if they thanked me or didn't thank me because it's not about what I'm getting back. What I did wasn't gracious. I was bartering. "I will do this for you, I'll do a kind deed for you, I'll do a kind act for you, I'll say something nice to you because I know you're going to appreciate it and say something nice back to me." So, am I really being gracious or am I really just trading? I'm just trading.

I'm going to affirm you so you can affirm me back. I'm trading. You see when you take the grace of God for what it is, how difficult it is to be truly gracious without the spirit's help. Grace can never be attached to a debt or obligation or it will cease to be grace. I always use the illustration of Christmas. I give gifts to the kids and I don’t ever expect to get a gift back from the kids. In fact, I just assume I don’t get a gift back from them because I know I paid for it. So what good is it? I just spent money on myself. I just like giving it.

And as a parent, you know the same thing, you just like giving the gifts and you love to see the kids open the gifts. You don't really expect anything back. Your pleasure is in giving, not in receiving. Grace can never be attached to a debt or obligation or it will cease to be grace. See, Jesus sees us all, my friends, and he sees the stuff we don't even see yet. Pastor Goertzen did a great devotion in the men's breakfast on Saturday and he just talked about this, how he himself, especially in the loss of his precious Janie, is just now learning about things in his own heart, his own mind.

Now, this is what's beautiful. Despite this rot, this anti-grace works-trained soul and heart and mind that we all have, Jesus loves us. He likes us. Sometimes that's a difference. I always knew he loved me because they wrote a song about that. "Jesus loves me this I know." They never said or wrote a song "Jesus likes me this I know" because I don't think he likes me, because I don't like me. I don't like things about me, so how could he like me if I'm not really liking me very much these days? No, he likes me and he's for me.

This is what we do with grace. We tweak it, we adjust it, we put asterisks next to it, we put addendums to it, we say, "I know, but..." That word "but" means I want to somehow take God's grace and make it a little less amazing. But when we meditate on it, think about it, dive into what the word of God says about it in our hearts, it can change our nature. It can soften our cantankerousness. It will help us even accept people for who they are. Knowing God's grace, what God's grace is towards me makes it easier to give grace to somebody else.

Now, here's the thing. Some of us don't think we need as much grace as others. By the end of this message, you will. Now, let's review the story. The younger brother. These first verses I'm going to be kicking off in the last half of the parable. He asked for his inheritance. Let's just go over a little five-minute review of last week. He asked for the inheritance. He went to his father. Now, we're taking this son, we're reading it in the English, but we're framing this in Middle Eastern peasant culture.

And this is where the story explodes into a whole another understanding when you frame it in the cultural application of cultural norms, I should say, of the day. When the younger brother, because that's how the Pharisees heard it. The Pharisees heard this story and filtered it through the normal culture of their day. We read it in our English 2,000 years later, we miss that. We don't see that. It's a great story, it's a great video, it's a touching story, it's a moving story, we get the bottom line out of it, but we don't see the extremes of the story unless we place it back 2,000 years ago into the culture in which Jesus was speaking to.

So, when the younger brother goes to his father and says, "Dad, I want my inheritance," he's in essence saying this: "I wish you were dead." You didn't do that. You didn't ask for your inheritance early. That was a no-no. That was a cultural no-no. It wouldn't be that blunt, but that's the strong insinuation. "Dad, I wish you were dead because I want my money now. I don't want the responsibility of the inheritance. I don't want the responsibility of the family. I don't want any of those things. I want my money now."

And in essence, Dad, I'm saying like this to my family: I don't want to be recognized with you, I don't want to grow old with you guys, I don't want to keep the family line going, I don't want to work the family land, I don't want to work the family, raise the family cattle. No, I'm done. I'm leaving this family. I'm departing. Give me my money now so I can go live like I want to live. That was all part of last week's message. And so he did. And he got his land, he got his cattle, he sold it off immediately pennies on the dollar and went into the Gentile land and squandered it.

You know the story. First of all, this story never would have happened. This is an absolute make-believe story in Jesus' day. This never would have happened and that's why Jesus was bordering absurd in teaching this to this audience. They would never have said that's incomprehensible. So he planned on coming home. The son says, "Okay, this isn't working. I've squandered the money, I can't find any food, I'm raising pigs and I'm a Jew and I'm raising pigs. This isn't good. So, I'm going to go home to my father and he'll hire me as a hired worker." That's sort of our equivalent of day labor.

Now, that sounds humble and then he got a speech and "Dad, I'm sorry and please forgive me." He rehearsed a speech, but it really wasn't that humble. He was still doing the anti-grace thing because what he's saying is this: "I'm going to go home and work hard and earn their respect back. I'm not going to get restored by my father's grace. I'm going to be restored by my self-effort and my self-reliance. I'm going to get a job, I'm going to work really hard, I'm going to pay my dad back every penny so I can look at my older brother and say shut up, and the people will quit mocking me, and the village will accept me back. I will work my way back into their good graces and their acceptance."

See, the son really didn't ever really get humbled, he just got hungry. Again, there's a difference. Now, in a normal culture, if he came back, the kids, I mean it's a small village. Remember it's like the church was so small everyone knew the private prayer requests? The village was sort of like that way. And the son walks back into the village, representing four or five families maybe and two or three hundred, four hundred people, whatever it is. They know he's coming back. They know when he left. There was no secrets there. The kids could heckle him. They could throw dust at him. People would turn their backs on him as they walked by. That would be the normal thing to do because of how he shamed his father with his actions.