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: It's still the same. Hasn't changed. Maybe in the big cities it's changed, but when you get out of the big city and go into the countryside, it's still the same. The family things are still the same, the nuances of culture are still the same. And so when you read Luke chapter 15 and you frame it through 2000-year-old peasantry culture, the peasantry culture of Palestine of that era, it is explosive to say the least. I hope I'll start to show you why. Being the younger brother, he had one-third of the estate coming to him. The older brother would always get two-thirds of the estate.

Understand that the inheritance probably wasn't cash. It wasn't, "I'm going to get mom's or dad's IRA, cash that in and give me my money." No, it was mostly cattle and property. There could have been some cash involved, but there was cattle and property. That's how most inheritance was. This property was probably in their family for many years and so it was passed down from generation to generation. The dad would give it off to his sons and his sons would work the land, they'd give it off to their sons and their sons would work the land, and that's how it happened. Sometimes it didn't change much for decades and decades.

They lived in a small village. This is a significant point because back then those villages were usually made up of one, two, three, four families, maybe five. You know how the families were: I settle here and Aunt Mildred's here and Aunt Joan there and Uncle Teddy's over there and they have all their kids and they settle down and that's how they grew. It was like four or five main mover and shaker families in these particular villages. And they were usually pretty small. There wasn't a lot of privacy.

For those who remember the Martins when they came, they told a joke: they said the church was so small that everyone knew the private prayer requests. Same thing here. Everyone knew what was going on. There were no secrets, especially in families, especially in this culture. If one knew, everybody knew. They didn't need a newspaper, they had social media back then, it was just called gossip. You found out everything just because everyone was talking about it. There were no surprises in that village.

So the son, he comes to his father and asks for his inheritance early. Now this is the first mind-blowing point here. In essence he said this: "Dad, I want my inheritance now." Or in other words, "Dad, I wish you were dead so I could have my money." Because you didn't ask for an inheritance early. "Dad, I wish that you wouldn't be around so long, I wish you'd die now," even though I'm not saying that, I'm shrouding it in more clouded language than that, but when I ask for my inheritance, what I'm basically saying is, "Dad, I don't want you in my life anymore. I wish you were dead so I can take my money and do what I want with it."

I had a woman one time call me and ask for an appointment. She came in and said, "I want you to pray, Pastor Kelley, that my mom would die because she's in a nursing home and I really need the inheritance of the money." That was what she asked of me. Took me a while to throw her out of my office. But that's what money can do to people sometimes. It can really skewer you. If you've been part of a family estate, I've been an executor of close to 15 estates and in-family, out-of-family, and some of them are really easy and peaceful. Some of them get pretty nasty because money does funny things to different people. So he looked at his dad and said, "I wish you dead."

Know what he said to the village, aunts, uncles, relatives? "I don't want you in my life either. In fact, I don't want anything to do with any of you. I want to take what I have coming to me that I haven't earned, I want to take what I have coming to me and I want to go and live like I want to live. And as far as you guys, I don't give a snap about you guys." First of all, that would have deeply offended the father, and the father did not have to give him the inheritance. That was his call. And it would have angered the villagers.

At that point, the villagers would have done like this to him, and there's a nice little Hebrew term which escapes me right now they would have declared it on him, which meant he was dead to them, this young man. That sounds rude. That's what he wanted. He wanted to be dead to them. So he liquidated. Remember, he got cattle and land, that's not good travel money. So he liquidated. He sold cheap. He took this cattle and the livestock and he took his property and said, "Hey, I'm selling this stuff on pennies on the dollar. Who wants to give me money for it?"

And for sure they had some good old real estate agents out there that scoffed that right up. He cashed out so he took his family's property and he sold it off to strangers best we can tell. In the story that's insinuated because he didn't want anything to do with the family. He says, "I'm rejecting my family, I'm rejecting my family's reputation, and I'm rejecting my family's name." Now, the language he used in the Greek here and in the Arabic even clearer that he used for his inheritance, he asked in a specific way. He's saying, "I want my money, I want my inheritance, but I don't want any of the responsibility that goes with it."

Because in a normal way, they would have got the inheritance but then he had a responsibility attached to working the land, keeping the family name up, guarding the family's reputation. "I don't want that. I just want my money. Give me my money." The normal cultural thing would have been wait for the dad to die, take over the portion of land and work the land and the livestock just like your family had been doing for generations and decades. He jeopardized the father's well-being in the present. The father jeopardized his own well-being by agreeing to it. Didn't have to.

The village would want him punished or the village would want him banished and really, by the strict interpretation of the law, even though it wasn't exercised much, he could have been stoned. It was an insulting request, basically blew him off. We can see the Lord Jesus setting up something pretty profound here. He's setting up a great lesson for these listeners, these Pharisees, for the self-righteous, and the lesson is sort of like this: the greater the offense, the more glory there is in grace. I think one of the great illuminations of our first moments in eternity was how amazing grace was.

I don't know about you, but for me, and I've been teaching and preaching, I meditate and I think on these things, I reflect these things for years, I want it to be part of my being and part of my character and how I see myself and how I treat others, but no matter how much I understand or think I understand the grace of God, I still think I'm earning something. "If I do well, then God's really happy with me. If I'm not doing so well, then God's a little frustrated with me because I'm a little frustrated with me." And I can never really detach myself from God's grace.

I can never really see myself outside of my performance. Now I'm not going to get into the older brother now, but I want to get into the father a little bit and then we're going to recount the story. The father, William Temple said this: "He gives us freedom even to reject his love." The glory of God is in our free volition in the sense when we choose him. He gives us freedom, I don't have to accept his grace, I don't have to accept his love. He broke the father's heart and the father let him. He jeopardized the father's well-being and the father let him.

Not only did the son break every cultural norm and standard, the father broke every cultural norm and standard for the son. What he did for the son goes way beyond. He risked his own reputation, he probably became a topic of disdain by the community and in some cases might have even been blamed for the son's behavior. Maybe you've seen some kids that didn't quite turn out like you look at the parents and you look at the kid and you say, "That kid doesn't look like he came from those parents. Those parents are dignified, they're respectful, and this child has sort of went the other way in his adulthood."

And you think, "Wonder what went wrong? Wonder what those parents did wrong? I wonder if they never disciplined him? That was probably the problem. They probably never held that young man accountable. They probably were hypocrites at home and he's just acting out on their hypocrisy." So we look at the byproduct of this child's life and obviously people don't become that way by themselves. There must be a parent to blame or something, right? Or a lack of parent. Spurgeon said the glory of God is found in his grace.

Now, this young man was in a Gentile land. He basically partied his money away rather quickly, probably bought some temporary friends, maybe you've seen that happen before. I've watched it with my own two eyes. They bought some friends and they're dear friends, they're good friends, they're faithful friends till you run out of money and then they're not there anymore. So he finds himself needing a job, so culturally speaking he went to a man that raised swine and said, "Look, I need a job." And this Gentile guy goes, "I don't really want to hire you."

You've seen this, it works still the same thing works in business and industry today. "I have this employee, he's not doing his job, I don't want to fire him because then he's going to get unemployment, so I'm just going to cut his hours or give him some really awful job until he quits or she quits." Maybe that's happened to you. Well, here's the Gentile guy, "I don't want to hire this guy, I don't want to pay this guy. He's a Jew, let him feed the pigs. He won't last long." And he's watching the pigs eat the husk, that's only edible through the pigs, that humans couldn't eat those things, couldn't digest them.

Pigs can digest everything. And so he's looking at the pigs, the pigs are... they're pigs, they're fat and they're happy, belly's full. He's starving, can't find a meal. So he comes up with this idea: "I'm going to go home and become part of my father's family." Even his hired servants eat more than me, be better than me. So I want to frame this because he comes home, he wasn't thinking about moving in back into the father's house, that'd be his bondservants or a servant, they lived inside the father's house. He just wanted to be a hired hand.

He wanted to be hired by the father to work the land, maybe live in the town. It's like day labor. And every day he'd come in and he'd work hard for the father and he would repay his father back. It's funny because this sounds good, but you know what he's saying? "I don't need grace. Just give me a little break and I'll work really hard, I'll clean up my act, I'll show them that I can make this happen, I'll show them I'm not the loser they think I am, the screw up they think I am, I'll show my older brother, I'll pay my father back every penny."

"So they won't have any excuse to reject me in the family anymore. I'll just learn a trade, I'll work really hard. Self-reliance. I'm going to make it right and restore myself to my family." He'd prove to everyone that he could do it. He missed the glory of the story. Hard work wasn't going to restore him. A newfound integrity wasn't going to restore him. A new work ethic, a new attitude wasn't going to restore him. Grace. That's what Jesus is trying to get across to these Pharisees. Grace is going to restore this young man.