“The True Elder Brother”
Sunday, January 24, 2010; Luke 15:31-32
Series: from the book The Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller
Introduction: From the diary of a Pre-School Teacher, she says:
My five-year old students are learning to read. Yesterday one
of them pointed at a picture in a zoo book and said, "Look at
this! It's a frickin' elephant!" I took a deep breath, then asked...
"What did you call it?" and the child said again: "It's a frickin'
elephant! It says so on the picture!" And so the teacher looked at the picture, and sure enough it said A F R I C A N E L E P H A N T. But how it is supposed to read is African elephant.
I remember there were many times when my children were growing up when they would say something that sounded bad, but I either misunderstood them, or they didn’t know what they were really saying. This is true of the Parable of the Prodigal. For so long we have thought that it is just about the younger son and his sinful ways. But the last few weeks we have learned that it isn’t what it seems.
While it is true that the younger son did sin in his actions, we have learned how the elder son had sin in His life as well. What is worse is that the younger son, because his sin was obvious, recognized his wrong, confessed, and was forgiven and restored to the family. However, the goodness of the elder son led him to become defiant, and prideful, and ignore the fact that he was acting sinful as well.
This morning we try to understand the elder brother a little more and what it means to be a true elder brother.
I. What we need- (1 Corinthians 2:2)
a. God’s initiating love- The truth is, we are all lost. Some are lost
like the younger brother, going astray from what God would have them to do. Others are lost like the elder brother, trying to be good, but self-righteous in our behavior. A good question to ask is: What do we need to escape the shackles of our lostness? How can our heart be changed from fear and anger to one of joy, love, and gratitude?
The first thing we need is God’s initiating love. In the story we notice how the father comes out to each son to express his love to him. He does this in order to show the son that he is welcome to the feast of the father. In fact, he doesn’t wait for them to come to him, but he goes to them. It is not the possibility of repentance that causes the father to love his sons, but rather he loves them because he created them; they are part of who he is.
In the first son we see that this love transforms him. It is not the confession of his son that leads to his love, but rather the love of the father that leads the son to confess. In regards to the elder son, the father goes out to his son, who is angry and resentful, and offers him the same love. However, the elder son doesn’t react with the same humility and repentance.
In both cases, it illustrates the initiating grace of God. The father sees how both sons are lost; and it shows that there is hope, even for the spiritually prideful. The plea that comes from the father to the elder son is meant in the story as a plea from Jesus to the Pharisees. These are the people who will ultimately hand Jesus over to the Roman authorities to be executed. Yet, even in knowing this, Jesus still reaches out to them, not with harsh condemnation, but with a loving plea to turn from their anger, their resentment, their self-righteousness.
The truth is, we will never find God unless He first seeks us, but we should remember that how He seeks us out might not always be obvious. Sometimes, God jumps on us dramatically, as He does with the younger son, and there is a strong sense of love overcoming our wrongdoing. Sometimes He quietly and patiently argues with us even though we continue to turn away, as is the case with the elder son.
Illustration- In a Peanuts comic strip, Charlie Brown is walking, with Lucy following. They have just lost the baseball game, and Charlie Brown says: “Another ball game lost! Good grief. I get tired of losing…Everything I do I lose.” To which Lucy says: “Look at it this way, Charlie Brown. We learn more from losing than we do from winning.” To which Charlie Brown shouts out: “THAT MAKES ME THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!”
In this parable, the elder brother feels like he has lost. Even though he seemed to be faithful and obedient, and the younger brother was defiant and reckless, it is the younger brother, and not him, who gets the celebration. Rather than trying to learn from his apparent loss, the brother instead gets angry and defiant himself. He gets all into himself and what he feels he hasn’t been given, instead of taking the attitude of the apostle Paul, found in 1 Corinthians 2:2- (where he says), “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”
b. A repentance deeper than regret- We also learn from this parable
that our repentance must go deeper than just regret for individual sins. When the younger brother comes back, he has a long list of wrongdoings for which he must express remorse. When we think of repentance we think, ‘If you want to get right with God, you get out your list of sins and you tell him how sorry you are about each item.’
However, repentance is to be more than just having a list and addressing each condition. For example, with the elder brother, he is lost, outside the feast of the father’s love, yet he’s got almost nothing on his list of wrongdoings. He says, ‘I’ve never disobeyed you,’ and the father doesn’t contradict him, which is Jesus’ way of showing us that he is virtually faultless regarding the moral rules. So how does a person who is lost, yet who has no sins on the list get saved?
It is important to note that not everything in this story is to be taken literally. Neither Jesus nor any author of the Bible ever implies that any human being is without sin or fault, except Jesus Himself. Instead, the point is that it is a distraction to think that sin is only about what we visibly do wrong.
When Pharisees sin they feel terrible and repent. There is some emotional punishment of self. When they finish, however, they go back to being older brothers; without remorse or regret. They don’t get to the real problem.
So what is the real problem? As I said last week, the elder brother’s sin was his pride in his good deeds. He was so caught up in how faithful he was to his father, and how obedient he was to his work, that he saw no faults in himself. His problem is his self-righteousness; the way he uses his moral record to put himself above the younger son, and to hold God and others in debt to him. He feels like he is owed because of his good works. His self-image is based on his achievements and performance.
What must we do, then, to be saved? To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, that much is true, but we must do more. If all we do is list our wrongdoings, and say we are sorry, then we remain like the elder brother. To truly be Christ followers we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right. It isn’t just about the wrongs we do, but the very roots of why we do the wrongs, and why we do the right things as well. We must learn how to repent of the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord. We must admit that we’ve put our trust in too many things other than God. We must admit that we too often put our trust in ourselves and what we believe we are capable of doing right.
It is only when we see the desire to be our own Savior and Lord that we can ever be on the verge of understanding the gospel. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, but needing Christ for everything, you are then on the verge of what Christ wants us to know and be. Once we follow through on this, it will change how we relate to God, our self, to others, the world, our work, our sins, and our virtue. This is what radical rebirth is about.
Yet, this only brings us to the brink of Jesus’ message, not to its heart. There is more. Up to this point, we understand what we must turn from, but not what and whom we must turn to.
II. Who we need- (Luke 15:1-32; Genesis 4:9; Philippians 2:5-8)
a. Three Parables- In Luke 15, we see that Jesus actually tells 3
parables to the Pharisees in regards to the lost being found. The first parable is called the Parable of the Lost Sheep. In this parable a shepherd loses a sheep, goes out to search for it, and then finds it. When he finds it he says to his friends in verse 6, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.”
The second parable is called the Parable of the Lost Coin. In this story a woman has 10 silver coins, she loses one, scours the house to find it, and when she finds it she calls her friends and says in verse 9, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost coin.” The third parable is the Parable of the Two Lost Sons.
The similarities among the three stories are obvious. In each story something is lost—a sheep, a coin, the sons. In each story the one who loses something gets it back—the shepherd, the woman, the father. And in each story the narrative ends on a note of rejoicing and celebration.
However, there is a striking difference between the third parable and the first two. In the first two someone “goes out” and searches diligently for that which is lost. The searchers are determined to find what they lost, not letting anything deter them. In the third parable, when the younger son goes out with his inheritance, and doesn’t come back for a long time, the father doesn’t go out and search for him. In fact, many of the listeners, by the time Jesus gets to the third parable, might have been thinking, why didn’t the father go out and search for his son?
Story (from the book The Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller; p. 81): There is a true story of a young man who was a U.S. soldier missing in action during the Vietnam War. When the family could get no word of him through any official channel, the older son flew to Vietnam and, risking his life, searched the jungles and the battlefields for his lost brother. It’s said that despite the danger, he was never hurt, because those on both sides had heard of his dedication and respected his quest. Some of them called him, simply, “the brother.”
This is what the elder brother in the parable should have done; this is what a true elder brother would have done. He would have said to his father, “Father, my younger brother has been a fool, and now his life is in ruins. But I will go look for him and bring him home. And if the inheritance is gone—as I expect it will be—I’ll bring him back into the family at my expense.”
And in fact, if you remember back at the beginning of the Bible, and the story of Cain and Abel, when Cain gets mad at Abel and kills him, and then comes before God without Abel…we pick it up in Genesis 4:9 as it says, “Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’”…. In this passage, when God asks Cain about his brother, the insinuation is that yes, he is his brother’s keeper as his older brother.
b. Mercy and Forgiveness- Think for a moment about someone
breaking a lamp you own. At this point you have 2 options: option 1 is to have them pay for it, since they broke it. Option 2 is to choose to pay for it yourself. Now imagine another scenario, but one that is more personal. Let’s say that someone damages your reputation. Again, you have two options: option 1 is that you could make that person pay for their going to others, by criticizing them and ruining their reputation. Option 2 is that you could forgive them. The forgiveness you give here is free and unconditional to the one who hurt you, but it is costly to you.
For mercy and forgiveness to be truly given, they must be free and unmerited by the one who receives them. If the wrongdoer has to do something to receive them, then it isn’t mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one giving the forgiveness. For example, think back to when the father gave the younger brother forgiveness by not demanding he pay restitution to return to the father. It was free for the younger brother, but cost the father a part of his reputation, because the community would have looked down on this kind of pardoning. It also cost the elder son, because the younger son was now a part of the family again, and an heir.
We see that the elder brother in the story is not a true elder brother, who is happy to see his lost brother back. Rather, he is more concerned with his inheritance. By putting a flawed elder brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to imagine what it would be like to have one.
The truth is, we have one in Jesus. Jesus came all the way from heaven to earth to seek out the lost; us. Jesus wasn’t concerned about the cost of his own life, he just wanted to make sure we were found. As the younger brother deserved alienation, isolation, and rejection, so do we for our rebellion against God. The point of this parable is that forgiveness always involves a price—someone has to pay. There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself. Our true elder brother, Jesus, paid our debt on the cross, in our place.
Philippians 2:5-8 gives us the understanding of Jesus’ thinking: “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!” Jesus Christ, who had all the power in the world, saw us enslaved to our sin, and so He chose to come and save us by giving His life in our place! It is free to us, but was very costly to Jesus.
Conclusion: The poet William Cowper said it well: “To see the law of Christ fulfilled and hear his pardoning voice, changes a slave into a child and duty into choice.” We will never stop being younger brothers and elder brothers until we admit that we have sin, and thus need Christ. But even more, that we, because of what Christ has done for us, choose to want to serve Christ out of love, not out of duty; for the opportunity to bless God, not for the reward we hope to get from God.
On top of this, we need to seek to be “true elder brothers” by understanding that there are many that are lost in our world; many who need Jesus. It might cost us embarrassment, money, time, energy, to seek them out, but it is what God would desire of us. Those of us who know Jesus, are elder brothers, in that we have been reborn first. It is our role to be our “brother’s keeper.”
Let us be grateful for what Christ has done for us. Let Christ’s mercy and forgiveness lead us to be people who offer mercy and forgiveness freely to others. Amen.
Sunday, January 24, 2010; Luke 15:31-32
Series: from the book The Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller
Introduction: From the diary of a Pre-School Teacher, she says:
My five-year old students are learning to read. Yesterday one
of them pointed at a picture in a zoo book and said, "Look at
this! It's a frickin' elephant!" I took a deep breath, then asked...
"What did you call it?" and the child said again: "It's a frickin'
elephant! It says so on the picture!" And so the teacher looked at the picture, and sure enough it said A F R I C A N E L E P H A N T. But how it is supposed to read is African elephant.
I remember there were many times when my children were growing up when they would say something that sounded bad, but I either misunderstood them, or they didn’t know what they were really saying. This is true of the Parable of the Prodigal. For so long we have thought that it is just about the younger son and his sinful ways. But the last few weeks we have learned that it isn’t what it seems.
While it is true that the younger son did sin in his actions, we have learned how the elder son had sin in His life as well. What is worse is that the younger son, because his sin was obvious, recognized his wrong, confessed, and was forgiven and restored to the family. However, the goodness of the elder son led him to become defiant, and prideful, and ignore the fact that he was acting sinful as well.
This morning we try to understand the elder brother a little more and what it means to be a true elder brother.
I. What we need- (1 Corinthians 2:2)
a. God’s initiating love- The truth is, we are all lost. Some are lost
like the younger brother, going astray from what God would have them to do. Others are lost like the elder brother, trying to be good, but self-righteous in our behavior. A good question to ask is: What do we need to escape the shackles of our lostness? How can our heart be changed from fear and anger to one of joy, love, and gratitude?
The first thing we need is God’s initiating love. In the story we notice how the father comes out to each son to express his love to him. He does this in order to show the son that he is welcome to the feast of the father. In fact, he doesn’t wait for them to come to him, but he goes to them. It is not the possibility of repentance that causes the father to love his sons, but rather he loves them because he created them; they are part of who he is.
In the first son we see that this love transforms him. It is not the confession of his son that leads to his love, but rather the love of the father that leads the son to confess. In regards to the elder son, the father goes out to his son, who is angry and resentful, and offers him the same love. However, the elder son doesn’t react with the same humility and repentance.
In both cases, it illustrates the initiating grace of God. The father sees how both sons are lost; and it shows that there is hope, even for the spiritually prideful. The plea that comes from the father to the elder son is meant in the story as a plea from Jesus to the Pharisees. These are the people who will ultimately hand Jesus over to the Roman authorities to be executed. Yet, even in knowing this, Jesus still reaches out to them, not with harsh condemnation, but with a loving plea to turn from their anger, their resentment, their self-righteousness.
The truth is, we will never find God unless He first seeks us, but we should remember that how He seeks us out might not always be obvious. Sometimes, God jumps on us dramatically, as He does with the younger son, and there is a strong sense of love overcoming our wrongdoing. Sometimes He quietly and patiently argues with us even though we continue to turn away, as is the case with the elder son.
Illustration- In a Peanuts comic strip, Charlie Brown is walking, with Lucy following. They have just lost the baseball game, and Charlie Brown says: “Another ball game lost! Good grief. I get tired of losing…Everything I do I lose.” To which Lucy says: “Look at it this way, Charlie Brown. We learn more from losing than we do from winning.” To which Charlie Brown shouts out: “THAT MAKES ME THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!”
In this parable, the elder brother feels like he has lost. Even though he seemed to be faithful and obedient, and the younger brother was defiant and reckless, it is the younger brother, and not him, who gets the celebration. Rather than trying to learn from his apparent loss, the brother instead gets angry and defiant himself. He gets all into himself and what he feels he hasn’t been given, instead of taking the attitude of the apostle Paul, found in 1 Corinthians 2:2- (where he says), “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”
b. A repentance deeper than regret- We also learn from this parable
that our repentance must go deeper than just regret for individual sins. When the younger brother comes back, he has a long list of wrongdoings for which he must express remorse. When we think of repentance we think, ‘If you want to get right with God, you get out your list of sins and you tell him how sorry you are about each item.’
However, repentance is to be more than just having a list and addressing each condition. For example, with the elder brother, he is lost, outside the feast of the father’s love, yet he’s got almost nothing on his list of wrongdoings. He says, ‘I’ve never disobeyed you,’ and the father doesn’t contradict him, which is Jesus’ way of showing us that he is virtually faultless regarding the moral rules. So how does a person who is lost, yet who has no sins on the list get saved?
It is important to note that not everything in this story is to be taken literally. Neither Jesus nor any author of the Bible ever implies that any human being is without sin or fault, except Jesus Himself. Instead, the point is that it is a distraction to think that sin is only about what we visibly do wrong.
When Pharisees sin they feel terrible and repent. There is some emotional punishment of self. When they finish, however, they go back to being older brothers; without remorse or regret. They don’t get to the real problem.
So what is the real problem? As I said last week, the elder brother’s sin was his pride in his good deeds. He was so caught up in how faithful he was to his father, and how obedient he was to his work, that he saw no faults in himself. His problem is his self-righteousness; the way he uses his moral record to put himself above the younger son, and to hold God and others in debt to him. He feels like he is owed because of his good works. His self-image is based on his achievements and performance.
What must we do, then, to be saved? To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, that much is true, but we must do more. If all we do is list our wrongdoings, and say we are sorry, then we remain like the elder brother. To truly be Christ followers we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right. It isn’t just about the wrongs we do, but the very roots of why we do the wrongs, and why we do the right things as well. We must learn how to repent of the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord. We must admit that we’ve put our trust in too many things other than God. We must admit that we too often put our trust in ourselves and what we believe we are capable of doing right.
It is only when we see the desire to be our own Savior and Lord that we can ever be on the verge of understanding the gospel. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, but needing Christ for everything, you are then on the verge of what Christ wants us to know and be. Once we follow through on this, it will change how we relate to God, our self, to others, the world, our work, our sins, and our virtue. This is what radical rebirth is about.
Yet, this only brings us to the brink of Jesus’ message, not to its heart. There is more. Up to this point, we understand what we must turn from, but not what and whom we must turn to.
II. Who we need- (Luke 15:1-32; Genesis 4:9; Philippians 2:5-8)
a. Three Parables- In Luke 15, we see that Jesus actually tells 3
parables to the Pharisees in regards to the lost being found. The first parable is called the Parable of the Lost Sheep. In this parable a shepherd loses a sheep, goes out to search for it, and then finds it. When he finds it he says to his friends in verse 6, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.”
The second parable is called the Parable of the Lost Coin. In this story a woman has 10 silver coins, she loses one, scours the house to find it, and when she finds it she calls her friends and says in verse 9, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost coin.” The third parable is the Parable of the Two Lost Sons.
The similarities among the three stories are obvious. In each story something is lost—a sheep, a coin, the sons. In each story the one who loses something gets it back—the shepherd, the woman, the father. And in each story the narrative ends on a note of rejoicing and celebration.
However, there is a striking difference between the third parable and the first two. In the first two someone “goes out” and searches diligently for that which is lost. The searchers are determined to find what they lost, not letting anything deter them. In the third parable, when the younger son goes out with his inheritance, and doesn’t come back for a long time, the father doesn’t go out and search for him. In fact, many of the listeners, by the time Jesus gets to the third parable, might have been thinking, why didn’t the father go out and search for his son?
Story (from the book The Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller; p. 81): There is a true story of a young man who was a U.S. soldier missing in action during the Vietnam War. When the family could get no word of him through any official channel, the older son flew to Vietnam and, risking his life, searched the jungles and the battlefields for his lost brother. It’s said that despite the danger, he was never hurt, because those on both sides had heard of his dedication and respected his quest. Some of them called him, simply, “the brother.”
This is what the elder brother in the parable should have done; this is what a true elder brother would have done. He would have said to his father, “Father, my younger brother has been a fool, and now his life is in ruins. But I will go look for him and bring him home. And if the inheritance is gone—as I expect it will be—I’ll bring him back into the family at my expense.”
And in fact, if you remember back at the beginning of the Bible, and the story of Cain and Abel, when Cain gets mad at Abel and kills him, and then comes before God without Abel…we pick it up in Genesis 4:9 as it says, “Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’”…. In this passage, when God asks Cain about his brother, the insinuation is that yes, he is his brother’s keeper as his older brother.
b. Mercy and Forgiveness- Think for a moment about someone
breaking a lamp you own. At this point you have 2 options: option 1 is to have them pay for it, since they broke it. Option 2 is to choose to pay for it yourself. Now imagine another scenario, but one that is more personal. Let’s say that someone damages your reputation. Again, you have two options: option 1 is that you could make that person pay for their going to others, by criticizing them and ruining their reputation. Option 2 is that you could forgive them. The forgiveness you give here is free and unconditional to the one who hurt you, but it is costly to you.
For mercy and forgiveness to be truly given, they must be free and unmerited by the one who receives them. If the wrongdoer has to do something to receive them, then it isn’t mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one giving the forgiveness. For example, think back to when the father gave the younger brother forgiveness by not demanding he pay restitution to return to the father. It was free for the younger brother, but cost the father a part of his reputation, because the community would have looked down on this kind of pardoning. It also cost the elder son, because the younger son was now a part of the family again, and an heir.
We see that the elder brother in the story is not a true elder brother, who is happy to see his lost brother back. Rather, he is more concerned with his inheritance. By putting a flawed elder brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to imagine what it would be like to have one.
The truth is, we have one in Jesus. Jesus came all the way from heaven to earth to seek out the lost; us. Jesus wasn’t concerned about the cost of his own life, he just wanted to make sure we were found. As the younger brother deserved alienation, isolation, and rejection, so do we for our rebellion against God. The point of this parable is that forgiveness always involves a price—someone has to pay. There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself. Our true elder brother, Jesus, paid our debt on the cross, in our place.
Philippians 2:5-8 gives us the understanding of Jesus’ thinking: “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!” Jesus Christ, who had all the power in the world, saw us enslaved to our sin, and so He chose to come and save us by giving His life in our place! It is free to us, but was very costly to Jesus.
Conclusion: The poet William Cowper said it well: “To see the law of Christ fulfilled and hear his pardoning voice, changes a slave into a child and duty into choice.” We will never stop being younger brothers and elder brothers until we admit that we have sin, and thus need Christ. But even more, that we, because of what Christ has done for us, choose to want to serve Christ out of love, not out of duty; for the opportunity to bless God, not for the reward we hope to get from God.
On top of this, we need to seek to be “true elder brothers” by understanding that there are many that are lost in our world; many who need Jesus. It might cost us embarrassment, money, time, energy, to seek them out, but it is what God would desire of us. Those of us who know Jesus, are elder brothers, in that we have been reborn first. It is our role to be our “brother’s keeper.”
Let us be grateful for what Christ has done for us. Let Christ’s mercy and forgiveness lead us to be people who offer mercy and forgiveness freely to others. Amen.
posted by Logan's Blog at 7:31 PM
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