St. John Studies

An aspect of the prodigal story that has received little attention is the feast the father is going to have for his returning son.

The feast in the times of Jesus was a wonderful event, a symbolic event that meant a time of joy and celebration.

The father wants both sons at the feast.  One son has been welcomed to the feast by hugs and kisses.

The other has been welcomed to the feast with calm words.   After the older son had a temper tantrum, the father did not have to talk to him as he did, but he said “My son…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.”

Again, this society was patriarchal.  The father is the ruler of the family but this father uses gentle words of explanation to help the older son understand.

To sum up, Pastor Idleman’s book has been about change and the younger son, the older son and the father are in the midst of change.  The younger son has learned that satisfying his senses is not the way to peace as he has torn through his inheritance in the pursuit of wine, women and song.  The older son has learned that the strict, ethical way to God will not work as the “Pharisee way” of harsh judgment does not seem to apply in every case.  The father is showing a daring love for this son, a different love that is based on an understanding of human nature and a forgiving love of Jesus Christ.

As we celebrate Easter, is this change of heart what we really seek?  As we wonder what to do to Awaken ourselves to our shortcomings, as we seek to be Honest about the persons we really are, as we take Action to correct our sins of the past, aren’t you inspired by Jesus ‘s sacrifice?  Don’t we all see that His sacrifice leads to our salvation?  Don’t we  see that our sacrifice can lead to our salvation also?

The feast is a new beginning, one we all need to attend.  It is accepting a God that is fresh and new.  Idleman says “We expect God to be an angry father who demands justice, but through Jesus, He gives us love and grace when we don’t deserve it.  Ultimately, the story of Luke 15 isn’t about two sons who disobey.  It is about a Father who loves His children unconditionally.”

Pastor Tim Keller in his book “The Prodigal God” talks about change: “You cannot change such things through mere will-power, through learning Biblical principles and trying to carry them out.  We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our heart.  We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and make it part of ourselves.  That is how we grow.”

The feast is a celebration for the returning son, the son who stayed home and the father who is showing his family a new way.

Let’s celebrate with this family, let’s go forward and continue to feast on the ideas of Jesus Christ.  Let’s continue to study through “St. John Studies”….

This will be the last post on AHA.

Before I finish this last post, let me take the liberty to write that this experiment in blogging for St. John Studies has been good for me.  I pray it has been good for you.

We will continue Monday April 6 with a new book; God Knows Your Love Language by Dr. Gary Chapman.

Luke 18: verse 11  “God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get” [from the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector].

Wow, this guy is sure proud of himself.  His prayer is less of an admonition to the Lord and more of a self-congratulatory pat on his own back.

This is all spoken in the context of the parable that Jesus taught about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.  The tax collector is a well-known sinner; he makes his living by collecting taxes and skimming money from the funds he is collecting.  The Pharisee is the community’s highly visible religious leader.

People watch his actions and copy his behaviors.

Pastor Idleman wonders in Chapter 13: “Why is He [Jesus] so tough on the Pharisees?”

The answer is that the elder brother probably got his cues from the local Pharisee.  What are some of those cues?  Do the words “unreasonable, unpleasurable, uncaring and unmerciful” come to mind?  Those are four words we heard in Chapter 1.  These are words which many would use to describe the God that keeps them from even exploring Christianity.

Stop and consider this.

It is normal to see our heavenly father through the framework of our earthly father.   If you have a cruel, hate-filled, dismissive earthly father, it may be hard to see a heavenly Father as anything other than cruel, hate-filled and dismissive.

If you have a Pharisee who is cruel, hate-filled and dismissive, it is just another bad representative of God.

Pastor Idleman has the ability to take complex notions and put them in a context we can all understand.  He uses the example of a sales representative in a department store.  Say you are in the store and the sales rep. uses foul language  and gets pushy.   This experience would cloud how we feel about the whole store.

Many would never go back to the store because of this bad encounter.   The whole store is bad.

That is not the truth.

That sales rep. is bad.

However, that sales rep. represents the whole store.

Jesus knows that.

If a self-righteous Pharisee stands up in public and prays a prayer totally lacking in humility, the whole religion lacks tolerance for the sinner.   If a self-righteous Pharisee expresses unreasonable, unpleasurable, uncaring and unmerciful thoughts, the whole religion is misrepresented.

Again, the elder brother gets his cues from the Pharisee and he assumes that God is like the Pharisee.

The elder brother could not be further from the truth.

His own father shows him the way of God as he runs down the street to his younger brother.  His own father shows him the way of God as he hugs and kisses his younger brother and forgives him his sin.

But does the elder brother see that?

Probably not.

Pastor Idleman says that there are lots of Pharisees out there who are totally misrepresenting the heart of God; “there are a lot of older brothers totally misrepresenting the heart of God.”

No mercy for the Pharisee.

In the prodigal story, you may see yourself as the prodigal.

In the prodigal story, you may see yourself as the parent welcoming home a wayward child.

However, Pastor Idleman wants us to see ourselves as the elder brother too.

Why?  Because this is the person who really needs AHA, awakening, honesty and action.

This guy has kept his “nose to the grindstone” so to speak.  He has faithfully done his duties for the father all through the years.  He has not strayed.

Yet his faithfulness does not seem to have done him much good when it comes time to act.  When his brother “gets up and goes to his father” he does nothing.  When his father runs down the street to the prodigal and throws his arms around him and kisses him he does nothing.

I should not say that.  He does something.  He throws a temper tantrum.  He gets angry and refuses to come to the house to greet his brother and to join in the welcome-home party.  When he addresses his father, he says hateful words: “Look!  All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders”.  He is angry that his father has slain the fatted calf for the prodigal and he has never given the elder brother even a young goat to party with his friends.

What comes to mind?  Dare we say petty?

It is natural to be jealous.  We all fall into that devilish trap from time to time but where has this elder brother been all these years?  What has he been doing in his spiritual life to grow beyond this pettiness?

“For the enemy has pursued me; he has crushed my life to the ground; he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead.” (Ps 143.3)

Life is hard but it is what we have.  Those who have a solid belief in God have a Savior to get us through life.  When life gets tough, we don’t have to wallow in misery but lots of people do.

People who don’t know God or people who suffer from spiritual paralysis have a hard time dealing with the ebb and flow of life.

When a new Christian falls in love with God, it is all beauty and light.  I have fallen in love two times in my life.  One time with my wife and believe me I thought about her day and night when I was a young man in love.  The second time I fell in love was with God.  Again, I got obsessed with Him.  Day and night obsessed.  I felt I had tapped into the greatest power source in the world and I really needed beauty and light in my life at the time.  I thought it was going to last forever.

Eighteen years later, I can say that I have had some ebb and flow, good times and bad times, prayerful times and un-prayerful times.  But God has never left me and my desire to know Him has never left me.

“I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready.” [ I Corinthians  3:2] says it well.  When we are new, we get the milk.  When we grow older, we get the solid food.  Why?  Because the challenges of life get hard and we need more strength to fight off the things in life that kill our soul.

The enemy is out to crush our soul.

I am going to say something bold.  I see so many professing Christians who are walking around right now, today with crushed souls.

Seriously now, where do you see yourself?

Are you the prodigal?

Are you the father?

Pastor Idleman believes he wrote his book for the countless Christians who are the elder brother, suffering from spiritual paralysis.

Today, it is a well-known fact that the Middle-East is a patriarchal culture.  This is one of many aspects of this part of the world where our culture and their cultures don’t see eye-to-eye  [to use a cliché].

Can you imagine how much more patriarchal it was in the time of Jesus?

Pastor Idleman has written about the act of the prodigal son taking his inheritance early from his father.

When the prodigal asked for his inheritance early, this was tantamount to wishing that his father was dead.  At least that is what it communicated in that culture.

Elders were held in very high regard.

But what about how the Father acted when the son returned?

The culture dictated that the son be punished and yet the father did not do that.

Let’s set the scene:

Luke 15: 20 “While he [the son] 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.”

In that culture this is an example of a father humiliating himself.  The village expected a father to take slow, dignified steps and never to run anywhere, surely not to a profligate son, someone who has shown him disrespect.    Yet he raced down the road risking ridicule from his village.

When he arrives at his son, the village expected him to hit him and curse him for his disrespectful behavior but instead he kisses him and hugs him, in front of everyone.

This is the new order, the kingdom explained.

Grace in action.

This father is not a Pharisee, one who judges the behavior of others and labels them SINNERS.  This is a human being who knows we all make mistakes and this son has made a big one.

But he has come home.

Suddenly other lost and found parables make sense, the sheep, the lost coin.  The idea of staying at home is great but where is the rejoicing?   The rejoicing comes from the sinner who returns home, the sheep that returns to the fold, the coin that was lost but now is found.

Are the father’s actions difficult for those watching to understand?  Of course they are.

This is the new order.  This is why Jesus came to earth to live among us.  He says [Luke 15:7 “there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”

Jesus loved the lost.  He worked hard to preach to the lost. Yes, he even associated with the lost.

Why?

He wanted to bring them home with his unmerited, unsolicited love.

In his humiliation, the father of the prodigal hints at the humiliation that Jesus had to suffer on the cross.*  Jesus took all our sins on himself as he suffered a humiliating, public death.  The father of the prodigal took all his son’s sins on himself as he ran down that street, kissed his son and hugged him.

He did not care about what the “establishment” said he had to do.  He just wanted his son to come home.

*credit for this idea goes to one of my favorite writers John Stott.

I don’t know why this happens but it is very good when it does.  God gives me something to say in the everyday occurrences of life.  Little miracles are so fine.

Watching TV with my wife last night we saw a hospital commercial.  The dad in the commercial was dressing up in a tuxedo and it looked like he was going out on the town.

He wasn’t.

He was going to another room in his house to have tea with his daughter.

Susan commented on the commercial, “I wish I had a father who would do something like that for me.  How unrealistic.”  I have heard this disappointment before.  I am not going to elaborate on her dear departed dad but I use this prelude to introduce the idea of how do you see your heavenly father?

Often through the lens of your earthly father.

There are helpful words to be found on the “Healing Journey” website:  “If you had a bad relationship with your dad you will likely have a distorted view of fathers in general and that will negatively influence your other relationships. Age gender, income, and social status are irrelevant; a poor relationship with your father will influence your thinking, your behavior, your emotions, and most importantly your relationship with your Heavenly Father. A poor relationship with your father will distort the way you view everything in your life. It will affect the way you view authority figures, the way you view all men, and it will affect your marriage. A father either works to build his child up or he tears his child down. There is no such thing as a neutral relationship with a father.”

How does this relate to AHA?  The elder son wants to see his father as a punisher, a person who will exact retribution.  The younger brother broke many rules and now the older son expects the father to be mad.  After all, he has stayed home with dad and worked hard and has not received any reward.  But what happens?  The young son comes home and gets welcomed!  What has happened!  Dad has showed a side that does not fit the pattern of behavior.  The elder son is hurt and angry.

Again, from the “Healing Journey Website”:

“There is a direct correlation between the relationship you had with your father and the relationship you have with your Heavenly Father. If you found your father to be negative, distant, uninterested in you, unavailable for your emotional needs, you will tend to perceive your Heavenly Father the same way. As long as you continue to see your Heavenly Father in a distorted way you will not be able to be all that God has designed for you to be. You limit yourself and your relationship with God by your incorrect perceptions.”

The older son sees the Heavenly Father as an unforgiving God.

Boy does he get the surprise of his life as he gets the message of his life.  God is not unforgiving [ shown through the actions of his earthly father].

In fact, God is overjoyed at the return of the prodigal [again, the actions of his earthly father].

Pastor Idleman wants  us see that the “new Dad” is the REAL DAD.  The prodigal has not returned to his old home of punishment, retribution and slavery.  He has returned to a home of mercy, forgiveness and freedom.

What a relief for the prodigal.

It happened because he made a move…[Luke 15: verse 20 “He got up and went to his father”].

AHA  has been all about us making our move.

Let’s wake up to who and what we are:  Awakening.

Let’s be honest about who we are, what we are and our problems:  Honesty

Let’s take action [get up and go to the Father]:  Action

In the last Chapter of AHA,  Pastor Idleman refers a lot to the older son who did not leave home.  In yesterday’s post I referred to the sense of justice that this son was seeking.

The younger son left home and he violated a lot of rules.  He claimed his inheritance before his father became deceased [a huge way to show lack of respect for a father in middle-eastern cultures], he left home and blew his inheritance and then came back home, flat-busted broke.

The older son who stayed home was incensed.  How could he be forgiven so easily?

I am concerned about the attitude we show to others as Christians as others wonder what type of people we are.  Maybe the older son exhibited some of the characteristics that make people not want to join the Christian ranks.

Some of the Top 10 Reasons People Hate Christians….

1.Christians are judgmental:  it is all about the do and don’t guideline.  Fall away from the guideline and you will suffer.

2.Christians are unforgiving: after the judgment comes the condemnation.  Christians do not forget transgressions.

3.Christians accompany their holier than thou attitude with hypocrisy:  no one is perfect, even the most devout Christian.  Don’t tell Christians that.

4.Christians take themselves too seriously:  They live in constant fear of sin.  They don’t know how to recover from falling into sin when they fall into it.  They experience a lot of guilt and want others to also.*

Of course these are generalizations and they fall apart when applied to specific people but they make you think.

The older son was “angry and refused to go in” when the prodigal son returned [Luke 15: 28].  The older son said to the father “Look! All these years I have 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.” [verse 29]

That’s what I call righteous indignation!

Holier than thou.

Seeing clearly and focusing on the sins of the younger brother…and judging.

We forget the older brother in the story and that is a shame.

This guy is in pain.

Sadly, he does not understand the message of The Messiah…..

*this information comes from Joshua from his “Me Things” blog

I am going to write a little about my wife.

I am amazed about her likes and dislikes in many areas but one amazement is the fact that she likes reality crime shows like “48 Hours”, “Dateline” and “20/20”.

Maybe you are familiar with this type of show.

I am not a fan.

I think she still loves me though.

The formula is usually this.  A crime is committed [often in a little community] and if not a little community, the crime is committed by the least likely people to commit a crime.  It is usually a murder.  The community is shocked that the crime has occurred.  The environment is serene, often Christian, and the family involved is a fine upstanding family.

Then the dark side comes out.

The family involved has activities that no one is aware of.  In fact, no one would be aware of these “dark” activities if a crime had not occurred and now law enforcement is poking around in everyone’s lives.  The pattern of these shows is large life insurance policies are taken out before the murder is committed [motive].  Affairs have occurred and jealousies abound or damaged relationships [motive].  Gambling is often uncovered with massive amounts of debt [motive].  Drug or alcohol activity has happened with bad behavior and maybe debt [motive].

You get the picture.

The fine upstanding community is rocked by a fine upstanding family that is in the middle of a mess.  It all seems to conclude with a murder.

The murder has to be investigated, the murderer has to be found and a large portion of the show is about the trial.

Justice has to be meted out.

Someone has to pay.

I write all this to set up the last chapter of AHA.  Pastor Idleman has spent 99% of his book considering the prodigal son. This son has gone to the “distant country” and has turned his back on his father and his family [his God].

But what about the older son who has stayed home?

That guy has “toed the line”.  He has worked hard and been faithful to the father and his father’s holdings.

Then the prodigal returns and gets the hug, the new clothes and the fatted calf.

Justice?

I don’t think so.

Why do we see such anguish from victims of crime on the reality crime shows?  They want someone to pay.  The older son wants someone to pay.

And the prodigal doesn’t pay.

This last week we will explore this fascinating dynamic.  “Buckle up”  we may discover Awakening, Honesty and Action.

AHA is a book about changing, coming to God.

Ridding yourself of your sinful burdens as much as you can.

You know the things you do that are holding you back.

You know them better than anyone.

God wants us all to grow, to transform, to change.

It is so hard.

Sometimes we try and it is like Pastor Idleman trying to patch the hole in the bottom of the above-ground pool.  He has good intentions.   He swims down to the hole and touches it with a patch and the hole explodes and the sand sinks down under the pool liner and suddenly a little hole is a big hole. [He says the hole goes from the size of a pencil eraser to the size of a basketball].

Why does that happen?

Satan does not want us to change.

Satan wants us stuck; Satan wants us to fear change; Satan wants us to think if we try, we will have a disaster on our hands, just like Pastor Idleman.

” Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9

Questions for Chapter 12

1.Do you feel, or have you felt, that it’s too late for you?  Why?

2.When has your life been like trying to plug up the hole in the bottom of a pool—the more you try to fix something, the worse it gets?

3.What needs to be different in your life this time if you are going to experience Awakening Honesty and Action?

New Study Beginning on Monday April 6, 2015

Gary Chapman   “God Speaks Your Love Language”   

get your books now……….

I am sure you have.

Several years ago I watched my dad.

It was not easy and I was poorly equipped to do it.

Let me describe him in a few words [a few words do not do him justice but this is a blog].  He was a strong man all his life.  He was active, a doer. He built things with his hands and grew things.  He was not much of a talker, preferring to let his actions do the talking.

He loved me.

It was interesting the way I figured this out because he never told me to my face he loved me.  I could hear it in his voice as he introduced me to people I had never met before.  He was proud of me.

In the beginning, it was not so.  Dad [like many dads] wanted me to be like him but that was not to be.  I did not like farm work, garden work or wood shop work.  Dad was a farmer, an excellent gardener and knew his way around all types of tools.  He was even an industrial arts teacher to veterans after WWII.  He built our home and it is a nice ranch style home.

I liked school, I liked books and I liked being in the classroom.

Dad got to the point where he was ok with the person I had become and then it happened, a series of life-threatening occurrences.

And as we have been studying in AHA  for 11 weeks, he did the opposite of the Prodigal Son in response to the occurrences.  Instead of getting up, he sat down.

I don’t want you to think I am being too hard on him.  There comes a time when all of us can’t bounce back from a physical challenge and then we descend toward our death.  The human body is not made to last forever.

But Dad sat down.

As I said earlier, I was poorly equipped to handle this.

I cajoled him to get up and walk.  When he got a Schwin Airdyne bike, I was encouraged, but it soon became a place to hang clothes.  His main exercise was just watching tv.

Then his knees went.

Doctors said he was too old and too feeble of heart to operate.

Dad lived with daily pain.

His heart began to go down that slow congestive heart failure road as his lifestyle was so sedentary.

Then the Hoveround and the walker.

Dad had other changes that were more shocking: he started talking.  He talked nonstop sometimes.  This was a man who rarely said 5 or 6 sentences in a sitting and now he was talking nonstop.

Most of the talk was about The Cats, what he liked to eat, not sleeping and his knee pain.  Some would say he was a bit egocentric.

I don’t want to say that.

I just think the rest of us did not know what to do with the New Dad.

My personal opinion is that when his body began to fail, he just did not know what to do with himself.  Here was a man who was used to doing big, physical things and now he could do none of that.

The last year of his life he bought a trailer kit for a trailer to be pulled behind a pick-up truck.  When it arrived I said to myself “how is he going to make this?”

He didn’t.

My brother and I made it for him.  I did the painting part.  He could not do this work.  It was something he could have easily done in the past, but not now.

Dad had given up.

I don’t want you to think I am being hard on him; I love him.  In so many ways he is still with me.  I do have regrets.  I regret I was not able to listen to him better as he rambled.

However, I know he left me with some good lessons.

No matter what is happening to you, it is important to adapt to your life situation and not give into defeat.  He could have found things to do with his last years on earth but he chose not to.  It did not help him to live a happy life.

He was a good man.  He was a good father.  His miserable last years were so hard on him but I think they may just help me as I move forward in this life.

Do you have a plan against defeat?

It is hard to do and I may find it impossible.  I may not have what it takes but the words of Robert Ingersoll inspire me:

“The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.”

Whatever the days bring:

“This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 118:24

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