What Makes the “Good News” Good?
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What Makes the “Good News” Good?
April 10, 2011
by Rev. William “Buck” Day
It is well with our soul to enter into Scripture, to read God’s word together. So we want to do that. We are going to take a look at a part of Luke, Chapter 15. So I invite you to follow along as we read this familiar story. Starting at verse 11 for us from Luke 15: (Luke 15:11-24)
Then Jesus said, ‘There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’ ” So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his slaves, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” And they began to celebrate.
God’s word for us this morning! I invite you to join me as we pray again.
Lord, thank you. Thank you for your word, thank you for your Spirit that helps us to understand it. So Lord I ask that your Spirit would have full reign over us right now, that he would speak to us in the way that you would see fit. We ask it in your name, Jesus. Amen.
Well, this is one of those famous stories that probably many of you have heard before. We only read part of it; we didn’t read the other part about the older son. So I want to unpack a little bit of this first half for you, for the younger son goes to his father and he does what is the unthinkable. He goes and asks for his inheritance before the father dies. So what, in effect, he is saying to his father is I wish you were dead. Think about that. And surprisingly the father complies with the son’s request and gives him half of his money. He takes off and he spends it on partying hard and living high on the hog. Before long, his money is gone; there is a famine in the land; and he is stuck doing what would be unthinkable for any good Jewish boy—feeding pigs.
Then, the important piece in this text is that it says “he came to himself.” He came to himself; and, literally, that means that his thinking clicked in again. He started thinking again. It is one of those moments when: “What was I thinking?” Have you ever done that? That is what is going on here. He is like “Oh, what am I doing here?” So his thinking kicks back in and he realizes that his father’s workers have it better all of a sudden than he does. And he is thinking, “O.K. I need to go back to my dad.” So he goes back and he says “I have sinned against heaven and before you.” (Hold onto that confession, because we will come back to that in just a little bit.) The son goes back to his father, knowing that he can no longer be considered one of his sons. And he is not asking for that. He is asking to go back and says “I want to be one of the guys that live in the hired hand ranch house and just work my tail off from nine to five and get my square meal and then go back to work. That is all I want. I don’t want to be a son anymore. I know I am not entitled to that.”
But the father wants nothing to do with that, of course. He calls his servant and he tells him to put out the clothes that only a son wears and he said it is party time. It is party time, “for my son was dead and now he is alive. He was lost and now he is ‘found’.” The younger son realized that he was helpless and that he was hopeless in a foreign land. So what he does is he throws himself on the mercy of his father saying he has sinned.
Now think about that for a minute. Is that a word we would use today if we knew someone, maybe in our own family or in another family, where they had a child who took some of the family money and went off and spent it on what we might call sex, drugs and rock and roll? Would we use the word sin? I don’t think so. We might say the son made a “mistake,” right? The son made a mistake. He was immature. He made some poor choices; but, sin? Really? Doesn’t that seem a little harsh?
But that is exactly what we do according to Pastor Andy Stanley. He says “We don’t like to think about this word sin very much; so as a result we try to downplay the word sin, because the word sin carries with it this kind of heavy connotation of doing something wrong against God.” In fact, that is what the definition of sin is when you look it up. It says it is any act regarded as a transgression, especially a willful or deliberate violation of some religious or moral principle. Willful. Deliberate. Breaking a moral principle. That kind of sounds bad, doesn’t it? That is kind of heavy. And with that sins require punishment, don’t they? Sins come with guilt, don’t they? We don’t want to turn people off or offend them, either in the church or outside the church. So we tend to soft sell this idea of sin, soft pedal it. When we do, it can lead to some troubling consequences. Even the word sin in Greek actually plays into that kind of soft sell. The word sin in Greek actually means to “miss the mark.” Think of an archer shooting an arrow at a target and they are off the target, they are off the mark from where they intended to be.
I have used that definition with high schoolers before. How many times have we said “Well I meant to do it but I didn’t. I was not where I wanted to be. I was off the mark. It was a mistake.” Right. We like the word mistake. Mistake is an easier word for us; and, if we put that back into the story of the Prodigal Son, in today’s terms, we would say, what? “The son was immature. He made some wrong decisions. Yes, they were bad, but they were just mistakes.” Because when we think about mistakes, mistakes don’t require punishment, do they? What do they require? They require learning, don’t they? They require learning; we need to learn from our mistakes. We need to try harder. We need to do better. This young boy needed to learn from his mistakes. And I can see us saying, “You need to learn. Don’t do that again!” Right.
A mistake is even defined that way. It is an error in action, calculation, opinion or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, or insufficient information. So, when we take our paycheck and we gamble it away at the casino, it is a mistake caused by insufficient knowledge. Or, we lie to close a deal at work; it is a mistake because it is caused by an error in judgment. We surf the internet for pornography; it is a mistake because I used poor reasoning. I get a little too attached to an ex-girlfriend I found on facebook; it is a mistake. I was too careless. We call these things mistakes, don’t we? Because if they are mistakes, and not sins, we can see ourselves differently. We can look at ourselves differently. We no longer have to think of ourselves as sinners, we think of ourselves, as Stanley says, as mistakers. We are a mistaker instead of a sinner. Because you are a mistaker, all you need to do is you need to try harder. You need to do better; that’s all. But if I am a sinner, a sinner requires something of me. It means I owe somebody something. So we like to think of ourselves as mistakers, instead of sinners.
But if we are honest with ourselves, we know there is a problem with that, don’t we? We know better in our own head. We know in our heart it wasn’t a mistake, it was something we were going to do all the time. It was intentional. You see there is no guilt around a mistake, but there is around sin. So that pit in the bottom of your stomach isn’t because of a bad lunch, it is from the guilt, real guilt from true sin. But the world wants us to believe that we are just mistakers. I just made a mistake. But if we are really honest with ourselves, we know that is not true. We know it goes much deeper than that. The truth is that we are sinners. Jesus knew better than that, too. Jesus made it very clear that there is no way for us to get into heaven on our own. A quick fly-over of Matthew, Chapter 5, from the Sermon on the Mount, reveals this. These are hard verses for us to hear, first off; and they are even harder for us, I think, to internalize in our own minds and our own hearts. Jesus starts off in verse 17 of Chapter 5, he says: “You know all that stuff you heard in the Old Testament, about keeping the rules and the laws of the Old Testament,” he goes, “they are still in effect. You have to do that stuff.” And then he says, “You see those guys over there, those religious guys who spend their whole time doing religious stuff? You have to be more righteous than they are.”
Now think about the people who were hearing the Sermon on the Mount for the first time. You probably had a lot of country folk; you had merchants; you had carpenters; you had shepherds; you had farmers and they are hearing Jesus’ words. What do you think they are thinking at that point? “You mean those Pharisees and those Scribes, those guys that spend their whole day doing righteous stuff, religious, holy stuff? I have to be better than them? There is no way.” And Jesus says, “You are beginning to get it. You are beginning to get it.” And then he turns up the heat a little bit more. He goes on to say “We know that killing somebody is bad; but I tell you that if you ever get angry at a person, it is the same thing as if you killed them.” And they are all thinking, “Wait a sec, I have gotten mad at somebody. I am a murderer.” Then he continues to up the ante, he says, “If you have lusted after another woman, it is the same thing as if you have committed adultery with her. And if a woman remarries after being divorced, she commits adultery. And if a man marries a divorced woman, he commits adultery too.” He is using all these examples to just raise the bar and say: “This is what God demands of us.” And then he begins to tie it up into a nice little bow and says, “Oh by the way, love your enemies and pray for those who hurt you.” And if that wasn’t enough, the little tweak at the end of the bow, “You have to be as holy as God.” What were they thinking at that point? What are you thinking at that point?
There is no way for us to live up to that kind of righteousness as a standard. There is just simply no way; and Jesus says, “You know what? You are right. There is no way. There is no way for you to do it on your own. You have no hope if it depends on your efforts and your righteousness, because you are a sinner.” And the message of Jesus to the people that day and to us was really two-fold. It was one, you will never make it on your own to God, and God loves you, by the way.
You see, a sinner needs a savior. A mistaker needs themselves. As long as we think of ourselves as a mistaker, we are just going to continue to try harder. We are going to continue to try to do better. Jesus is saying, try all you want, because you are never going to make it. You are never going to get there.
When you realize that you need a savior, you realize that you are a sinner without hope, just like that younger son in our story today. He was without hope. When he “came to his mind,” when his thinking kicked back in, what did he do? He returned to his father and confessed his sin. He went towards his father. That is the way a sinner goes, because a mistaker runs away from God because they are afraid of what God might do to them. But a sinner runs towards God because they know that that is where they are going to get closer to what they need the most—a Savior. The sooner you confess your sin, the sooner you are going to receive grace. The sooner you confess your sin, the sooner you are going to meet your Savior. The sooner you confess your sin, the sooner you are going to receive forgiveness. There is that old saying that confession is good for the soul. It is true. It is true because when we confess our sin the guilt goes away as well; and it also acknowledges that you, me, all of us, are, in fact, without hope, without Jesus Christ.
I want to take a moment here and allow you maybe just to do some work with God. Maybe there are some things that you need to confess and whatever you do, it is just between you and God. And maybe you feel like there is nothing I need to confess; then at that point, just be quiet and ask God to just encourage you at that point. So let’s take a couple of moments of just silence and I invite you to confess as you have need, as the Spirit moves you, O.K. So let’s go ahead and do that.
(A moment of silence.)
God honors those who confess their sins. I want to thank you for doing that and I know God will draw himself close to you as you do that.
There is a story of a seminary professor who, every time he taught an evangelism class in seminary, he always ended with the same exam. The day of this exam he would pass out the exam and he would say, “I want to caution you to make sure you read all the way through this exam before you start filling it out.” In fact, that caution was even written on the top of the test, as well. As the students began to read through this test, it became clear to each of them that they didn’t study enough. The further they read, the worse it became. So by the time they got about halfway through reading through the exam, sometimes the professor said you could hear audible groans in the class room. But when they get to the last page, there is a note that says: you have a choice. You can either complete this exam as given or you can sign your name at the bottom and receive an A. As the students read that they sat there stunned, just like—“I can’t believe that that’s really all I have to do to get an A.” Then slowly it began to dawn on the students what was going on here. So slowly they signed their name and turned in a blank test and silently walked out of the classroom. Later on some of the students would come back and they would ask the professor, “What kind of responses have you gotten to this test over the years?” And the professor said that some of them actually just began the test without reading all the way through it and they sweat out the next two hours of trying to answer it all before reaching the last page. Others read the first page and begin to get angry and they actually turned in a blank test. They storm out of the room without ever signing it, never realizing what was available to them; and, in the end, discovering what they have lost. He said, “In fact, one guy actually read the entire test, including the note at the end, and decided to take it anyway. He said, ‘I don’t want any gifts. I want to earn my grade.’ He filled it out and he got a C+, when he could have easily had an A.”
The good news of Jesus Christ is not that we are sinners without hope, but that God loves us. He takes us back as sons and as daughters. That is what our son in the story learned today. He received his sonship again even though he didn’t deserve it. And that is grace, ladies and gentlemen, that is unmerited favor offered to him. Author Philip Yancey says that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. No amount of righteousness, no amount of sinfulness will change how God feels about you or about me. So the good news of the gospel really gets good. The good news of the gospel gets good when we have “come to our mind,” when our thinking kicks back in, when we confess our sins and find that there is no punishment; there is no penalty; there is no debt to be repaid; because our heavenly Father says that that punishment, that debt, that penalty has already been paid by the blood that was shed by Jesus Christ on the cross. That was the payment.
So my prayer for us as we begin to move towards Holy Week, with the death and eventually the Resurrection of Jesus, is that once again we would be gripped by the depth and the pervasiveness of our sin so that we would more fully realize what it cost Christ to name you as a son or as a daughter. Amen.
Let me pray for us.
Mighty and holy God, thank you. Thank you that your love knows no bounds because Lord we confess we are messed up. We are sinners in need of a Savior, and Lord you are fully aware of that and you provide exactly what we need in Jesus Christ. So Lord, thank you, thank you that your Son did what was needed for each of us so that we might be your sons and daughters, adopted into your heavenly family so that we might be with you forever. We give you praise and we give you glory and we give you honor because of that; and it is because of Jesus’ name we ask that, who is our Savior, and all God’s people said, Amen.