What’s So Amazing About Grace?
Note: This sermon was preached at First Free St. Louis in a series on Marks of a Healthy Church.
Please give attention to the Word of God, as found in the 15th chapter of Luke, beginning in verse 11. Jesus has just told two fascinating parables–one about a lost sheep and another about a lost coin:
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.
“Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.’ So he got up and went to his father.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
“But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'””
Luke 15 is one of the best-loved chapters in the Bible. It contains three parables, and the longest is surely one of the greatest short stories ever told. If you read sermons or commentaries on Luke 15 you find that sometimes the preacher places the emphasis upon the lostness of the sheep, the coin, and particularly the son. Sometimes the emphasis is placed upon the joyful celebration when each is found. And both of these emphases are valid. But I would like for us to see these stories as ultimately stories of grace. But first allow me to talk a bit about grace.
What is grace and why is it a mark of a healthy church?
First, let me explain where this sermon came from. When I laid out my plan to preach on the Marks of a Healthy Church, I included one sermon entitled, “Biblical Understanding of the Gospel.” I was going to talk about “What is the Good News?”, “What is true conversion?”, and “What is evangelism?”–all critical issues for a healthy church. But about a month ago Richard Schumacher preached a great message on the Gospel from Romans 1, and that freed me up to take a slightly different approach today. I decided to preach on Grace instead. Grace is, of course, closely related to the Gospel, for the good news is that we are saved by grace, through faith. But Grace is a larger concept than the Gospel. We are not just saved by grace, we also grow by grace, and we must show grace to others.
Grace permeates the pages of Scripture from beginning to end. However, it is at the same time one of the least understood and practiced of biblical truths.[i] Phil Yancey writes, “Christians have spent enormous energy over the years debating and decreeing truth; every church defends its particular version. But what about grace? How rare to find a church competing to ‘out-grace’ its rivals.”[ii] Of course, it’s not a question of truth or grace; it must be truth and grace. Remember John 1:17? “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” I spoke very directly about truth a few weeks ago when I preached on Biblical Theology and Biblical Preaching. Today’s focus on grace is every bit as important.
Grace is God’s love coming to us totally undeserved, free of charge, no strings attached. Some have used an acrostic to define it: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. The meaning is the same. Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. But by the same token it means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. Oh, we can make Him smile more–just as your child can make you smile by obeying you and being polite and getting his homework done on time. But if those things determine your love for your child, you are guilty of conditional love and failing to love as God loves.
We talk about grace a lot, but why do we practice it so little? I quote Yancey again:
From nursery school onward we are taught how to succeed in the world of ungrace. The early bird gets the worm. No pain, no gain. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Demand your rights. Get what you pay for. I know these rules well because I live by them. I work for what I earn; I like to win; I insist on my rights. I want people to get what they deserve–nothing more, nothing less.
Yet if I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor’s prison and got instead a clean credit history.[iii]
Grace is an enormous topic. It is almost foolhardy to tackle it in one sermon. But surely we can say something in a half hour that will help you grasp its profound significance. Stories sometimes help. Of all the stories in Scripture that reveal and highlight the grace of God, perhaps none does so more effectively than this one.
The searching father and his prodigal son
All through the book of Luke there is a recurring theme which is finally stated in its clearest form by Jesus himself in chapter 19, verse 10: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” We hear a lot about seekers in the church today, but the term is something of a misnomer. Lost people don’t seek God. Paul says in Romans 3:11-12 that there is “no one who seeks God.” Of course, there is certainly a sense in which lost people are seeking something to fill the emptiness in their lives, and since we have the only answer that will satisfy their spiritual thirst, we should feel compelled to tell them about the fountain of life. But the fact is people aren’t seeking God; God is seeking them, and that is the point of the 15th chapter of Luke, of the entire Gospel story, and really of the entire Bible.
Now frankly, the fact that Jesus was a seeker, a searcher for lost souls, was a major problem to the religious leaders of his day. They were constantly scandalized by the fact that He reached out to the riffraff of society. He would share a cup with a Samaritan, and a woman at that. He would go to a tax collector’s home, like Zaccheus, and even eat with him. He would touch lepers and speak grace and forgiveness to prostitutes. He would befriend the racial outcasts and the religious rejects. To the Pharisees, these habits, along with the fact that he did most of his miracles on the Sabbath, were all the evidence they needed to conclude that he was demon-possessed and worthy of death.
You see, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day believed in separation from sin. Frankly, that’s not a bad idea, unless separation from sin means also separation from sinners. For a long time C. S. Lewis could not understand the hairsplitting distinction between hating a person’s sin and hating the sinner. How could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?
But years later (he writes) it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life–namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficult about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.[iv]
Jesus also believed in separation from sin. In fact, of all the men who ever lived, he is the only one who was completely separated from sin in his own personal life. But he flatly rejected the notion that believers should hold themselves separate from sinners. In fact, his whole life and ministry was a paradigm of personal involvement with sinners, for how could he help them find release from their bondage to sin if he had nothing to do with them? No, He was constantly searching for them, constantly looking for ways to show them His grace.
I want to suggest to you that the parable of the prodigal son is better thought of as the parable of the searching father. The father never forgets his son who left and squandered everything; he never writes him off; he never tells people who ask about his family, “I have only one son”; he never stops loving him. And when the son eventually returns, forgiveness is immediate, unconditional, and final. In fact, the father runs to him (which would have been viewed as strikingly undignified for an elderly oriental) and kisses him (the original reads, “kissed him many times” or “kissed him tenderly”).
The Father doesn’t comment about the son’s scraggly hair or his body piercings or his tattoos, or even the needle marks on his arm. He immediately receives him, without probation, without contempt, without embarrassment, and floods him with tokens of acceptance. It starts with orders to bring the best robe (a sign of position), a ring for the son’s finger (a sign of authority), and sandals for his feet (a sign that he is no longer a slave). Not only that, but the fattened calf is called for and a feast and a celebration is ordered. Why? “This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”
Once Abraham Lincoln was asked how he was going to treat the rebellious southerners when they had finally been defeated and had returned to the Union. The questioner expected that Lincoln would express dire vengeance, but he answered, “I will treat them as if they had never been away.” That’s the way this father is; that’s the way God is; that’s the way of grace.
Philip Yancey wrote a book entitled, What’s So Amazing About Grace? I borrowed his title for my sermon today. Just reading this one story tells us what’s so amazing about grace. God is willing to receive the most willful, headstrong, rebellious person alive if he or she comes to his or her senses and returns to the Father. There isn’t even a hint of this boy deserving what his father does; it’s all grace. But I want us to turn our attention to the older brother, because we can learn something about grace from him that may be even more relevant to many of us.
The other Prodigal Son
The older brother, you see, was also a Prodigal, though in a very different sense. If possible, he is an even more tragic figure than the younger one. The message of the older brother is that …
It is possible to stay home and still be far from the Father. The strangest thing has happened to me over the years. The longer I pastor and the older I grow in the Lord, the more I find myself drawn to wicked people and the less to good people. That probably doesn’t sound very appropriate for a pastor to say, but let me try to explain. I’m talking about wicked people who have repented and good people who haven’t. Jesus referred to them right here in Luke 15 at the end of his first parable about the lost sheep. “I tell you that there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”
Of course, there aren’t any righteous persons who do not need to repent, so Jesus must be referring to people who think they are righteous and therefore refuse to repent. In other words, He is speaking of Pharisees, ancient and modern, who believe they have earned a right standing with Him through their scrupulous law-keeping. They are the people Mark Twain meant when describing those who were “good in the worst sense of the word.” Friends, God takes more joy in a scumbag who repents than He does in an upstanding, moral, tithing, Republican member of the Lions’ Club who is counting on his good works to get him to heaven.[v]
Sadly, there are many in the church who, like the older brother, have stayed home but are still far from the Father. I want you to think with me about some of the symptoms of estrangement in this older brother to see if any of these symptoms are showing up in your life. I call them obstacles to grace.
Anger and alienation.[vi] The story reveals that when the older brother learned that his younger brother had come home and his father was celebrating with a party, he “became angry and refused to go in.” He flew into a rage when he saw how good his father was to his brother. It’s instructive that not once in the story does the older brother use the term “father” or brother” when describing his family. Even though he is formally at home, he feels no real kinship with those in the family. Second, he demonstrates …
Slavishness and superiority. “Look!” he said, “All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.” He experiences no joy in working with his father; it is bondage to him. Home is an obligation, not a family. I think there are a lot of religious people who indeed view themselves as “slaving for the Father.” I have known Catholics who went to Mass every day for 25 years–I’m not just talking Sundays here–I’m talking every day! I have known Protestants who have tithed religiously down to the penny–not just on their income, but on their bonuses, their interest, and their Social Security checks. Growing up in a pastor’s home in a fundamentalist church, I knew people who would have missed the birth of their first child if it came on Wednesday night during prayer meeting. I doubt if they were really that devoted to God; rather I suspect they had an enormous sense of legalistic duty, trying to keep God’s wrath off their backs. They knew little about grace.
Can you also read the superiority in the older brother’s voice as he claims, “I’ve never disobeyed your orders”? “I’ve never smoked pot, I don’t drink, I don’t traffic in pornography.” And, you see, the problem here is not that he should have done any of these things, but rather that he sees the essence of his relationship with his father as the things he hasn’t done, as compared to his brother.
Ingratitude and isolation. “You never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.” He accuses his father of being stingy, when in fact his father has given him everything. And he reveals the distance of his heart from the father in the isolating statement that he wants to celebrate with his friends rather than with his father. I wonder if he wasn’t so busy keeping his long list of rules and regulations that he didn’t have time to think about enjoying life.
Contempt and comparison. The last thing he says is, “When this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!” Notice that he has so much contempt for his younger brother that he won’t even refer to him as his brother or call him by name. Instead, he says, “this son of yours.” Also, this is the first mention of prostitutes, and I rather suspect the older brother is exaggerating to make the sins of his younger brother look even worse than they were. The self-righteous do that, you know–building themselves up by tearing other people down.
All of these symptoms demonstrate how it’s possible to stay home and still be far from the Father. And all the time miss out on grace. But I want you to understand an extremely important fact:
It is almost impossible to be so far from the Father that He no longer searches. I added the little word “almost” just before my outline went to press, because there is a sad truth conveyed in various Scriptures that there can come a point where God quits searching. In Romans 1 we read several times that “God gave them over” to the sinful desires they were pursuing; He took His hands off and said to those who persistently rejected His revelation, “OK, you want to do it your way? I’m going to let you.” But seeking and searching are so much a part of God’s character and nature that you have to almost demand that He leave you alone before He will.
With that little caveat, I say with confidence that anyone is welcome in the Father’s house. And to demonstrate that, we see that the father himself shows initiative. When the older brother refuses to join the party, his father goes out to him and pleads with him. God is not proud; He stoops to conquer. He reaches out not only to the rank sinner who repents, but even to the self-righteous who don’t think they need to. He loves both.
The Father also demonstrates availability. He says to the older brother, “My son, you are always with me.” He is living in the father’s house, he is eating the father’s food and drinking his wine, he is enjoying the benefits of being in the father’s family. You know, spiritually there are many people who worship regularly in the Heavenly Father’s house, who eat and drink regularly at the Lord’s table, and who receive many of the blessings of the Father, but they no more enjoy the Father’s presence than this son did. Oh that we might grasp how much God desires for us to enjoy intimate fellowship with Him!
The father also makes provision for this son. “Everything I have is yours.” The inheritance, you will recall, has already been divided between the two sons. The older is rich in resources, but poverty-stricken in his frame of mind. It is all available, but he has availed himself of none of it. Friends, everything God has is ours–salvation, peace, joy, fulfillment, relationship–it’s all ours, free for the taking.
By now we can see that the older brother is as lost as the younger ever was. The younger was once lost but now found, once dead but now alive. The older is still lost, still dead.
It is possible to be far from the Father and still find one’s way home. A person can be guilty of great sinfulness and still experience God’s mercy and grace. The Apostle Paul called himself “the worst of sinners.” This wasn’t hyperbole or false humility; it was true. He was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a murderer. Friends, we’re not talking misdemeanors here; we’re talking high crimes. A blasphemer is one who berates and vilifies the very Creator of the universe. As a persecutor in the early days of the church, this man was hunting Christians down as fast as they were converted. And he wasn’t hunting Christians down to interrogate them and warn them; he was hunting them down to kill them. So heinous were this man’s actions that when he himself was converted on the Damascus Road, the Christians who had escaped his sword had a very difficult time believing that the grace of God had reached even to him. They greeted his conversion with the same skepticism we might greet the alleged conversion of Madonna or Osama Bin Laden.
The Older Brother claims he “never disobeyed” while the Apostle Paul admits he is “the worst of all sinners.” The Older Brother kept his nose clean but his heart was dirty. Paul violated every law in the Book, but he was willing to cast himself on the grace and mercy of God. And it was Paul, not the Older Brother, through whom God chose to display His glory.
Why would God save someone like Paul? There were thousands of people who hadn’t violated all of the commandments Paul violated. There were thousands who joined the crowds following Jesus, rather than persecuting his followers. Well, he tells us why. God reached out to Paul because he was so bad. Paul became a trophy of God’s grace. When people saw Paul they would say, “Wow, if God can save Paul, he can save me too!”
If you have any doubt today that Jesus Christ can revolutionize your life, put those doubts away. I could point out dozens and dozens of lives in this very room which have been transformed from brokenness, depression, immorality, selfishness, addiction–you name it–by the saving power of Jesus Christ. You see, He didn’t come just to save sinners from Hell; He also came to save lives from wreck and ruin here and now. Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10)
There is one more brief but important message I want to convey today–one especially for those of us who have already come home to the Father, and it is this:
The one who comes home to the Father is obligated to share the Father’s attitude toward other prodigals. Sometimes we come home but fail to adopt the Father’s perspective. Perhaps you have personally accepted Christ, but you don’t have much use for the grossly sinful people you see around you. Your attitude toward ex-convicts and drug addicts and problem gamblers and AIDS patients and sexual addicts may be much like that of the Pharisees toward the tax collectors and sinners of Jesus’ world, or the like that of the Older Prodigal toward his younger brother. “They made their own bed; let them lie in it.”
But friends, those who reject repentant sinners are out of line with the Father’s will. Period. Just as the Father offers unconditional forgiveness, we need to as well. We need to reach out to those who have made horrendous mistakes and love them. Not only that; when they have demonstrated repentance, we need to restore them and quit holding their past over their heads like a hammer. The notion that a divorced person, or one who has committed adultery, or a recovering alcoholic can worship here but he’d better keep a low profile is completely incompatible with what the Scriptures say about individuals like Moses or David or Paul or Peter. The notion that there are certain positions in church leadership that are forever closed to such individuals is incompatible with God’s grace. The only relevant question is this: “Has he or she thoroughly repented and is their sin now part of their past rather than their present?”
Conclusion: It’s time for all Prodigals to come home. Whether we have been in a far country or have stayed home basking in our self-righteousness, we are lost. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We must see our sin, whatever it is, as awful and inexcusable in God’s sight. We must see our self-righteousness as the sin He hates the most. We must see our gossip, our critical spirit, our greed, and our pride as every bit as heinous as the next guy’s drunkenness, filthy language, homosexuality, or child abuse.
Friend, the Father is looking for you. He is anxious to pour out his grace, His unmerited favor, upon you. God welcomes sinners, and this means you. And he doesn’t just tolerate you. He is searchingfor you. His heart delights over anyone who recognizes his sin and is willing to accept his love as expressed in the death of Christ on the cross.
Will you bow your hearts with me and do business with God? If you are a lost Prodigal, far away from home, with no dignity left and hungry for love, won’t you open your heart right now to the Searching Father. He loves you and promises to forgive you and treat you as his own son. If you are self-righteously counting on your good works, won’t you renounce them this moment and trust Christ and him alone?
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.
Tags:
Grace
Prodigal Son
Self-righteousness
[i]. Dr. David Seamands writes, “The two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God’s unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people.” (See Seamands, Healing for Damaged Emotions, 28).
[ii]. Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, 29-30.
[iii]. Yancey, 64.
[iv]. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 149.
[v]. I think this is the same issue Paul is addressing in Romans 5:
“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
The “righteous man” in this verse is the good man Mark Twain was talking about, the pious and rigidly upright, the one who can spot a deviation in someone else’s life from a mile away and always feels compelled to point it out. Such a person has few friends and almost no one is going to make a sacrifice in his behalf. On the other hand, there are some people whose piety has been softened and made attractive by a gracious spirit. They speak the truth, but only in love. For such a person one might perhaps find someone willing to sacrifice his very life. But God loved us so much that while we were neither righteous nor good, Christ died for us. That’s grace.
[vi]. These four categories come from Joel Gregory, Gregory’s Sermon Synopses, 167.