The Lavish Grace of God | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

Um, you know, in general, I'll do series of messages that'll come together off of a theme or a concept.

Um, and those range in uh you know how long they go.

Some sometimes it's uh four or five weeks, and then we did one earlier this year that was like 16, I think, or 17 weeks.

Uh we're gonna do one that's gonna be two weeks, so I'm gonna call it a mini-series.

All right, we're gonna do two weeks uh out of Luke 15, and it's the story of the prodigal son.

So if you have your Bible, uh go ahead and turn there.

Uh I'm gonna get in quickly because I want to be a good steward of your time here.

Starting in verse 11 is where this story begins, and it says Jesus continued, There was a man who had two sons.

The younger one said to his father, Father, give me my share of the estate.

So he divided his property between them.

Um, okay, you'll notice we're in Luke 15.

You notice we start in verse 11.

Uh, there's a little bit of context that's kind of right in front of us if we'll look for it.

So if we were to go back a few uh verses to the beginning of Luke 15, to verse 1, verses 1 and 2 kind of give us who Jesus is talking to, who was his real-time audience when he was telling the story.

And it says in verse 1, tax collectors and other notorious sinners often came to listen to Jesus teach.

And this made the Pharisees and teachers of religious law complain that he was associating with such sinful people, even eating with them.

So, what you see is Jesus has an audience that is diverse in terms of how they see the world and how they behave, and they didn't like one another.

There was a lot of tension between these people, and yet for different reasons, they find themselves in the same place.

They're standing in front of Jesus, and Jesus certainly understands those dynamics.

So he gives three parables in succession, and it's pretty easy to see that the parables escalate as it relates to loss and redemption.

So the first one is a man who had a herd of a hundred sheep and he loses one, and he values that one lost sheep so much that he's willing, you know, to go to any lengths to get it back.

So it's a statement of value, it's a statement of loss and restoration, but it's a 1% loss, right?

It's easy math.

You have a hundred, you lose one, it's a one percent loss.

The second is a woman who had 10 coins, and we talked about this a few weeks ago.

This wasn't wasn't just a coin collection, this was a wedding gift, this was like a wedding ring.

Imagine losing 10% of your wedding ring, right?

She loses one coin out of 10.

So now the math has gone from 1% to 10%, and she's sweeping the house to restore an inanimate object, but it has tremendous animation in her mind and heart and what it symbolizes, and so she gets it back.

And then the third story is a man had two sons and he loses one of them.

So we went from 1% of a herd to 10% of a wedding ring to 50% of your children, and so there's an intensification of not only the magnitude of the stories, but the magnitude of the loss and restoration.

Um, there is an element to first century Jewish and Greco-Roman culture that I think is important to know as you're really trying to recreate the story and understand the feeling of the recipients.

And a lens we need to understand a little bit better and look through is the honor-shame culture of the first century.

So if you think of the dynamics of the first century, the honor-shame culture, honor and shame, in other words, not so much are you right or wrong, but are you honorable?

Is your life and your life's work being recognized?

What is your place in the community society?

What does your family name mean?

Uh we live in our Western culture, we tend to uh really focus on individuality.

We affirm individuality quite a bit in that day.

Of course, we all feel social pressure and peer pressure and those type of things, but it's really uh much smaller compared to in that time where your place in society, your honor in culture was like a social currency.

Uh let me give you a little bit more on it.

So if you think about being a first century Jewish person, you are under the power of the Roman government, and the top of that food chain is Caesar.

You have no say.

You don't get to put, you don't vote for Caesar or not vote for Caesar.

Caesar is there.

There's a power structure that you have no say, literally none in.

Um, the governor, the you know, the king of the Jews, Herod, or or when Jesus is crucified, Pontius Pilate, who's a governor.

These people are appointed.

There's no there is no voting.

It's just you're it's they're just appointed.

And then what the the the uh Roman government does is they allow, in some ways, the Jewish people to make some internal decisions based on their own their own people.

And so they the Jewish community has a religious governing body called the Sanhedrin, which would be the closest thing to partisanship we we might see in the New Testament, where you have Pharisees and Sadducees.

And usually you see the Pharisees and Sadducees, and you see that they were both antagonists of Jesus, but being an antagonist of Jesus was one of the only things they were in alignment about.

Pharisees and Sadducees did not like one another, and the Sadducees were what you would call the high priest.

So any anywhere you see the high priest, you see Sadducee.

And the Sadducees were in relationship, they had been delegated authority and power, and in many ways in their position because of their wealth and increasing, giving increased wealth because of the Romans.

So that they are the essentially the link to, in fact, in that day, you might have said the Sadducees were in bed with the Roman government.

The other part of the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees who did not like the Romans.

Uh they they were not in cahoots with the Romans, they had no influence with the Romans.

Their actual social currency was in the fact that they were the people's champ.

They were the religious governing body that was connected to the heart of the people.

Of course, in our day, if you're the people's champ, you can parlay that one way or another.

In that day, it really had nothing to do with your position.

It had everything to do with an honor-shamed culture where you had a social currency.

So now you understand why when Jesus shows up and he refers to the Pharisees as hypocrites, hypocrite being uh from their word actor, in an honor-shame culture, frankly, part of the effect of that culture was because honor and shame were so huge in terms of how I see myself and my security in the community, that the whole world became a stage.

And so the Pharisees were playing that stage.

And when Jesus uses the term Hippocritos, essentially saying you're actors, and he uses acting language to describe them, that was shame.

They felt the honor-shame culture threatened.

Therefore, this is why they're always provoking and trying to provoke and antagonize and trying to show down with Jesus publicly, because what he's doing, not only is he stealing our social currency by with his honor and his following, which is all we really have anyway, to in their minds.

That they're going, on top of that, he has taken people like the poor, and he said, Blessed are you when you're in all these situations, okay, that are different than the things we're saying.

So this is where this tension comes from.

So now, with some of that context, when you look at Luke 15 1 and 2, you see that you have Pharisees and teachers of the law who have a vested interest in attacking Jesus, but then they're upset because in an honor-shamed culture, one of the ways to show honor to someone was to eat with them.

So Jesus is eating, not just with bad people, he's eating with tax collectors who, like the Sadducees, were in bed with Rome and financially profiting.

So you're getting the tension here.

You're feeling what this crowd is feeling.

And so Jesus then takes them through these three stories.

Okay, so let's uh oh yeah, one more thing.

So another thing that I think that's important to understand in the in the culture is they had some of the similar challenges we have, which is you have this big Bible, and you're like, what do I do with it?

What does this mean for now?

So if you think about, again, first century, obviously the New Testament had not even been written yet.

But what you have is uh a bunch of people who have the Hebrew Bible, which is the Torah, first five books of the Bible, and the prophets, so that's where you would hear the law and the prophets, but they're still going, like, this is so old, it's like it's been passed down for so long.

How does that apply now?

So in 150 BC, there was a guy, I've mentioned him before, but I'll bring him back up.

His name was Ben Sira.

And Ben Sira was a very influential teacher who basically took the Hebrew Bible, the law and the prophets, and brought modern application to it.

If you did a close reading of it uh reading of his work, you would see that a lot of the things that Jesus says in the New Testament, in many ways, echoed Ben Sirah so Ben Sirah said this.

There's a book called The Wisdom of Ben Sirah, where he is essentially trying to take these old things and go, here's present application.

So there are some things Jesus says that mirror that basically say the same thing Ben Sirah said.

But then there are other places in the New Testament where Jesus contradicts things that Ben Sirah said.

And this story is one of those things.

In fact, let me show you a passage from Sirach, which is, again, the writings of Ben Sirah in his 33rd chapter.

He says, To son or wife, to brother or friend, do not give power over yourself as long as you live, and do not give your property to another.

So he's writing essentially to patriarchs, he's writing to men, and he's saying, This is kind of how men should do.

This is what God wants men to do.

So don't give any don't give people power over yourself, especially your property, don't give it to another.

In case you change your mind and must ask for it, while you're still alive and have breath in you, do not let anyone take your place.

For it is better that your children should ask from you than that you should look to the hand of your children, excel in all that you do, bring no stain upon your honor.

Again, in an honor-shame culture, they're saying you need to protect your own honor and protect yourself.

In fact, he he sums it up by saying this at the time that when you're at the end of your days of your life, in the hour of death, distribute your inheritance there.

So he's saying, protect your your estate, protect your wealth and land.

Don't get caught up in your emotions, giving something away to somebody, and then later you're like, why'd I do that?

And then always protect your own honor.

So this would have been to them, again, very, very influential in terms of their shaping of piety and godliness.

So then you can imagine now, this group of people standing there, when Jesus comes up with his third parable.

Let's go back and start reading verse 12.

The younger son said to his father, Father, give me my share of the estate.

Okay?

My share of the estate in that culture, two sons, says the younger son.

So the older son was called the Behor, which means he gets a double portion of the estate.

So we don't divide it in two and give half and half, we divide it in three, and the older son gets two-thirds, and the younger son gets one-third.

So the younger son would have gotten half or a third of the estate.

And says, so he divided the property between them.

Not long after the younger son got together all that he had, liquidated the estate, his part of it, set off for a distant country, and then squandered his wealth on wild living.

This is within this culture, again, what Jesus is doing is he is painting a picture of a very dishonorable son in an honor-shame culture.

So, to all of those listening, frankly, both the tax collector, the notorious sinner, the Pharisee, and the teacher of the law, they're all sitting here, and the first thing they're feeling is disgust for the son.

I mean, what kind of son would do that?

To go to your father and ask him for his estate is just tell him that you wish he was dead now.

That's like saying you're dead to me.

That's like saying, you know what, you're gonna die someday.

How about give it to me while I'm young?

I mean, this is just incredibly dishonoring.

And then, but the the part of the story too is that the father in the story, as they're hearing it, is also losing face.

He is doing something that's not honorable.

He is going against what Ben Sira says, and he's doing the very thing that we go.

That that's that's not what strong people do.

Uh that that's that's not honorable.

And so they're starting to paint this picture, and then the son goes and he squanders the money.

It says he goes to a foreign land or he goes to a distant country and squanders his wealth on wild living.

Again, this is layered.

This is something that when when they're hearing it, it's the son is leaving our promised land, he's leaving the covenant community, he's abandoning God's covenant and God's covenant people to take from the wealth of the land, to take from the inheritance.

He's not only dishonoring his father, he's dishonoring all of his ancestors.

And he's taking this, and it's not even that he redistributed the money uh locally.

He goes to Gentile lands, foreign lands, and wastes the money out there.

So to them, again, this is piling up.

Okay, this is this is compound exponential shame.

It's going from bad to worse, and he lived recklessly.

Uh it says in verse 14, it says, after he'd spent everything, so he'd completely wasted all of the his father's hard-earned inheritance.

It says there was a severe famine in the whole country, and he began to be in need.

Well, I could do a whole, we could we could do a whole talk right there, right?

Of what happens when you begin to be in need.

Like, like here's a kid who just really hadn't been in need of much of anything.

Everything had been provided for him.

People had been working before he got there.

People uh were doing things that he didn't see only to have his needs met in a way that was so clockwork he didn't realize how much work had been done on the clock.

And then all of a sudden you get to where you think you're bigger than you are, and you think you know more than you do, and pretty soon you get to a place where now you're in need.

And when you're in need, sometimes you start to remember some quotes that you blew off when you weren't in need.

And when you get low enough and you get hungry enough and you get needy enough, uh you start to learn some things that you've been rejecting.

Uh the fact that you had provision, the fact that you had some money, the fact that you were able to distract yourself with pleasure, you were able to, you know, kick the lesson can down the road for a little bit.

You you were able to procrastinate on what God was trying to show you, and yet here you are, and you've got nothing and you've lost everything.

And when he began to be in need, he began to learn.

Need can be a great teacher.

It says in verse 15, so he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country who sent him to the fields to feed pigs.

He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

Okay, back to the idea of disgusting, being disgusting.

So to this group, particularly of Pharisees, we know how tightly we've talked about this a lot.

If you've been around here, we've talked a lot about how they viewed food laws.

Peter was so entrenched in believing that the food laws equaled piety, that when a voice from heaven tells him to eat unclean animals, he tells God no.

We know that in the book of Galatians, they had a hard time keeping their true north, keeping their bearings, because violation of the food laws seemed to be open and shut in many of their minds as a way to honor and please God.

And so when you now have Jesus painting a picture of not just an unclean animal that you would never eat, but you have him down there feeding these unclean animals and not even dreaming about bacon or eating the animal.

He's actually fantasizing about eating the pig slop going in the pig's mouth.

So this is one where if you've ever had somebody get kind of crass and you're like, come on, dude, like you didn't need to quite go there.

Like you could have made your point differently.

Jesus has taken these, he's created this picture of dishonor and disgust that's really hard to handle, hard to receive to that audience.

When I got to this point in the study, especially as I was just meditating on this this week, I was really thinking about deeper things.

I was I was thinking about really for all of all of us who are sincere, and I and I believe most people are sincere in their desire to follow Jesus, to follow the example of Jesus, to live like Jesus, to do what Jesus did, often it can be quite confusing as to what is a bold action or what is a bold statement.

We see Jesus here, he's creating a controversial and I would say offensive picture.

That's how, especially the Pharisees would have felt.

And we see Jesus, and he's willing, he's willing to be offensive.

And when he's doing that, right, if we we look at that and we go, look, I think we probably all agree that I'm willing to, and I think you're probably willing to do whatever you really sense God's asking you to do.

I'll be as obedient as I need to be, I'll be as courageous as I need to be.

But in our humanity, often there can be true confusion as to what is boldness actually?

What is me willing to say something, regardless of what it will cost me, because I'm willing to be spirit-led, committed, and obedient, or what is my flesh that's been irritated, is angry, is scared, and is now doing something that I perceive to be bold, but's actually driven by my flesh.

And that's not always clear, no matter how sincere you are, and sometimes those strong feelings, we just sort of say this is God thing.

And then I've also seen, and I felt this myself, but I've seen where then people go, Well, hold on a second, though, we do have some scripture because Jesus was offensive.

And so Jesus was offensive, therefore I have a blank check to also be offensive because he was, and if you're offended by what I just said, you probably wouldn't have liked Jesus either, because Jesus was offensive.

And so, what do we do with that?

And my my encouragement to you, and this is as I sat and meditated and prayed on this, as a desire to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, is I realized that it's not enough to simply compare myself to Jesus in that both of us are willing to offend.

Before you compare yourself to Jesus, before you compare yourself to Jesus in your willingness to offend, you should first compare yourself to Jesus in your willingness to love.

What should I say should always be preceded by what should I see?

If I'm going to say what Jesus said, I should first see what Jesus saw.

And when it, if you get to a place where you go, I don't care who I offend, you have now contrasted yourself to Jesus.

Because Jesus did care who he offended.

He cared so much for who he offended that he laid his life down for them.

Jesus' response to the Pharisees, be very clear, Jesus' response to the Pharisees, although their desire was to try to get their honor back by antagonizing and provoking him, Jesus' response to them, as offensive as it may have been, was not out of being provoked and being angry and retaliating with frustration.

He was doing it with a hyper-disciplined sense of compassion and love.

Was it offensive?

Absolutely.

But look at the elaborate story he tells.

Look at the lengths he goes to.

He starts in the first story with a 1% loss.

It's just a sheep.

The second, he goes in a 10% loss, it's an inanimate object.

He works his way.

I'm nodding my head as he gets to the sun, it's a 50% loss, and all of a sudden now I'm a father.

But now you've taken the my love as a Father, and you put it next to the teachings that I've been given about my own honor, and now I have to decide am I going to protect my honor and my estate or what does loving my son look like?

And we're all in the same conundrum.

We're working ourselves through it.

He's doing this.

Why?

Not because he's annoyed by the Pharisees, not because he's trying to dunk on the Pharisees, not because he's trying to show the Pharisees up and grandstand on the Pharisees.

It has nothing to do with that.

He's trying to bring them along on a journey, and some of the things he's saying are provocative.

And it's up to them whether they're going to receive it or not.

But make no mistake about it.

It was coming from a heart of compassion and love of someone that was willing to die for the very person they were offended.

So, so this is the reality, friend.

It's not enough to just speak the truth.

You've got to speak the truth in love.

From the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

Every time I open my mouth, I give you a whiff of my heart.

Every time you open your mouth, I can smell your heart on your breath.

And I think it would behoove us all.

I've never used the word behoove in a sermon until right now.

I think it would honor God, might be a better way to say it.

For us to do a little smell your own heart.

What's coming out of my heart?

You've had this before.

If you've ever had somebody offend you and didn't care if they offended you simply because they didn't care about you at all, versus you've had somebody who said something that was really hard to hear and they were saying it, you could feel it, that there was nothing in them that was trying to break you down.

There was nothing in them that was trying to push you down.

This is listen, this is hard for me, but I'm gonna say this because I love you.

You could feel their heart and their love.

So when Jesus is doing this, and when he's saying this, right, he's doing it from a place of a clean heart.

Tyler, thank you for the scripture.

Is he here?

He he took off.

He just did his thing.

He's out of here.

All right, we love you, Tyler.

Hopefully he's watching online.

He was in here first service.

Tyler brought up a verse I've been meditating on all week out of Psalm 51.

Create in me a clean heart, oh God.

Renew a right spirit within me.

The same guy wrote Psalm 139.

And he says, Search me, oh God, know me, know my heart, know me better than I know myself.

Try me, put me on trial, cross-examine me, look into my thoughts, see if there be anything in me that offends you, anything offensive to you.

And so I think let's be very careful that we don't just simply compare ourselves to Jesus and our willingness to offend.

Let's go to great lengths.

Let's take our sweet time.

Let's build habits to consistently lay our hearts before God and say, God, would you purify my heart so that if something has to come out of my mouth or if I need to be quiet, Lord, that you would give me the courage to do so, not out of antagonism, not out of frustration, not trying to get one up, but simply doing from the same place of love and compassion that we have modeled through Jesus.

Let's jump back into the story.

Luke 15, 17 says, when he came to his senses, this is speaking of the Son, that he came to his senses.

He had the moment where the neediness collapsed in on him, and he came to his senses.

He said, How many of my father's hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death?

I'll set out and go back to my father and say to him, Father, I've sinned against heaven and against you.

I'm no longer worthy to be called your son.

Make me like one of your hired servants.

Okay, what he's doing here, again, to the original recipient, he was essentially saying out loud, what would have been the expectation if you had a son this dishonorable and he happened to ever show up in town again?

This is the expectation.

The expectation would be that the father and the older brother would regain some of their own honor by shaming you publicly.

And if they shamed you publicly, they literally, communities had ceremonies, formal ceremonies designed to shame a dishonorable son in order to do a few things.

One, it's a deterrent, because if you live down the street and you're thinking about being a dishonorable son as well, and you see how they treated that dishonorable son, then maybe you won't do it, or at least you'll think twice.

But it was also a way for the father and brother and the family to maybe get their name back a little bit at the expense of the son, and therefore, yes, you'll get to eat food and you'll be able to be a hired servant, and you'll have to live in shame, but at least you'll get to eat.

So the son is sitting there and he's thinking, okay, maybe, you know, they'll either just completely expel me and reject me, or maybe they'll just let me live in shame, but at least I'll I'll I'll be able to eat food.

And so he goes home.

Verse 20 says, So he got up and went to his father, and when he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him and ran to his son and threw his arms around him and kissed him.

Oh, this is layered.

This is layered.

So here's what's going on.

Whenever I've read this for many years, when I read this and I picture the son a long way off and the father running to him, I picture this scene and it's like little house on the prairie.

It's like you got this house, this farmhouse, and then you got the sun is like way over, way, way out there, and it's just between the house and the and the sun is a huge field, you know, and the father's out, you know, and he's you know, he's getting ready for bed, whatever, and he like, is that a is that a deer?

You know, is that a wolf?

Like, what is out there?

And then it's a son, and then he takes off running through this big wide open field, and then he hugs him.

Um, that's not what this first century audience would have thought.

That's not what they would have seen because they didn't live in these huge open fields, they lived in neighborhoods and communities.

So when you see the father sees his son a long way off, and he's running to him, he's running past houses and neighbors, and he's getting to the son before the neighborhood does.

The other element of this that would have been jarring and shocking to the original audience is that in that culture it was undignified for men, particularly patriarchs, respected, honored patriarchs, to run.

You never ran.

You did not run.

That was considered undignified.

In order to run, you would have to, you were in a tunic, you'd have to pull up your tunic and expose your legs and run.

And in that culture, for men to expose their legs was shameful.

In this culture, there are still some men that should never expose their legs.

It is very shameful for some.

And yet, that was their mentality was if you were to see a patriarch pulling up his cloak and running, that was embarrassing, that was humiliating.

So when you see what's happening, he's running past the honor-shame community.

That when they see that this kid had the guts to come home after having dishonored himself, humiliated his family, they've lost complete face, their social currency has been completely depleted.

And the only thing left to do is to have a public ceremony of shame for him.

That the father redirects the shame.

He exposes his legs, he runs, he gets to him before the community does, and then everything he does next is loaded with meaning.

He puts a robe on him, and the robe is a symbol of honor, it's it's giving honor back.

He puts a ring on his finger, which was symbolic of you are in our family.

I'm giving you your place back in your family.

He puts sandals on his feet, which is what you would do to a free man, not somebody who you had hired to work for you.

Every single layer of this was of redemption, and he's doing it in front of the community.

And then, of course, what do we know next?

Is he kills the fat and calf and he throws a feast.

Why?

Because instead of us having a public ceremony of shame for a lost son, I'm going to create a feast.

I'm going to throw a party.

Because it's important not only that my son is reconciled to me, but I want to reconcile my son to this whole neighborhood, to the entire community.

And so when you see this now, can you think of a better picture of the gospel?

I mean, Jesus is setting up the cross.

He has notorious sinners and tax collectors, people in bed with Rome.

He has Pharisees who won't have anything to do with Rome, people whose social currency has been threatened, people that have a vested interest in his demise.

And he stands there in front of all of them and he loves them so much.

He's willing to create a story they'll never forget.

He's putting pictures on the canvas of their mind that they won't be able to unsee and unhear.

And what he's doing is essentially describing what he's about to do on the cross.

I'm going to go and I'm going to divert the shame from where it belongs to me.

I'm going to take everything that you did that was wrong and wasteful and dishonoring, and I'm going to take your dishonor upon myself on your behalf.

And not only am I going to restore myself to you, but I want to also restore you to the community.

This is the high priestly prayer.

Jesus says, Father, may they be one as we are one.

I end with this.

Next week we're going to take a look at the older brother.

Because the story ends with verse 25.

It says, Meanwhile, the older brother was in the field.

But my final thought for you before we pray together is to the close reader, some of you are like super, super careful readers and you notice everything.

And you probably noticed that in the story, the word prodigal never shows up.

Like, why the heck does everybody call this the prodigal son when the word prodigal isn't even in the story?

Well, the short answer to that is when all the manuscripts of the book of Luke that have been recovered are uh Luke does not put headings over chapters, right?

The Bible that you have will name the Sermon on the Mount or the Prodigal Son.

And so those headings were added hundreds of years later when you know scribes and and and writers were essentially helping you to navigate through your Bible.

So it was about you know four or five hundred AD, the Latin Vulgate, Saint Jerome writes the Latin Vulgate, and he gives the heading over this passage, the prodigal son.

Which then begs the question, what the heck is prodigal mean?

What is prodigal?

If I asked you if everybody was like, if you didn't go to uh Google uh like you're about to, some of you are like, I'm going there right now.

Uh if you didn't know, and I just said, what do you think prodigal means?

You'd probably say wayward.

Yeah.

We that's kind of how we use it now.

Hey, so-and-so, uh, if you're a church person, you'd be like, hey, so-and-so's prodigal, means hey, they've gone off the deep end or they've run off.

But that's not what the word prodigal means.

The word prodigal has a double meaning.

The first is it means wasteful, but the second part of the meeting meaning means extravagant or lavish.

So just like we can use one word two ways, one is negative and one is positive.

If I said, hey, so-and-so is wasteful with their money, that would be a negative thing to say, so-and-so is mismanaging their money.

But if I said so-and-so is extravagant, if I use the same word, extravagant in their generosity, it would speak to the character.

In one sense, it's irresponsible, in the other sense, it's incredible heart of generosity.

So, Jerome, when he puts this in the Latin Vulgate as a heading and calls it the prodigal son, it is a story of a son who is wasteful, but a father whose grace was extravagant.

A father whose grace and mercy was so extravagant that it appeared wasteful.

To some in an honor shame culture, would go, why would you waste your grace and mercy on someone who does not deserve it?

And it's like, I know, right?

That's the story.

And the application couldn't be more clear.

You and I are both recipients and agents of God's grace and mercy.

First recipient.

It's not those who are well who are in need of a physician, but those who know they're sinners.

There's two kinds of people, those who are sick and know they're sick, and those who are sick and don't know they're sick.

He's like, it's probably better to know you're sick if you're sick, so that you can get help.

He's like, you know, those that know that, the great physician shows up.

So first we are recipients of God's grace and mercy.

And it's from that receptivity of knowing I was the wasteful son.

I'm the prodigal.

I've done things that dishonored myself and the people around me.

I've made decisions I sure like to have back.

I've said and done things I should not have said and done.

And yet, the gospel is that Jesus diverted my shame.

Diverted the wrath of the community to himself.

Because he loved me so much.

He gave me his grace.

Of course, it's a parable, so we don't know what happened two or three years later, but my hunch is when you've been the recipient of that kind of grace, mercy, and had a revelation of the Father of His love, probably some big changes came along.

But the second is I'm an agent of his grace and mercy as well.

And the fueling of my agency in what I do comes from his grace, mercy, and love.

Of what I've received, I now give.

And I want to take a moment to invite you, I want to pray with you.

Everywhere you go, whether it's in your home or in your community, not just for this moment in time, but for the rest of your life, may you continue to remember that we are recipients and we are agents of His grace and mercy.

Let's pray.

Lord, we come to you in the matchless name of Jesus.

Lord, as we look at some of the cultural elements of this story of how both the notorious sinner and the teacher of the law would have heard this story.

Lord, it does speak to us.

Lord, in this moment, we recognize that we are in need of your mercy and grace.

In fact, if you're here this morning, as I was talking about the waste of the prodigal son, when I'm talking about the dishonor, the shame of the prodigal son, maybe some of you are here today going, that that really resonates.

I'm in the place today, even feeling unworthy.

I'm thinking if these people knew who I was and what I've done, uh, they probably wouldn't think I should be in this room.

Maybe some of you are watching, listening online, and that's the reason you didn't even didn't want to come in person.

I'd rather take this in the privacy of my own home.

It feels safer than to know what the community might say or do.

Today, regardless of what the neighborhood might say about you, I want you to know you have a heavenly father that sent his son Jesus to run past the neighborhood to get to you before the neighbors can, to divert your shame to himself.

And if that's you, and you say, I need to receive that today.

Would you lift your hand right now?

Just receive it.

Lift your hand right now and say, That's me.

I need to receive his grace and mercy.

Today's your day to be a recipient.

There'll be a day that God will use you as an agent, but today you're a recipient.

You can put them down.

Lord, we receive your grace and your love today.

Lord, we thank you for the good news of the gospel.

That you demonstrated your love toward us and that while we were sinners, you died for us.

Lord, even the things that offend us, Lord, that come from you are not coming from a place of frustration or disgust.

They're coming from a place of compassion and love.

So we receive them today, as hard as they may be, to receive.

So I pray, Lord, for each of your sons and daughters that raise their hands today, Lord.

I pray that even in this moment you would draw near to them.

Make your presence clear to them.

And Lord, I pray that you would use all of us, Lord, in this moment in time to be agents of your grace and mercy.

We love you, we praise you, we thank you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.