SCRIPTURE: Luke 15
OBSERVATION/APPLICATION:
Now the tax collectors and “sinners” were all gathering around to hear him. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ [Luke 15:1-2] Are you sensing a pattern yet? How often in Luke do we not sense God’s frustration with religious people for how they view and treat people, how they stand in the way of “sinners” finding God. If there is a recurring them in Jesus’ life, its that God’s people just don’t get it. Jesus tells three parables to make this point; they build to a crescendo when Jesus makes His point – about the failure of the older brother to love his wayward sibling. God’s compassion for the lost is the underlying theme of God’s mission, but the point of these three parables together is to convict the muttering older brother in all of us.
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.’ [Luke 15:28-31] Do you see the words the brother uses, “slaving for you”? Here we have the truth behind religion – it is a heartless, empty exercise designed to manipulate the divine to give us what we want. It’s about us, about how we look, about what we want and get, about our due before God. It is not about a love relationship between God and us.
God loves you, me and everyone! This doesn’t mean everyone is ‘saved’, or that everyone is OK as they are. God hates sin, injustice, pride, cruelty. God didn’t love “sinners” because they were sinners, but because they were His wayward, runaway, ‘lost’ children. He loved them enough to seek them, to want them to come back. He wants this for everyone.
Those who do not see “sinners” with eyes of grace and love, do not see as God sees. They don’t know His heart. God goes overboard to be gracious to sinners, even allowing them to choose sin, so that they will come to their senses [Luke 15:17] and come back to Him. The next time you see someone who might be classified a “sinner”, don’t seem them with older brother eyes, but with loving Father eyes, as on the verge of coming to their senses and coming back home. Maybe our grace will push them in that direction.
PRAYER:
Lord, help me to see these tough teenagers around me as my brothers and sisters, and not as a problem or a threat. They need grace too.