Sermons in the The Storyteller Series

Good morning, Grace. I'm loving getting to share these times with you on Sunday morning. I hope you're watching along with us live. This morning we arrive at the end of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus was the greatest storyteller to ever live. And one of the main ways he taught was through parables, short fictional stories that are used to make a moral point. And this morning, we arrive at a parable that has confused me and dumbfounded me my entire life. Every time I come across this parable, I read it and I go, God, I don't know what that means. I don't know how to make sense of that. I don't know how to apply that. I don't understand it. I even have a note in my Bible. You can't see it, but there's a note right here that says, Lord, help me see this. Help me understand this parable. And that's why I put it in this series, because I wanted to force myself to dig in and do the work and understand this part of God's word that has always eluded me. So this morning we're covering the parable of the shrewd manager. You can find it in Luke chapter 16 verses 1 through 13. So if you have a Bible there at home, I want to encourage you to open that up. Again, if you have family around, open that up and look at God's Word together. Go through it together. It's always a great practice and habit to interact with the text as you're being taught the text. So open up Luke chapter 16, look in verses 1 through 13, and you'll see the parable there that has eluded me for my entire life. As I dug into the study this week, I became more and more grateful that God kind of pointed me in this direction because I love the message that comes out of this parable, and I find it to be an incredibly challenging one for us as believers. And I say as believers because that's an important part of this parable. If you'll look at the beginning of chapter 16, it says, Meaning Jesus has now turned his attention to just his disciples. Previously, he was addressing the crowds, the tax collectors and the religious leaders and the lay people and just the people in and around Jerusalem or Galilee. And now he has turned his focus directly to the disciples. And there aren't too many parables that are addressed just to them. Most parables are told to the crowds, are told to everyone who can hear, and there's this layered meaning. And sometimes Jesus will go back and explain the parable to the disciples later, like the parable of the sower that we covered weeks ago. But this one is just for the disciples. This one is just for an audience that has claimed with their life, Jesus, we are following you and our lives are about your agenda. We have committed to serving you. So if you're a believer this morning, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then it's my firm conviction that God's called us to be disciples, and therefore, as Jesus addresses his disciples in chapter 16, he's addressing us, you and I, as believers. He's addressing an audience that has committed, and this is what we do when we accept Christ as our Savior, to following Jesus and to use our life serving him. That's our commitment. It's the same commitment the disciples made. And Jesus is saying, okay, in light of that commitment, let me tell you something. So if you're watching this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian, I'm so grateful that you're doing this and investing in your spiritual health in this way. And I hope that this helps move you down the road a little bit spiritually. But I want you to know that this one doesn't apply to you yet. This is one that you can just kind of stand back and consider if you want to be a part of that. But if you're a believer, then Jesus is speaking directly to you. And the parable goes like this. He says there was a master who had a manager in his employ. And the manager's responsibility was to manage all of the accounts, all of the wealth of the master. And the master finds out that the manager's not doing a very good job, that he's squandering his wealth, that he's managing it poorly. And he realizes it's time to fire the manager and bring in somebody new. And the manager gets word of this. He realizes that the master is going to fire him. And he's smart. He starts to look out for himself. And he starts to figure out, what can I do to take care of myself after I get fired? And I love the discussion that he has internally. In scripture, we see that he says that he's too weak to dig and he's too proud to beg. So he's got to figure something else out. And I love that because I think a lot of us, if we were put in this situation, we would go, gosh, I am not in good enough shape to do manual labor. And I'm way too proud to go out there and ask for a handout. So I better figure this out. And he gets the idea that what he's going to do is he's going to go around to the people who owe a debt to his master, and he's going to forgive them a portion of that debt to curry favor with them to kind of create his own golden parachute so that when he loses his job, he'll have somebody that'll give him maybe a place to stay or maybe a couple days worth of food or maybe they'll actually give him a job. So he comes up with this plan to curry favor amongst the debtors to his master to take care of himself in his own life. And so he calls the people who owe his master money, he calls them in and he looks at one and he says, what do you owe my master? And the guy says, well, I owe him 100 measurements of oil. And he says, tell you what, take your bill, write down 50 really quick, go ahead and pay it, and we'll call it even, okay? He gives him 50 measures of oil for free. Then the next guy comes in, he says, what do you owe the master? He says, well, I owe him 100 measures of wheat. And he goes, tell you what, sit down, write on your bill that you only owe 80, and we'll just go from there. And he's forgiving them of their debt to curry favor with them. And that's all the way down through verse 8. And I would expect, if you've read other parables, if you've followed along, I would expect at this point for Jesus to use the master to drop the hammer on the manager. And the point would be that you need to settle up your debts. The point would be like, now you have to pay tenfold what you gave them because it wasn't yours and that we shouldn't steal. I would expect Jesus to really give this manager what for. But that's not what he says at all. As a matter of fact, in verse eight, it says that the master commended the manager for his shrewdness. And I've always gotten to that part of the parable and gone like, what? It feels contrary to everything that Jesus teaches. It was dishonest. It was slick. It was sly. It was icky. Why would the master, who in this case is holding the place of God in the parable, why would God, why would the master commend the manager? And it only gets weirder from there. Listen to what Jesus says. Pick it up in verse 8. It says, What? And then he says this. What? What does that mean? My whole life. I mean, I read that when I was a kid. I'm in high school and I'm reading that and I'm like, yeah, I don't understand that one yet. And then I go to Bible college and I encounter it again with all of the classes that I've taken. And I'm going, yeah, I'm not really sure. That's very clear. And then I go to grad school, and at some point or another, I got this Bible. I got this Bible as an adult. In my 30s, I wrote this note, help me to see this. Still, at every stage of my Christian walk, I read this story. I'm dumbfounded by it. I put it down, and I go, yeah, I don't see it. And so as I dug into it this week and looked at what other people said about it and thought about it, and as I prayed through it, I think I came to the conclusion that there's these two clarifying questions that can help us understand the parable. That if we'll ask these two questions about the parable, I think we can begin to understand it better and then apply the challenging message from it. The two questions to help us understand the parable better are what ability is Jesus acknowledging and with whose wealth is the manager being generous? What ability in this parable is Jesus acknowledging with the disciples and to the disciples and to us, and with whose wealth is the manager being generous? I think if we'll answer those questions, we can arrive at an understanding of this parable that is really very helpful and challenging. To that first question, what ability is Jesus acknowledging? I believe as we look at this, he's acknowledging within all of us the ability and the knack and the knowledge to play politics. Now, no one says that they like politics, right? No one says that they like playing politics. You'll never meet anybody who's like, you know what I love? I just love kind of sch it. We know how to do it. How many of your boss's jokes have you laughed at that weren't funny? How many times do you share a story just to get the reaction in the room that you need so that people will look at you and think you're great? How many of your father-in-law's jokes have you laughed at that are not funny? Now, I know that my dad is going to be watching this sermon, and dad, you need to know that 100% of Jen's laughter has been authentic over the years. Every bit of it, you're hilarious. But for the rest of us, how many times have we laughed at our father-in-law's jokes when they're not funny? How many times have we said nice things that we don't mean because it's the right thing to do? Parents, we play politics with our kids. We know how to ask them to do certain things to get our way so that they don't resist us, so that they just go along with us. Wives, you know how to do this to your husbands. You know exactly how to frame up a suggestion so that the big weekend project is his idea and not yours, right? Even our kids know how to do this. My daughter is four and she knows how to play politics. She knows how to use everything at her disposal to further her agenda. There have been nights when she'll get up out of bed and I'm the first person that she sees and she knows she's supposed to stay in bed, but she'll hug me and she'll say, Daddy, will you lay down with me? And I'll say, sweetheart, why do you need me to lay down with you? You need to go to bed. And she says, because I'm lonely. She's not lonely. She sleeps in that bed by herself every night. She's not lonely, but she knows that I'm a sucker. She knows that I'm going to have sympathy for her. She knows I'm going to feel bad for her and that I'm easy to take advantage of in that state. So she says, Dad, I'm lonely. Will you please lay down with me? She knows what she's doing. And what Jesus is saying in this is that we all know what we're doing. We even have words and phrases for it. We know what it means to grease a palm. We know that we're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. I don't know what that means, but I know that I shouldn't do it. We know that we're not supposed to bite the hand that feeds us. We all do this. We all have used our own shrewdness, our own ability, our own wit, our own charm, our own whatever innate abilities that we have to advance our own agenda. And he's telling the disciples, you know how to do this too. I think what Jesus wants us to see in part of this parable is that we all have a little bit of the shrewd manager in us. We all do. What that manager did is he marshaled the resources available to him, both internal and external, to further his own agenda. He used his own talent and his charm and his wit and his intellect and in concert with the wealth of the master to further his own agenda, to build his own kingdom, to serve himself. He made it about him. And what Jesus wants us to see and wants his disciples to see is that we all have this ability. We all have certain gifts and talents and innate abilities. We all have internal and external resources that we use at different times to build our kingdom and to further our agenda. We are all shrewd like the manager. We've all done it. Because we've all done that, because there's a little bit of that manager in all of us, the second question is hugely important. And answering this question is really when the light bulb started to go off about what this parable is about to begin with. The second question we asked is, with whose wealth is the manager being generous? With whose wealth is the manager being generous? And the answer is the master's. It's not even his wealth. It's the master's wealth. And again, I think this is where the disciples started to realize what Jesus was talking about. And this is where I started to realize what Jesus was talking about. He's trying to get the disciples to acknowledge, listen, the resources that you have, the money that we have, it's not your money. It's God's money. He gave it to you. Everything that you've been entrusted with, the resources that we have, the money that we have, God's made you a steward of that. That's his money. That belongs to him, and he's entrusted it to you. And I think we take it a step further, and we look at the shrewdness of the manager and what that requires, and we acknowledge that the gifts that we have, we didn't earn those gifts. We didn't place those gifts in ourselves. We didn't give ourselves those things. God did. And so I can almost see Jesus looking at the disciples and going, Peter, your courage and your willingness to be the first one out of the boat, your willingness to say the difficult thing, I gave that to you. That's not your resource. That's mine. John, your empathy and your love for others and your depth of knowledge and insight, I gave that to you. Matthew, your knack with money, I gave that to you. Those are all gifts that were given to them by the Father. And I think what Jesus wants the disciples to see and in turn us is that everything that we have, everything that we have was given to us by God. It's not our resource, it's his. And just like we marshal our resources and our abilities to build our own kingdom, what Jesus wants the disciples to see is that because the gifts that we have are his, it is his expectation that we would use those and leverage those to build his kingdom rather than our own. I remember when I understood this for the first time, when that particular light bulb went off in my life. I was 28 or 29 years old. I was a student pastor at my previous church. And that church had a pretty big youth group, and the youth group, it had cool kids in it. The kids were athletes. They were funny. They were charming kids. They were sharp. And I started in April or May and took them to camp in the summer and remember thinking,, how am I gonna win these kids over? How am I gonna get them on my side so that I can minister to them? They really liked their previous youth pastor and I was kind of stepping into his shadow and it's like, well, how am I gonna win them over? And that first day, that Monday afternoon, we had free time and as was my habit, I went to the ball courts. And you grab a basketball, and you throw it out on the court, and everybody comes running. And for a few hours, I played basketball with my guys, with the guys in the youth group. And God, for whatever reason, blessed me with a modicum of athleticism, not a lot. And if you think I'm bragging about being athletic, I can remember the specific moment in my life when I realized I was not an athlete. It involved an African soccer player in college running over me, putting me on my chest, scoring a goal, and then jogging back while he winked at me, okay? So I can remember the exact moment in my life when I realized, dude, you are not athletic. But I did have some ability to hang in there with the fellas. And so we played basketball all afternoon. And simply by playing basketball and by being competent and by staying on the court and staying on teams and doing the right thing, I was able to win them over. That afternoon changed things. The months previous, it was really hard to have conversation with those guys. And after that, it was easy. Something clicked. And I fell into place as a student pastor. And it dawned on me there at Look Up. You know, my whole life, I had been reasonably athletic. Not very athletic, but enough to get by. I had been at least a little bit funny. I knew how to kind of charm people. And my whole life, I just assumed that I had those gifts to build my kingdom. Remember in high school, I used those things. I leveraged everything that I had. I leveraged all my resources to get people to like me, to get girls to like me, to get guys to think I was awesome, to get people to want to be my friend. It was all about Nate. I used it to build my kingdom. And it wasn't until look up at the end of my 20s with the new youth group of kids there that I realized, oh my goodness, God didn't make me serviceable on a basketball court for my own good so that I could get people to like me. He didn't give me the ability to come up with a joke or to say a funny thing in the right moment to win people over to me. He has tailor-made me for this season in my life. He knows that the way you win over high schoolers is to be able to run around with them. He knows that the easiest way to connect with any group of dudes is to throw a ball out there and run around and get to know them that way. That's worked on the mission field. When I've gone to Honduras, I can't even speak their language, but I grab a soccer ball and I throw it out on the field and I run around with them and suddenly there's a connection. And I realized in that moment, my goodness, God didn't give me these small gifts so that I could get people to like me for the reasons that I've always used them. He didn't make me kind of funny so that I could win people over to me. He gave those things to me. He tailor made me so that I could connect with these guys that I was going to be ministering to. God knew in my future, he is going to have to connect with high school students, so let me gift him and enable him in such a way that he's going to be able to connect with these kids. And I realized, my goodness, my whole life I've been like the shrewd manager and leveraged all the resources, internal and external, to further my own agenda and to build myself up when God gave me these things to build his kingdom. God gave me these things, not to draw them into myself, but to draw them into God. And since then, I've become increasingly convinced that the Christian life is a gradual realization that all I have is God's, and I'm expected to leverage everything to build his kingdom. I really think that's true. The Christian life is this gradual expectation, this peeling back of the onion of one layer and then the next layer and then the next layer until we gradually understand that everything that we have has been gifted to us for the purpose of leveraging it to build God's kingdom. Yet so often we don't realize that and we use those things to further our kingdom. And Jesus wanted the disciples to see this reality. That if you don't pay attention, if you don't listen to me, you're going to have these gifts and these talents and these resources, but you're just going to be like the shrewd manager and you're just going to use them to build up your own kingdom, and there's something bigger than that going on here. This is why he makes the point that he makes. He says, listen, unless I can trust you with little things, to be shrewd in little things, how can I give you more? Unless you can take that shrewdness and that resources that I've given you and apply those to building my kingdom in little ways, how can I entrust you with bigger ways? If you won't leverage everything you have on this side of eternity, how can I welcome you into that side of eternity? Suddenly, that portion of the parable makes sense. And you know, I see people at Grace doing this in so many ways. I think of somebody at the church who's become a really good friend of mine, who is fortunate and is in a spot in life where they don't have to work. But recently, he had an opportunity come up, like a contract-type deal, a temporary agreement, where he had the opportunity to generate some more income for himself. And he told me, you know, I think I am going to pursue that. But recently, God has laid on his heart just the important work that some nonprofits are doing. And so he told me that he is going to pursue that opportunity to make that money, not to keep it for himself, but so that he can funnel that into the nonprofits that he believes are building God's kingdom and doing God's work. That's a man whose eyes have been opened to the gradual realization that everything he has in his life, his ability to close the sale, to do the deals, to manage the relationships, to play the necessary politics within those kinds of deals and structures, that everything that he's been given, he's now marshalling to build God's kingdom rather than his own. I think that that is the surest sign of someone in whom the gospel has taken root is that we realize what Jesus is trying to communicate to us in that parable, that, oh my goodness, everything I have is not about me. It's about building God's kingdom. I think about Rob Hounchell. In just this small way, a couple years ago, he realized the church didn't have a bassist. And apparently God has gifted him with some musical ability, so he bought a bass and he taught himself how to play it so he could serve the church in that way. And he stands right back there with no light on him, half the Sundays, and he plays the bass for the sake of the church to build God's kingdom rather than his own. I think about Elaine Morgan, who just quietly behind the scenes does so much. Unless you're an elder or part of the missions committee or in the children's ministry, you don't see everything that a woman like that does. And we have a bunch of people like that who show up at all the events and all the things and self to see that, hey, everything we have is God's and we need to leverage it to build his kingdom. But I think we need to see the layers of that unfolding more and more and think to ourselves, God, how would you have me use my resources? How would you have me marshal my abilities to build your kingdom? We need to begin collectively asking questions like, Father, my money is not my money, it's your money. How would you have me deploy it to build your kingdom? Father, you've made me good at building things. You've made me good at starting things. You've made me entrepreneurial. How can I use that to further your kingdom? God, you've given me a business acumen. How can I use that to further your kingdom? God, you've made me diplomatic. I'm a good people person. How can I use that to draw people towards you? God, you've given me a heart of care and of concern and of empathy and passion. How can I use that to express your love in the community and draw people to you and not to myself? We need to begin to ask questions like that and learn the lesson from this parable that everything we have is from God. And it's with his wealth and his resources that we are to be generous and we are to be shrewd and we are to deploy those to build his kingdom. That's why Jesus finishes the parable the way he does. It's the only way that he can finish it. He says, listen guys, now that you understand that I have given you everything that you have and my expectation is that you would use that to build my kingdom and further my agenda rather than your own, you need to understand that no man can serve two masters. There's no possible way you can further your agenda and my agenda simultaneously all the time. Sometimes they're going to conflict. He says at the end, no man can serve both God and money, which I think is another way of saying no man can serve both God and himself. We can't further God's agenda and our own agenda at the same time. They are going to conflict, and eventually we will love one and hate the other. And I think so often in life we straddle the fence where in this way I'm furthering God's agenda, but in this way I'm looking out for myself. And Jesus says, no, I need you all on team Jesus here. Marshall everything you have, all the resources, all the gifts, all the abilities to further his kingdom, not our own. And as we sit and we think about that, what it would look like to use every last square inch of our life, all of the resources available to us to further God's agenda and not our agenda, to build God's kingdom and not our kingdom, I think it can feel pretty intimidating. Almost like sitting at the bottom of a mountain going, gosh, I've got to climb that? How in the world? I don't even see a way to the top. I'm so far from marshalling everything I have to serve God. I'm so invested in building my own kingdom that I don't even know what to do to begin to build God's kingdom. And because it feels like such a lofty goal, I think sometimes we might shy away from it. But if we think of it as a mountain to climb, we don't have to know every step along the way. We just have to know the next one or the first one. And back in another lifetime in February, when we met in person, I shared a sermon about discipleship. I said, at Grace, we're going to define discipleship by simply taking the next step of obedience. So this morning, I would ask you in light of this parable, in light of the reality that everything we have has been given to us by God and it is his expectation that we would leverage that with all of our shrewdness and ability to build his kingdom rather than our own. What's the next thing in your life that you can leverage to build God's kingdom. Not what are all the steps, what's the next step? Not how are we going to climb the whole mountain, just how are we going to take this first step? I hope that you'll discuss that this week in your families and in your small groups. What's the next thing that you can give over to God that you can begin to leverage in your life to further his agenda rather than your own. And maybe we can continue to learn from the parable of the shrewd manager. Let's pray. Father, first we thank you. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. Now, give us the courage to acknowledge them. Give us the courage to acknowledge that you made some of us smart and you made some of us charming and you made some of us good with people and you made some of us humble. You gave us each gifts and abilities, God. Let us embrace what those are and acknowledge that they are from you. And let us leverage everything that we have, both internal and external, to build your kingdom rather than our own. Let us not serve ourselves so often and so diligently that we grow to hate you as a master. But let us serve you so much that we fall more deeply in love with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This morning, we are still in the middle of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus is the greatest storyteller to ever live. And he actually employed stories called parables in his teaching throughout his ministry. And we'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story used to make a moral point. And it's important this morning that we remember that these are fictional because this one that we're going to focus on this morning is maybe the most mysterious, most layered. It conjures up more questions probably than any other parable. In this parable is a reference to paradise and a reference to Hades and what life is going to look like in eternity. And a lot of people try to read into this parable what eternity must look like and what Jesus was saying about eternity. But what I would say to that before we even jump into the parable found in Luke chapter 16 is that that's not the point that Jesus is trying to make. Jesus isn't trying to paint a picture of eternity in this parable. He's trying to make a larger point that I want us to get to today. And I'm actually talking about this up front because Scripture does have a place where it talks about eternity, where it does fill in some of the blanks on what that's going to look like in heaven and in hell, being with God and being separated from God and what it's going to look like at the end of time. And we find that in the book of Revelation. I've been going back and forth in my own head and in my own heart about whether that was something I wanted to dive into as a church. So I want to invite you this week in your small groups, on your Zoom calls, in your check-ins, discuss this with your small group leader. And I'm going to be getting with the small group leaders and asking for feedback from them. And if Revelation is something that we want to go through as a church sometime in the not-too-distant future, then I would love to do that with you. But I just want to kind of gauge the interest level before we dive into that together because it's quite the undertaking. With that as an aside, we're going to set eternity and what this parable implicates about eternity aside today so that we can see the main focus of the parable. We can find it, like I said, in Luke chapter 16. If you have a Bible there at home, I hope that you'll open it up and go through the text with me. I'm going to read some verses, some of them, like always, I'll summarize. And I love it when you have your Bible open and you're making sure that I'm following along with the story correctly and you're not giving me the benefit of infallibility. I would also encourage, if you're watching this as a family, if you have kids with you, what a cool time to open up mom or dad's Bible and have them gather around and go through and consume and look at the text together. What a great time as a family to be able to gather around one Bible, God's Word, and consume that together. So grab a Bible if you have it and open up to Luke chapter 16. We're going to be in verses 19 through 31. It's in those verses that you'll find the parable of Abraham's bosom. And this is how was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. So that's how Jesus sets the stage. There's a rich man who had all he wanted every day. He feasted sumptuously, which sounds a little bit like me in quarantine, but this is what he did every day. That's how he lived. And at his gate, there was a poor man named Lazarus who begged, who ate the scraps off of his table. And the implication is that the rich man really didn't pay much attention to him. And Lazarus was so hard up that the dogs would come and lick his sores. I can't imagine the poverty or the sickness that would render you, that would put you in a place where you just said, you know what? Go to town, dogs. That's fine. It breaks my heart to think about someone living like that. And so these are the two characters. These are the two men, the rich man and then the poor man, Lazarus. And they both died at the same time. And in eternity, it says that Lazarus, the poor man, was in Abraham's bosom. Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people. That was being with him in eternity is acknowledged as being in paradise. And then there was a chasm, and on the other side of the chasm was Hades. And Hades is always associated with fire and separation from God and suffering. And the rich man was in Hades. And the rich man looks across the chasm and he sees Abraham and he cries out and he requests, Father Abraham, can Lazarus come across this chasm, across this divide, dip his finger in water and just give me a drop of water? I'm burning and I'm thirsty. And what's interesting there, if you look at the text, is Jesus chose very intentionally to have the rich man say, Father Abraham. What he's indicating there in that language is that the rich man was a Jew. The rich man looked to Abraham as his forefather. The Jewish culture at that time very much saw their eternity wrapped up in their lineage. He thought that because he was from the line of Abraham, because God made some promises to Abraham, that those promises applied to him, and simply by birthright, simply because of who he was and how he had lived his life, that he was going to spend eternity in paradise with Abraham and with God. And so what Jesus is saying there, it's one of the layers of this very layered parable, is that this man was a Jew and he thought that his lineage and his heritage was going to get him into heaven for eternity. And it didn't. And now he's having to face that reality. And it's a stark parallel because often to me in the New Testament, I find that there's a parallel between the expectant Jewish community and the expectant church community in the United States in the 21st century. We have plenty of people who are cultural Christians who grow up in church, who because their grandparents were believers, because their parents were believers, because they've always grown up in church, they just think they're automatically going to go to heaven. Even though maybe we've never articulated a faith, there's no evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in our life or that that faith and that love has taken hold of us. We haven't allowed God to come in and radically reprioritize our lives. Christianity remains just kind of a sliver of our life instead of our whole life. And it's entirely possible, we see in this parable, to go through our life expectant because of who we are and where we come from that one day we'll be in eternity because it just works out for us. And this rich man found out, no, that's not how it goes. And we would be wise to acknowledge that if we've been church people our whole life, that's not what gets us into heaven. That's not what allows us to spend eternity with God. What allows us to spend eternity with God is falling on our face and saying, I fall short and Jesus closes the gap and I need him more than anything else. He is the only way to the Father and so I need Jesus in my life and I submit to his lordship in my life. It's to acknowledge that we are sinners in need of a Savior. But the rich man cries out, Father Abraham, can Lazarus please just come across and give me a drop of water? And Abraham explains to the rich man, I'm sorry, man, that's not how this works. This chasm is too deep. It's too wide. It was intentionally placed here so that nobody could go from paradise to Hades and come back. And no one can come from Hades to paradise. It cannot be crossed, so Lazarus can't bring you any water. And the rich man, in response to this, asks what I believe is a heart-wrenching question. He says, okay, fine. Can Lazarus, can you send him back to my father's house? I have five brothers and they need to know about this. They need to know that this is true. They need to know that eternity is not some old wives' tale, that this is actually taking place. They need to know that there is suffering waiting on them, that they are on a path to where I am, and I don't want to be here. Can you please send Lazarus back so that my family doesn't have to suffer like I'm suffering? It's a heart-wrenching question. It's a very human request. It's this realization by the rich man, oh my goodness, all those teachings I heard over the course of my life, they're true. And my brothers are like me. They don't believe them either. Can we please send Lazarus back to prevent them from experiencing what I'm experiencing? I want to know that they're going to be in paradise. I don't want them to put up with this to endure this. But Abraham's response is tough. Look what another reason why I say it's a layered parable because the end of it, he says, if they didn't believe Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe Lazarus. They're not even going to believe it if someone were to rise from the dead. Jesus is saying to this Jewish crowd that's listening to him, without them even realizing it, in a few weeks, I'm going to die and I'm going to conquer death and raise myself from the dead. And even then, some of you won't believe. He's foreshadowing his own death at the end of this parable. And Abraham's response is tough. The rich man says, please, can Lazarus go and share this message with my brothers to prevent them from coming here. And Abraham says, they have Moses and the prophets. They have what we understand to be the Old Testament. They have the scriptures. They have the Bible. God has spoken to them. And he says, no, no, no, just send Lazarus back. They'll listen to Lazarus. And Abraham says, even if someone is resurrected from the dead, they still will not. If they won't listen to Moses and the prophets, they won't listen to them. And it's this stark message. Your brothers are stubborn. Your other rich brothers are stubborn. They've been exposed to the message. God has been speaking to them. We've told you over and over and over again. Since you were a young boy, you all, your family, had the messages of Moses and of the prophets and of the Old Testament, and God's Word breathed into your life, and you have all chosen not to believe it and not to repent and not to submit to God and there's no other voices that are going to help. The message from this parable that we don't want to miss is that if we think God isn't speaking to us, we probably just aren't listening. If we think God's not speaking to us, if we're having a hard time hearing the voice of God and we're going, God, why don't you say something? Why don't you make your will more clear? Why don't you make yourself more clear? It's probably not that he's not speaking to us. It's far more likely that we're just not listening. It's not that the rich man and his brothers weren't getting spoken to by God. They had the Bible. They had Moses. They grew up in a culture that was designed fundamentally to point them to the Father. But they missed it. And they didn't miss it because God wasn't speaking to them. They missed it because they weren't listening. And haven't we seen this happen in our lives? Haven't we seen this happen in the lives of the people around us? I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years with people who are skeptical of the faith. And they'll say something like, you know, if God is real, why doesn't he just make himself more evident? Why does he make it so hard to find him? If God is real, why doesn't he just like show himself front and center? And listen, I don't want to demean or sweep away those questions because they come from a sincere place. They really do. And questions like that make sense to me. But whenever I hear a question like that, I'm just convinced that we're not listening. Because when someone says, if God's real, why doesn't he just come and put himself right in front of us? I think to myself, do you mean Jesus of Nazareth that lived for 33 years and then historically died and was resurrected? Do you mean like that? Or when somebody says, if God's real, why doesn't he make himself evident? I think, do you mean like in nature? Do you mean that God should make himself more evident in his creation? That that's the way that he's chosen to reveal himself to us? Romans 1 says that God has revealed himself to us in nature so that no man is without excuse. When people say, I wonder why God doesn't make himself more evident, I wonder to myself, have you ever looked at the grandeur of a mountain range? Have you ever sat on the peaceful beach and just behold the beauty of a sunset or a sunrise? Have you ever looked at a painting in the sky and not thought, man, God, you nailed that one? Have you ever not sat in the peace and the grandeur of the plains? Have you gone out west and looked at how big and open and wide everything is? Have you been to the Caribbean and seen how crystal blue the waters are? Have you been in the hills and the east coast of the United States and looked at the lush greenery? How do you look at those things and not think, wow, there must be an author to this? Scripture tells us that even if man refuses to praise God, that the rocks cry out, that the heavens declare the glory of God. How can we say that God doesn't make himself more evident when all we have to do is literally step outside and look at his evidence all around us? How can we say that God hasn't made himself evident when we've had the gift of holding a child that we created? One of the things that I marvel at when people say, why doesn't God make himself more evident? I think of this idea of just the size and the scope of the universe. Do you understand that we still haven't found the smallest thing? We still can't find the smallest thing that God created. Years ago, 100 years ago, we thought it was a cell. We thought that a single cell was probably the smallest possible building block of life. And then we developed microscopes and we did some research and we went, oh man, we were way off. There's things that are a lot smaller than this. And then we discovered the atom. We were like, okay, that's got to be the smallest thing. And then we went, oh, that's not the smallest thing. There's like electrons. Those are tiny. And then we went to electrons and we're like, oh my gosh, there's a whole universe of things inside electrons. And no matter how much research we do, we still can't find the smallest, most fundamental thing that all of nature is based on. The universe that God created is infinitesimally small, yet it's unfathomably large. If we zoom out from the smallest thing and look at the largest thing, we still can't comprehend the universe. We still don't understand how it all dances together and hangs there. Science still can't explain the origin of it. Even if we can trace it back through history, through all the different experiments and reading and research that we have, we still don't know how it came into creation besides a creator God. Even Einstein, as he searched for a theory of relativity to stitch together the universe and understand all the things at play here God exists. And we don't just do this with our belief in God, but sometimes we do it circumstantially. Sometimes we're in different circumstances and we'll think to ourselves, why won't God tell me what I should do here? Why can't I hear his voice? I think of an example from several years ago when I was at my previous church. There was a guy who was a good guy, great character, one of my small group leaders. I was a small group pastor, and he and I worked together a fair amount. He came to me and he said, hey, I feel like God has laid on my heart that I need to plant a church. What do you think I should do? And I had to tell him. I'm not one to pull many punches in situations like this. So I had to tell him, listen, man, I don't think you're ready. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think your family's where it needs to be. I don't think where you need to be. I think you should, that's a good goal. But the timing's probably off. It's probably not the right time. And he said, okay, I hear you, but I think I'm gonna talk to the pastor about this. I said, all right. So he goes and he sits down with our lead pastor and he says, hey, I think the Lord wants me to plant a church. And our lead pastor said the same thing I did. Gosh, it's a good goal. It just doesn't feel like the right time. I really don't think I would support that. And the guy said, okay, I'm going to talk to the elders then. So he goes and he sits in front of the elders and he says, hey, I think God wants me to plant a church and I'd really love you guys to support this. And they unanimously and quickly said, we don't think that's a good idea. And after hearing all of that advice, he went home and he told his wife he was no longer going to plant a church and he was a faithful small group leader for years. No, that's never how that story goes. He went, okay, I hear you guys, but God's leading me in another way. And he went and he left us and he went and he planted a church. And sure enough, within a year and a half, two years, that church didn't exist and he had to figure out life again. And he may be tempted at the end of that road to say, God, where were you? Why weren't you speaking to me? And the truth of it was, God was speaking to him the whole time in a cacophony of voices that he invited into his life as spiritual authorities that he just refused to listen to. It wasn't that God wasn't speaking to him, it's that he wasn't listening. And I believe we all do this. I believe we all search for the voice of God. God, what would you have me do here? God, why don't you show up in this situation? God, why don't you make yourself more evident? When God the whole time has been speaking to us. When God the whole time has put voices in our life, has put his word in our life, has put a church in our life, has put family members in our life to guide us, to serve as his voices, and yet we say we can't hear him. So to me, that's the main point. That if we can't hear God, it's not because he's not speaking, it's because we're not listening. But the interesting question that comes out of that message is, what is it that's preventing us from hearing the voice of God? Why sometimes do we struggle so mightily to hear something that's being spoken so clearly? And I think to find the answer to this, we should examine the contemporaries of Jesus. I think if we look at the religious establishment, at the Pharisees and the religious leaders and the majority of the Jewish people at the time of the life of Christ, who did not believe that Jesus was who he said he was, who were not listening to the message of God. I think if we look to them and try to figure out why was it that they couldn't hear the voice of God, that we may be able to figure out why we can't hear the voice of God. And so as I thought about that question this week, why was it that the religious leaders at the time of Christ couldn't understand what he was saying? What was prohibiting them from hearing Jesus, from hearing the message of God? I came to the conclusion that they couldn't hear God because of their own deafening expectations. They had these expectations playing in their ears that were so deafening that they were drowning out the message that God was trying to communicate to them. I kind of think of it like this. For Christmas, I got maybe the greatest gift that's ever been given, AirPods, for Christmas this year. And AirPods have this great technology in them. It's noise canceling technology so that when you put them in your ears, they begin to actively work to cancel out all the noise in your area. So you can literally turn down the volume of an entire room simply by having these in your ears. It's magical. If you have a four-year-old or a Kyle, I highly recommend these. And then when you partner their noise canceling ability with a song that you may be choosing to play from your phone, you can't hear anything. It's magical. Jen, my wife, hates these things because when they're in, I can't hear anything going on around me. I'm in my own little universe. And the truth of it is that when these are in my ear, I can only hear what I want to hear. I can only hear things that are coming through my phone, things that I have intentionally chosen and told my phone, had these expectations playing in their ear that made them completely unable to hear anything else that God was trying to say to them. Those expectations were deafening. Their expectations of Jesus were that he came to be a physical king. They expected him to be a king, to literally come and sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem, to overthrow Herod, to overthrow Roman rule, to rise Israel to national prominence, to literally take over the whole world and sit in a righteous and glorious divine reign over the planet with the Messiah Jesus on the throne. They expected a physical kingdom. They expected that Jesus was going to come from Jerusalem, not Nazareth, not the country, not be a poor carpenter or probably a stonemason if you really get into the technicalities of the words. They didn't expect that Jesus would be a poor stonemason from Nazareth, from the north of the country. They expected that he would come from Jerusalem, that he would be a member of the religious elite, that he would come up through their institutions, through their religious structure and hierarchy. They envisioned that he would be the high priest, that he would cater to them. They did not think he would carouse with sinners. They did not think he would be friends with prostitutes. They did not think that he would associate himself with people who were not amongst the elite. And what they didn't realize is Jesus came to save sinners. He came to seek the lost. He came to interact with the broken. He came to build a church. He didn't come to establish a physical kingdom and sit on a physical throne. That is too small of a kingdom for our Messiah. He came to earth to establish an eternal spiritual kingdom whose throne is in heaven that he will sit next to his Father and reign on for all of eternity. And we as the church and everyone who becomes a believer is a part of the spiritual kingdom that Jesus came to establish. And all of the Old Testament points to that reality, but because they had their own deafening expectations in their ear, they couldn't hear that message from God, and so they rejected it. Their own deafening expectations caused them to reject the Messiah when he showed up in front of them because they could no longer hear his message. And if that's true of them, it makes me wonder about our expectations. I wonder what expectations we have that are prohibiting us from hearing the message of God. A very easy one is the message of prosperity. There are some men and women who are peddlers of the false gospel of prosperity who teach people that to be a believer means that you will be prosperous, that if you have enough faith, God will give you material blessing. There was actually a televangelist at the beginning of this COVID nonsense who told people in his TV audience that even if you lose your job, if you give your last paycheck to this ministry, God is gonna flourish you. The Bible's very clear that guy's gonna get his, just so we all know. But that's a false gospel. It builds an expectation that to become a believer means I will be prosperous. It means I'm gonna close close the business deal. It means I'm going to get the car. It means I'm going to have the wealth. And it's an incredibly damaging belief because people who are in poverty and subject to that kind of false optimism sign up for faith with the expectation that God is going to make them prosperous. And then when he doesn't, it leaves them shipwrecked on the side of the road with no faith and no hope in a God that they should have never believed in in the first place. It's a false gospel. And that expectation built up that because I'm a believer, God is going to prosper me is a false expectation, and when it doesn't come to fruition, it shipwrecks their faith. And I don't know where we're getting that in the Bible because Jesus himself was poor. He says, He said, He said, He didn't have a lot of extra money to throw together. A lot of times their meals came down to just the amount of bread that they had. Nowhere in the Bible does it state that if we are believers that we will be prosperous, yet that expectation exists and persists and wrecks people's faith along the way. One that we are probably more susceptible to in our crowd and in our culture, and I've seen this over and over again in the lives of people, is the expectation that to be a believer means that God is going to prevent pain. That if I'm a believer, if I'm walking with God, if I'm walking faithfully, if I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, then he is going to allow me to dodge the raindrops of tragedy in my life. That if we'll just dot our I's and cross our T's and mind our business and do what God asks us to do, then we're not going to get the tough diagnosis and neither is anyone that we love. We're not going to experience that loss and neither will anyone in our immediate circle. That to be a believer is an insurance policy that God is going to protect me against pain. A lot of us have that expectation. We might not say it that way, but it exists. And we know it exists because I've seen so many people who have a solid faith who experience loss or tragedy for the first time, and that faith is shaken to its core. Do you know why it's shaken to its core? Because part of the foundation of that faith was an expectation that my God will prevent me from pain and tragedy when God does not claim that in Scripture anywhere. Sometimes it's built on poor teaching on verses like Romans 8.28 that teach, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. And some people want to apply that to this life right now, saying that no matter what happens, it's going to work out for our good. When really what that verse means is God is orchestrating everything to bring us nearer to him in eternity, that everything will work out for those who love him, for their ultimate good, for eternity in paradise. It might not work out in this life, but it will always work out in the next life. But when we have this expectation that to be a believer is to prevent us from pain, we will inevitably experience pain that runs contrary to that expectation. And I don't know how we got this idea because all through the Bible are people who suffer for God. When God speaks to a prophet named Ananias, he tells him that Saul is his chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. And get this, he will show him how much he must suffer for his name. That same Saul becomes Paul and details at the end of his life, all the ways he suffered for God through the years. Even Jesus himself, we don't talk about this a lot, but by the end of Jesus' life, Joseph, his earthly father, is not on the scene anymore. So it's entirely possible that somewhere in Jesus' adolescence, his mother became a single mom. It's entirely possible that Jesus experienced part of adolescence. The Son of God experienced life, potentially, as someone who lost his earthly father in a single-parent home. Does that sound like God protects people from suffering all the time? James tells us whenever we endure trials to consider it pure joy. Not if we endure them, but when we do. If we want to have a healthy, accurate, vibrant understanding of God, we have to move away from the expectation that to be walking with him means that we get to dodge the raindrops of pain. That's not a scriptural teaching. And that expectation leaves our faith shipwrecked. Another one, another expectation that I see is the expectation that God's going to make sense. The expectation that we'll be able to understand the almighty, infinite creator God. That if I just read enough books, if I can just systematize it enough, if I can just ask the right questions, if I can just seek out the right answers, then one day everything will tie up in this nice, neat little bow when theologically and experientially and philosophically I'll be able to understand God in a way that is satisfactory to me. When Romans 11 says His ways are higher than our ways. When Psalms says that His ways are unsearchable and unknowable and inscrutable. How can we expect to know an infinite creator God who knows good and well what the smallest thing is because He created it and He knows how big the universe is and how it hangs in place because he created it. How can we think that that massive God can be tucked into a little, tight, neat box so that my human understanding can grasp it and explain it to others all the time? It's unreasonable. And then sometimes when we can't make sense of some of the things that God says or does because we can't fit it into our human box of understanding, we walk away from him because of this false expectation that we should be able to understand him all the time. When the Bible doesn't advocate that, it doesn't tell us that we can. We can understand bits and pieces. We can know him, but we won't fully know him until we are in eternity. The last expectation that I would point out to you this morning is the false expectation that the morality of God would mirror the morality of our culture. I've been alive for 39 years. And in those 39 years, I've watched the needle on certain topics move. I've watched our culture say that in one decade, this behavior is unacceptable. And in another decade, say no longer is it not unacceptable, but it is embraceable. And if you don't, then you're wrong. I've watched that needle move where this behavior was wrong and now it is right, where this was something that we don't even really speak about because it's uncouth and now we embrace it and we support it. And sometimes those shifts are good. Sometimes they're good and necessary evolutionary shifts in how we understand Scripture and how we understand our culture. But sometimes the morality needle moves in our culture, and we take the Bible and we rush to squeeze it in and say, oh, this certainly is what God would encourage as well. This certainly is what God is teaching as well. We have to have misunderstood the scriptures in the past. They have to mean this now because this is what our culture thinks and dictates, and certainly that makes the most sense. And instead of taking the morality of our culture and viewing it through the lens of eternal and inerrant Scripture. We take Scripture and we view it through the lens of malleable, constantly changing, argumentative cultural morality, and we try to make God's eternal Word fit into that. And when we can't do it, we throw out the Bible and we say, I guess it can't be trusted because it didn't meet our expectation that God's morality would mirror the morality of our culture. Over and over again, you can probably think of more. We have these expectations of God that he never claimed, that he never gave us, that he never affirmed. And yet because God isn't meeting those expectations, we can't hear him. We have our AirPods in and we can't hear anything except for what we want to hear. And the whole time, God has been speaking to us. God has been calling out to us. God has been making himself evident to us. God has been offering us gentle, unobtrusive guidance through his scriptures and to the people in our life who love him and love us. But we have a hard time hearing him because our deafening expectations are drowning his voice out. And so it makes me want to leave you with this question to think about as you go throughout your week, hopefully to talk about in our small groups if we've developed enough trust to be this vulnerable with one another. Certainly you can see ways that your expectations have potentially damaged your ability to hear God. I know that I have mine. I would even venture to say what I've found in my own life is when God doesn't make sense or when I'm having a hard time with faith or when I don't feel like I'm in sync with him, normally it's a time when I need to sit down and say, God, what am I expecting you to do that isn't a fair expectation of you? And I'll realize it's my own bad thinking and poor beliefs about God that are keeping me from walking in faith with him. It's not his voice. It's not his teaching. It's not what he's doing. So as we wrap up, I would ask you to consider this. What expectations do we need to remove from our ears so that we can hear what God has been saying to us all along? What things have we been clinging to? What beliefs do we have that, like the religious community and the life of Christ, are playing in our ears so loudly that we can't see Jesus when he's standing right in front of us? What expectations do we need to remove so that we can finally hear the voice of God with crystal clarity? I hope you'll do that this week. I hope we'll walk with a more clear understanding of who God is and what he wants for us. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We know you are good. We know you love us. We know you are consistent and you are immutable and you are unchangeable and you are steadfast. We know that you are faithful when we are faithless. God, help us grope our way to faith. Help us see the things in our life, the expectations that we've placed on you that you didn't place on yourself. Help us to humbly admit those and remove them from the equation so that we might finally hear you with clarity. Help me hear you with clarity as you root out the expectations and the untrue beliefs that I have of you in my own life and in my own heart, Father. Be with us in our families and in our friends and in our peer groups even this week. Help us see with clarity who you are and what you never claim to be. And help us walk with a more crystal clear faith, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be together in this way on Sunday morning again. A few years ago, it dawned on me that Staples was a double entendre. The name for the store, Staples, had a deeper meaning. I never had pieced it together. I just assumed that maybe Staples started out selling actual like metal staples and then things were going well for them. So they expanded into like paper and pens and other office supplies and then desks. And now here we go. We got a whole big box store. But it dawned on me, oh my gosh, driving around, I don't know how I figured it out or why, like it's some great mystery, that it means that they sell staples, like things that offices need. And I thought, man, isn't that clever? It was this really obvious thing that had been sitting under my nose for years. The other one that I noticed was the arrow in FedEx, where the E goes into the X, it makes an arrow. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. If you've never seen it before, you should look at it. It's pretty amazing. The other example of this that I could think of was Sarah Lee, the baked goods company. Growing up, they had a jingle, nobody does it like Sarah Lee. And I, for years, thought that the jingle was, nobody does it like Sarah Lee. But I learned that the actual sentence, and some of y'all know this, some of y'all are already grinning at home and elbowing your spouses and your children because you're proud and you know, and some of you are faking it. But the actual logo, the actual jingle is, nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee, which is absurd. Nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee is better, but it's really nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee. You can Google it. That's true. And so one of these things I love in life is those obvious things, those little truths that if you're observant, you'll pick up on that have just been sitting there for years under our nose that maybe we've never noticed. I'm sure you guys and your family, maybe after the sermon, you can think of a couple other examples of that. But I think that there's an example of that in Scripture. This morning we arrive at one of the most famous parables, one of the most poignant and meaningful parables to me, the parable of the prodigal son. And I think most of us know this parable. Most of us could tell it. Most of us know the main point of this parable. But I think tucked into this parable is another lesson, another thing that once we see it, we'll think of this parable in a completely different way. It's something that I encountered a few years ago from a pastor and an author named Tim Keller, the way that he viewed the story, and it changed the way that I viewed it as well. And hopefully we can do that for you this morning. I think what we'll see coming out of the parable of the prodigal son is two profound questions that hopefully we'll all wrestle with this week, maybe with ourselves or our friends or our family or hopefully in our small groups. I hope that you guys are doing Zoom calls with your small group. I hope that we're participating and staying connected the best we can, and I hope that you'll enjoy talking about this parable this week. But the parable of the prodigal son comes at the end of Luke chapter 15. At the beginning of Luke chapter 15, the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of eating and carousing and hanging out with sinners, with people that he shouldn't be spending his time with as a presumed holy man. And so Jesus tells three parables all about the father's love and concern for the lost, all about him going after the person or the thing that doesn't know him or isn't with him. And the parable of the prodigal son is kind of the capstone on this. And so he tells the story of a man who had great wealth and he had two sons. And the younger son goes to the father and asks for his inheritance early. He goes to the father in this story and he says, hey, listen, I know that I'm supposed to wait for you to die. I don't want to do that. I just want my stuff now. And essentially what he's saying here, the subtext of this is, I would rather just have your stuff right now than I would want to spend more time with you. I don't want to live out my years here on this home here in our property or in our complex or whatever it was at the time. I would much, much rather just have your stuff and be able to go do what I want. So the father responds with remarkable grace because the question that the son has asked is really genuinely disrespectful. He says, I'd rather you just be dead. I'd rather you just die. I don't even want to have to live out the next several years. Just give me my stuff so that I can go enjoy my life right now. And if I were the father, I would respond to that request by essentially saying, first of all, no. Second, you're not getting anything. Forget it. If I'm going to give you anything, it's going to be a significantly reduced portion. Your slice of the pizza just got real thin. It's the last slice that nobody wants. That's yours. But the father responds with this remarkable goodness and grace. And he says, okay. He says, fine, if that's what you want. If you want all my stuff now, you can have it. So he divides everything in half and he sells off some property and he gives the inheritance to his son. And his son does what we would expect him to do. This is what he does. You can find it in chapter 15, verse 13. I hope that you have your Bible there at home. I hope that you guys as maybe families or individuals are going through the text with me as I kind of summarize the story. But in verse 13, we learn what the son did with the money. It says, So he goes to the father and he says, I don't really want you. I want your stuff. Can you just give it to me right now? And the father, in remarkable goodness and grace, everything that he worked hard for, everything that he had accumulated that he wanted to leave a legacy for his son, he takes all of that and he goes off to a far country and he squanders it on reckless living. And that's a really nice biblical way to say that he partied. That's what he did. Later we find out that he spent some of that money on prostitutes. No doubt he spent it on alcohol and whatever kind of drugs he could get his hands on at the time. He just went out and he did whatever he wanted. And he got people around him that wanted him for his stuff and for not himself the same way he revered the Father. And he ran out of money. He didn't invest it. He didn't like go to the city and get a job and try to set up a 401k for himself. He ran out and he spent it on whatever he won. He was led by his appetites. And eventually, he ran out of money. And right at the time that he runs out of money, Jesus says in the parable that a great famine came across the land. So it was a hard time. It was a lot like now. Unemployment was high. People are wondering about where they're going to get their next paycheck, and they didn't have a government stimulus check that was going to be coming in, and their businesses couldn't apply for a 250% of payroll loan. Like, that wasn't going on. So he had to get things figured out, and this young boy, this young man ends up living on a pig farm. He convinces a farmer to hire him to watch after pigs. And apparently he lived out in the field, in the barn, with the pigs. That's where he was allowed to sleep. And it says that he was so hungry and so destitute and had so little that he was looking at the pods that were being fed to the pigs with jealousy. And I don't mean to belabor this point too much, but what would have to happen in your life to be with a group of pigs and watch the slop come down the trough and think, gosh, if I could just get my hands on that? Seriously. What kind of place of destitution would you need to be at to not just want it, to not be willing to eat it, but to be jealous of the fact that they had it? That's where he was. And then in verse 17, we see this really human insight into this young man. And I really, I love this sentence and I love this verse a lot. I think it's a turning came to his senses, when he had time to think, when he finally realized what was going on. His life had been a blur. He took his father. He probably thought for months or years about how he just wanted his father's money. He didn't like his miserable life on his father's property. Just give me your money so I can leave and go enjoy myself and spread my wings and flex my freedom muscles. And so that's what he did. He took the money and he went and did that. And he was focused on having a good time and enjoying himself and doing whatever it was that he wanted. And then from that, he ran out of money, and now he's scrambling, trying to figure out a way. How am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to put a roof over my head? What am I going to do next? And his days are just consumed with that. But eventually, life slows down enough, and he looks at his surroundings, and he's like, I'm jealous of what the pigs are eating. At least my father's servants have bread. My dad pays his employees better than this guy pays me. And in that thought process, he came to himself. He realized what he was doing and what his life was becoming. He woke up. And you know, this isn't the point of this sermon, but I do want to stop here and make this simple point that one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot for the past couple of years, and I was just talking with staff the other day, I want to see if I can think through a way to do an entire series on this topic, but one of the sneakiest tricks of the enemy, I think, is to simply distract us. I think we are the most distracted group of people that have ever lived in human history. I think the option to pull out a phone and have the whole world and a screen in our hand means that we never have the blessing of boredom. We rarely have the blessing of idle thought. We get in the car, we turn on a podcast, or we turn on music, and we have a conversation. We sit at a light, we pull it out. We sit at home, we turn on the TV, we get in the shower, we turn on music. I think we are so distracted and distractible that sometimes we don't have the chance to come to ourselves because we don't have any quiet. We don't make any space in our life for the Lord to speak into because we no longer have the blessing of boredom. And it got me to thinking that maybe one of the hidden blessings of isolation will be the chance to come to ourselves. Maybe one of the hidden blessings of this time of isolation and quarantine when we don't have much to do. I was just talking to Steve before we filmed this, and he said, man, it was so weird for me to get up and leave this morning. I said, yeah, really? He goes, yeah, I mean, I leave once a week. We're all in our houses. And so maybe one of the hidden blessings of this time is just the opportunity to slow down, to reflect, to really think through. Is what's happening with my life what I want to happen? Is what's happening with my life honoring to God? Is this my goal? Is this what I want? Or do I need to come to myself? Do I need to wake up? Do I need to finally listen to God and say, maybe the reason I'm unhappy is because I'm not organizing my life according to his principles. I wonder if some of us need to have this moment where we come to ourselves like the prodigal son did, and maybe that moment can be one of the hidden blessings of this time of isolation. But in this moment, the son also does a very human thing, and I really do love this part. He develops a speech, right? He says he's going to go back to his dad, and he's going to say to him, listen, I've squandered away my opportunity to be your son. I don't deserve to be your son anymore. Will you just hire me? I'll work hard for you. You don't have to make me a manager. I'll be bottom rung. I just need bread and a roof. I don't even have that. I just need that. And so he's got his concession speech planned, which is a very human thing. This is what we do, right? You tick off your spouse. You do something that you know your husband or your wife is going to be mad about. What do you do? You rehearse the speech in your head. You figure out what are we going to say. This is what we did when we were little kids. When we got in trouble, something happened at school and we were going to have to go home and explain to mom and dad what we did. What did you do? You rehearsed your speech, right? You got it right. I don't deserve this. I'm really sorry that I did this. If you'll please just forgive me. That's a very human exercise. And so that's what the son does. He rehearses his speech. He gets ready to go home and apologize. And he hits the road to go back home and to grovel. And Scripture says that the father saw him coming while he was a far way off, and that the father ran to meet him. And that's an important detail because men in that day and age did not run. There was no joggers. People didn't get on all the gear and then go running through their neighborhood. You did not see distinguished older men running for the same reason that you won't see me dancing, okay? It's undignified. I'm not good at it. I don't want you to see me do it. It's embarrassing. That's the general sense that men would have when they would run once they were older and they no longer needed to go to battle or things like that. It was undignified to be in a hurry in that way. But the father didn't care. He saw his son and he wanted to go greet him. And he gets out to his son and the son starts into his speech. He starts into his prepared speech. And I would expect, I would expect the father to listen to the speech. I would expect the father to sit there arms folded. Yeah, you better have a good explanation. Yeah, you're right that you don't deserve to be my son anymore. I don't know. I'm going to have to consider whether or not I'll hire you as a servant. I'm going to have to consider whether or not, let me talk to my guys and see if any of them wants to be your boss. I got to think about this. Let me talk to your brother and see if he wants to welcome you back into the fold. That's what we would expect from the father. That's what he had every right to do. But that's not what he did. In the text, we see that the father stops the son. He's not interested in listening to his concession speech. He's not interested in, I'm sorry. He doesn't even make the son utter it. As soon as he sees him, he runs to him. He throws his arms around him and embraces him. He brings him back to the house and he gives the servants the orders, kill the fattened calf, the one that we've been saving for the big party and a big feast, go do it. The nice expensive bottle of wine that we got in Italy 20 years ago, go uncork it. This is the thing that we've been waiting on. And then he comes out and he tells his servants, give him my robe and give him some shoes. And those are symbols of being restored back into the family, being received back into the family. No, you're not going to be my servant. I'm not going to make you work for one of my guys. You are my son, and here is your robe. And then he takes his ring, and he puts it on the finger of the son, and that's a symbol of the authority of the family. So what we see in that reception, and the father running and flinging his arms around him, and clothing him, and putting his ring on his finger, and throwing him a party, what we see is something remarkable from the father, that the father doesn't just receive the son, he restores him. He doesn't just wait with open arms and receive him and hug him and say, yeah, you're right. You messed up, but I love you. You're my son. You're always going to be my son. Now, there's going to be a probationary period. You can't get an inheritance anymore. I'm not going to spend any more money on you. All that's your brother's. You don't deserve that. He doesn't do any of that. He not only receives him, he restores him to the full rights and privileges owed to his son. And the father's mind deserved by his son. And one of the themes through this story that blows me away every time I settle in and look at it is the remarkable grace and goodness of the father. His son asks him for his inheritance early. He spits in his face and says, I want your stuff more than I want you. And the father should have responded, get away from me, you don't get any inheritance. But instead he says, okay, if that's what you want. He wastes his money and the father knew that this would happen. And he comes back humble, hat in hand, broken, apologetic. And the father brushes that aside. He excused the apology. He embraces his son. He receives him and he restores him back to his full rights and privileges of being his son. Grace that he did not deserve. And I'm blown away by the remarkable goodness and grace of the father in this story. And I think maybe one of the most important things we could take out of it for ourselves is that our heavenly father offers us the same remarkable grace and goodness. Your father in heaven who created you and loves you offers you the same grace and goodness that he offers the prodigal son. He offers you the same reception and the same restoration that he offers the son that left him. He treats you with that same amount of grace. Let it sink in this morning how gently the Father loves and corrects you. Let it sink in this morning the kindness that he shows you when he doesn't need to. The concessions that he makes for us when he doesn't have to. The goodness that he offers us when we reject him. The same father that loves his son in this story loves you and offers you that same grace. And you know, often when we think of the prodigal son, the son that left and invested his life in wild living, those of us who grew up in church, we think of the people who maybe came up and didn't come up in church or maybe ran away from church and did whatever they wanted to. And they lived recklessly. They partied. They lived in ways that maybe church people wouldn't live. And then they come back and the Father restores them. And we think that this is great. And we think that that's who the prodigal son is, is people who literally go away and live recklessly and then at some point or another come back to the Father or come to the Father for the first time. And sometimes that is the prodigal son, and those stories are amazing. But you know, I am convinced that the longer you're a Christian, the more you can relate to the prodigal son. The longer you're a believer, the more seasons you have in your life where you may not wander away to a foreign country and live outwardly recklessly. It may not be noticeable that you've run away from God. It may not be apparent to everyone else that you're wandering from the Father. But you know that maybe in your mind or your heart or your spirit, you're thousands of miles away. Sure, we're coming to church every week. We're logging in. We're online. We're chatting. We're doing all the stuff. We're doing the Zoom calls, and we go to the small group, and we do our part. But even amidst all that, in our hearts and in our minds and in our spirits, we can have wandered thousands of miles away. And maybe this morning, we need to come to ourselves and rush back to the Father that's waiting on us with open arms and know that he offers us the same goodness and restorative grace now that he offered then. And that's the main point of the story. That's the main takeaway that we should get. But there's one more thing that we need to be aware of because the story doesn't stop there. It doesn't stop at the restoration of the leaving son. What follows is this incredible conversation that the father has with the staying son. The staying son is out in the field. He's working. He's being responsible. He's not living recklessly. He's not squandering the father's money. He's out in the field doing the right thing, doing what he's supposed to do. And then he gets word that there's a party. And he finds out that the party is because his derelict younger brother has come back and dad's gone nuts. And he's thrown a huge party. And so the older brother is ticked and he goes and he pouts on the stairs. He sits on his front porch and he pouts. And I gotta be honest with you, a lot of people I know, including myself, empathize with the staying son. Empathize and identify if you had to pick which one you identified most with in the story, the prodigal son who went out and lived recklessly or the staying son who stayed put and made responsible choices and did what was expected of him. A lot of us at Grace are the staying son. Our whole life we've tried to do the right thing. We've not gone out and squandered. We've not gone out and lived recklessly. We've always tried to make wise choices. And so when we see the staying son upset, we identify with him. I know I have one good friend who has flat told me she doesn't like this parable because she feels like the staying son and he gets in trouble too and it doesn't make sense to her. Or at least he didn't used to. And so the dad comes to the son. He leaves the party and he comes, he sits down with his older son who stayed. He says, son, why are you upset? And the son's response is, dad, why are you doing that for your derelict son? Why are you doing that for the one who betrayed you and left you and squandered your wealth? Why didn't you do that for me? I've been here all these years. I've made the right decisions. I've been with you all these years, and you've never thrown a party like this for me and my friends. It's not fair, Dad. And again, I empathize with that. I think he brings up some good points. But the father's response is remarkable, And it reveals something that I think is really profound. Look at what the father says. I'm in verse 31. And he said to him, actually, I'm going to start in verse 30. This is what the son is saying, but when this son of yours came who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him. Dad, you threw him a party. That's not fair. And the father's response is, and he said to him, son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours. That response is incredibly revelatory. He says, son, son, son, son, you're missing the point. You're missing the point. The point isn't the parties that I could throw you. The point isn't the inheritance that you're going to get one day. The point isn't trying to get my stuff. The point is me. You've always had me. You've always been with me. You've always been in my presence. And the prize here, son, isn't the parties that I could throw you or the things that I could give you. The prize is being with me. And what we realize in that response is that the sins of the leaving son and the sins of the staying son are the same. The sins of the sons are the same. They wanted the father's stuff more than they wanted the father. Don't you see? They had different ways of going about it. The leaving son, at least I'll give him the credit of being more honest about it. He said, dad, I'm not really interested in you. I just kind of want your stuff. If you'll go ahead and give it to me, I can go spread my freedom wings. But what's revealed in the pouting of the staying son that was responsible and made good choices is that he wanted the same thing. He just chose a different path to the father's stuff and to the father's blessings. That's what he says. Dad, I want the party too. I want the things too. I want all the things that he's experienced, but I've gone about it in a better way. And the father says, son, that's not the point. The point is that you have me. And so ringing through the centuries as Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, and we read it generation after generation, is the father's desire for us to want to be with him, for us to want the father, for us to want to be with God more than we want his blessings. This is what true love is anyways. I mean, when I'm at home with Lily, on a Saturday when Jen maybe will leave and go do things that she deserves to do because she's been in the house all week, she'll leave and she'll be gone. And so I'll take an extended dad responsibility day on Saturday and just kind of watch Lily all day, which is not babysitting because she's my kid. So I get that day to spend with Lily. And then in the evening, maybe Jen walks back in and I'll say, I'm so happy to see you. I'm so glad that you're here. She will rightly ask me, are you happy to see me or are you happy to have help? Right? What does she want to know? Am I happy because now she's going to relieve me of my duties because of the things that she can do for me? Or am I happy because I've just missed my wife? Because what does my wife want from me? She wants me to miss her presence. She wants me to value time with her. This is how our relationships work. In every relationship we have, we want people to want to be with us for us, not for what we offer them. And God is no different. The ringing lesson from the story of the prodigal son is not just that God receives us and restores us when we wander off, but that his heart's desire is that he would be our heart's desire. So in this story, I think we are left with two profound questions. The first comes from earlier in the story, the experience of the leaving son. And it's a question that I asked earlier in the sermon I want to stop and highlight now. Is it time for you to come to yourself? As we reflect on the sermon and what we've learned and what we should think and take into the week with us, one of the big questions I want us to be asking ourselves is, is it time for me to come to my senses? In this time of isolation and quarantine and slowing down where I have now the blessing of boredom, should I put down the devices and sit in a quiet room and think for a minute? And ask, do I need to come to myself? Are there things that I need to realize? What is God trying to say to me? I wonder if we could do that. I wonder if we would be brave enough to ask ourselves this question this week. The second question, and this is a tough one, is do we want God or his stuff? If you identify with the staying son, the one who's kind of done the right things and made the right choices, if you identify with the prodigal son and you're just kind of looking at everything and you go, listen, I just want the blessings, I don't want the life. We should ask ourselves, have I made these choices because I'm interested in God and his presence and in his goodness or am I interested in what he can do for me? That's a tough question to answer. Ever since encountering this years ago, I ask myself that question throughout the year. Every time I pray virtually, this question rattles around in the back of my mind. Am I pursuing God because I want his blessings or because I want him? Am I excited to get to heaven because of all the stuff that he's going to give me when I get there or because I'll be in the very presence of my Savior? I don't know. I hope that more and more each year I'm less interested in the blessings that God offers me and more interested in the presence that he offers me. I hope that more and more each year I'm drawn closer to God because the Father's response in the story is, you've always, everything I have is yours. These are all your blessings anyways. Of course there are things that come along with being with me. It's everything that I can possibly offer you, but I am the prize. Sometimes I wonder in my life, am I making God the prize or his things and his blessings the prize? So I'd like to invite you into that thought process as well. And this week with our friends, maybe even with our families as this wraps up, hopefully in our small groups this week we'll talk about these questions. Do I need to come to myself? Am I more interested in God or am I more interested in what God can do for me? I hope that you'll wrestle with those questions and I hope that this parable of the prodigal son will serve to bring us all closer to God as is always our prayer at Grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this story. Thank you for all the truths that are nestled within it. God, I pray that you would help us to see it with fresh eyes. I pray that you would help us to suss out in our lives where we are pursuing the things that you do for us and not you. God, if we are prodigal this morning, if we are wandering away, maybe not physically, but if our minds or our hearts or our spirits have wandered away from you, would you help us come to ourselves? Would you give us the gift of quiet and of peace and of thought and help us come to ourselves and make that crucial, pivotal decision to come back to you? For those that need it this week, God, help us come to ourselves. Father, for others who need to assess this, help us, give us a heart for you. Let us pursue you, not the things that you do for us, but just your presence, God. Give us a pure heart and desire for you. It's in your son's name we ask for these things. Amen.

Hey, Grace. Shocked? I bet you are. I'm sure you were expecting Nate, but instead it's me, Easter Kyle. Why am I here? I'm here to tell you that I am downright bummed. Why are you bummed, you ask? I'm bummed because I'm not going to be able to see my entire church family on Easter next week. Now, sure, I'm upset because I'd love to be able to shake hands and give hugs and just see everyone, but I'm mostly upset because I wanted to see those Easter threads. Personally, I just got this suit for our Easter service. Now, I bought it, and I was like, well, if we're not going to meet together, we've got to make a video because people need to see this. Now, not only do I have my Easter clothes, but I know that you do too. I know you guys prep months in advance for what you're going to wear. And so we don't want that to go to waste. And so what we have decided to do is next week, we would love for you as you wake up, to wake up a little bit earlier for our 10 o'clock service, get dressed in your Sunday and your Easter best. I want to see dads wearing pastels. I want to see daughters wearing their dresses. I want to see everyone looking fresh to death. Now, once you've done that, I want to be able to see it. So we need you to throw it on Instagram, throw it on Facebook, and tag Grace Raleigh. I can't wait to see everyone looking their Sunday best. Good morning, Grace. Thanks, Kyle, for that announcement. I do hope that next week you'll get up, put on your Easter best, and share that with all of us so that we can see it. I think that'll be a fun way to make the best of spending Easter together. I'm so glad to have this time with you on Sunday mornings. If you're watching this on delay, again, I understand schedules get crazy, but my hope is that we're all watching this together on Sundays at 10 o'clock so that we can experience being together. Hopefully you are in the lobby on the YouTube website talking with people, saying hello, and engaging with some of the folks from the church. If you're watching for the first time or for the first couple of times, thanks for being here. We're so glad that you are. We are in the middle of a series called Storyteller, looking at Jesus and the stories that he told called parables. You'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story that's used to make a moral point, and Jesus was the master storyteller. He was the master storyteller and used these to make these incredible points. And this week, we arrive at what I believe is the most famous of all the parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan. And you know, a few years ago, I was reading a book, and I did some research this week to try to figure out what the book was and to get the quote exactly right. But after about 10 minutes of some really intense Googling, I just decided to give up because I remember the main idea that I took away from this book. And one of the things that the author said was, you know, in life, to go from competency to mastery, you have to learn to find joy in the nuances of a particular subject or a particular topic. And I thought that that was a really interesting point that we can kind of get to this place of competency relatively quickly by learning some of the basics around whatever discipline or topic that we're pursuing. But if we want to master it, we've got to learn to find joy in the nuances and the little things. And I think the same is true of Scripture. I think if we want to be masters of God's Word, if we want to understand it well, if we want to be able to explain it to people and really take hold of it, then we've got to learn to find joy in the nuances of Scripture. So even though this is a well-worn parable, most of you probably know it. Most of you at home, if you pause this right now, you could probably tell it to the other people in the room. Even if you're watching this and you're not necessarily a church person, you didn't grow up in church going to Sunday school where they taught you these stories, you probably still at least have heard of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And we think that we know the point of the story. The point of the story is that everyone is our neighbor, and that's one of the points of the story, and that's a great point. But I think if we sink into the nuances of this parable, what we'll find is that there is a greater point waiting on us. This parable is found in Luke chapter 10. It begins in verse 25. So if you have a Bible there with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn, open that Bible to Luke chapter 10, and you can follow along with me as I tell you this story. So Jesus is teaching, and it says that a young lawyer asked him a question. So we need to understand right away that a young lawyer is not necessarily how we would think of a lawyer, someone who's gone to law school. A young lawyer in that context, in that culture, really had been going to seminary because the law was based on God's word, on what we call the Old Testament, what they call the Tanakh. The law was based on the law of God. So a young lawyer was really kind of a young theologian. And he's presumably talking with some friends, having one of those debates that you normally have. I went to Bible college, and there was all these different debates. In your college, whether it was Bible college or a liberal arts school, you engaged in debates about philosophy and about politics and about life in general, and you solved the problems of the world. It's one of the great things about being that age is the different conversations and ideas that you exercise. He's probably doing this with his buddies, and he sees Jesus, this well-known teacher, this rabbi, and he asks him a question. And so he said, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? That's his question to Jesus. What do I have to do to inherit eternal life? Another way of thinking about that is, what does God want from me? What does our Creator God expect from us? What does He want me to do? When Jesus responds like a rabbi does, He responds in the form of a question. And rabbis often did this. They didn't just come out and say the thing. They didn't just come out and make the point. They asked questions. They wanted to lead people to their own truths. And so rather than just coming out and answering him, he says, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, what do you think? What does the law say? How do you read it? Which is a way of saying like, you're a student. You've studied this. You ought to know the answer to this question. What do you think it is? And the lawyer refers back to a well-worn passage in Deuteronomy, Shema Israel, and something that they repeated before every time they had synagogue or temple. And he repeats that and he says that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Amen. And Jesus says, that's right. And he says, and you should love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have read it correctly. And we know that in other places in scripture, Jesus says these two things, love God and love others, sums up the whole Bible, the whole law and the prophets. And so, so far, this young lawyer is tracking right with Jesus. He's doing really good. But then he says, the Bible says, in order to justify himself, he asked. So the lawyer is having this conversation with his buddies. He's talking to his friends. He's debating over here. He's making a point. He's asserting something about who his neighbor is. And then Jesus is there. And so to kind of show off in front of his buddies, get Jesus to justify his answer in front of his friends, we presume, he says, yes, and who is my neighbor? Apparently that was the discussion or the debate of the time. There's a little bit of uncertainty. Is it just Israelites, the people of Israel? Is it the friends of Israel? Is it the people in my immediate neighborhood? Is it the whole nation? Is it the surrounding nations? Is it even people that I don't like? There was some debate about that question. And so this young lawyer invites Jesus into that debate with his friends to justify himself. And Jesus, rather than just answering his question, begins to tell a story. He says, and who is my neighbor? And Jesus replies in verse 30, he says, a man was going down to Jericho. He starts in on the story. And it's at this point where I can almost feel the countenance of the lawyer shifting. He's bold enough to ask Jesus the question. Jesus asks him a return question. He nails it. He gets it right. Love God, love my neighbor. And Jesus says, that's correct. And he's like, you see, I told you I'm right so far. He's feeling pretty good. And he says, and who is my neighbor? And Jesus says, there was a man on his way down to Jericho. And you can almost see the lawyer going, oh no, what have I gotten myself into? I can see the disciples over to the side. I can see James elbowing Peter. Peter, Peter, shut up, man. Listen, this guy's stepping into it. As Jesus starts into his story, that's when everyone begins to lean in and go, oh gosh, what's the point that he's making? And so Jesus says there was a man on his way down to Jericho. This is a well-worn road. It was very traveled. Jerusalem is in the mountains and Jericho is on the coast of the Dead Sea. And so people would often walk down to Jericho. And so that's where this man was. And he was attacked by robbers. There were some robbers hiding out in the nooks and crannies of the road because it goes through valleys. Incidentally, the road to Jericho goes through the valley of the shadow of death that David refers to in Psalm 23. That's a freebie. I'm just giving these things out. So he's walking down this road, and he's jumped on by the bandits, and he's attacked. He's robbed, they strip him of all of his things and they leave him on the road half dead and dying. And Jesus says, after that happens, a priest comes walking by. And they would expect, like we would expect, a priest to know what to do. A priest is going to do the right thing. A priest is going to care for this man, but he says the priest just walks on by him. Then Jesus says a little while later, a Levite walks by. And we would again expect, or that audience would expect, a Levite to know the right thing to do. And to help us understand what a Levite was and why they would have this expectation, To be a Levite was to be a part of a tribe of the 12 tribes of Israel. The 12th tribe was the tribe of Levites, and they were the priestly tribe. To be a priest, you had to be a Levite, but not all Levites were priests. Some were assigned duties in the temple. So the easiest way to think about it for us, because this is a priest who had leadership in the temple or in the church, and then a Levite who had duties and other leadership in the church, the easy way to think about that for us would be a pastor and an elder walked by. And so in our context, we would expect, like they would expect, that a priest and a Levite or a pastor and an elder would know the right thing to do, would do the loving thing. But in both cases, the priest and the Levite walked by the man and left him to die. And for years and years, I thought that they did this because they were jerks. I thought they did this because they were hypocrites, because they got up on Sunday and they said the stuff they were supposed to say, and they shook the hands they were supposed to shake, and they hugged the people they were supposed to hug, but then during the week they didn't really practice what they were preaching. I thought maybe they thought they were too important or too good, or that his case was hopeless, and so they just walked on by. And my whole life, I've judged the priest and the Levite for being terrible examples of love. But someone pointed out for me a couple of years ago a tension that was going on there that I didn't notice when I was a kid and encountered this story for the first time. You know, the man on the road was dying. He was essentially dead. And the priest and the Levite are not allowed to touch dying things. They're not allowed to touch something that's dead or dying. If they did that, they would become unclean. It's a violation of the law that they uphold to reach down and to help this man. Because they can't do it without touching him and without getting messy. They can't do it without getting unclean. So it's entirely possible, it's entirely possible that they saw this man, they wanted to help him, they felt genuine empathy and sorrow for him, but knew, I can't do this. I will become unclean. I am a priest. I am a Levite. I have duties in the temple and I need to be able to perform those, so I can't help this man, and they walk on by. Then Jesus introduces a Samaritan into the story. And you've probably heard that there was tension between the Hebrew people and between the Samaritan people. And maybe you don't know why that tension existed. Maybe you could perfectly articulate it, but for those who can't, this is why there's tension between Jews and Samaritans. The Jews were God's chosen people. They were descendants. The Hebrew people were descendants from Abraham. And throughout their history, by edict of God, they had taken great pains to maintain the ethnic purity of the line of Abraham. They were forbidden to marry people from other nations. They had to protect and maintain this line. And the Samaritans were a race of people from folks who had intermarried with other countries and other nations and other ethnicities. And so they had lost the purity of the race of the Hebrew people. And because of that, they were ostracized and forced to live in their own cities and their own towns. And so there was racial tension between the Jews and the Samaritans because the Samaritans weren't pure like they were. The other thing that deeply offended the Jews about the Samaritan way of life is the Samaritans claimed to worship the same God. They claimed the same lineage. They claimed that they were just as good with God as the Hebrew people were and that their forefathers went back to Abraham as well, just like the Jewish people did, and that they worshiped the same God and that they executed the same religion. But their religion actually gets traced back to a split in the kingdom between Jeroboam and Rehoboam when Jeroboam instituted his own religion to make money and keep the tax dollars there. It was this political maneuver that he made, and the Samaritans are the descendant of that fabricated religion that is kind of part of the Jewish faith, but not the entire Jewish faith. If we wanted to understand it in our context, it would be this religious division that we see between Christians and maybe Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses claim to worship the same God that we as believers do, but they believe different things about Jesus than what we do. And so while the claim is that everything is the same, what we as Christians believe is there are nuances there that actually make those very different. And so there is ethnic tension between the Jews and the Samaritans, and there's religious tension between the Jews and the Samaritans. And they didn't live in the 21st century with political correctness where we sweep over all of those things and be nice to everybody anyways. They lived in an era where hate was perfectly fine, and so they hated each other. Jews despised the Samaritans. They wouldn't even walk through their towns. They would inconvenience themselves and walk around them. And the Samaritans likewise were justified in despising Jews. They were justified in disdaining them, in there being tension between those two groups of people. And so when Jesus introduces the Samaritan man into the story, he's doing it on purpose. He's making a radical statement. And this is where everyone can feel the story begin to turn and the lawyer has to be going, oh no, what am I going to do? He's going to make me look like an idiot. And this Samaritan has every reason to leave this man dying on the road because this man is likely a Jew and he has every excuse to not help him. But look at what he does. We pick this up in verse 33. It says, but a Samaritan as he journeyed came to where he was, the man who was injured and dying. And when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and he bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper saying, take care of him and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back. Look at the remarkable love of the Samaritan. He doesn't just kneel down and give him some water. He doesn't just kneel down and bind up his wounds and give him oil and wine. And if he's making a journey, he likely needed that oil and wine for himself. He didn't make provisions to help someone convalesce, to heal someone, and to patch someone up. He didn't make provisions for those things as he went on his journey. He needed that. And it would have been enough if he knelt down and gave up his oil and his wine and bound up this man's wounds, touched him, becoming unclean, and the Samaritan understands the same rules that the priest and the Levite do. He just decides that this is more important than remaining ceremonially clean, spiritually clean. And so he kneels down and he touches him and he binds him up. And that would have been enough. That would have been love, but he doesn't stop there. He picks the man up and he lays the man on his animal. Presumably, he gave up his seat and now he has to walk the rest of the journey while this man rides on his animal. And he takes him to an inn. And it would have been enough to take him to an inn to drop him off and go, hey, this guy's dying. I need a room. And just leave him there and let it be the innkeeper's issue. But he brings the man to his room and cares for him overnight. He has a sleepless night to care for this man. And I don't know about you guys, but I have a four-year-old in the house. So every now and again, we have sleepless nights, and I would not choose them. I like to sleep. This man gave up a night of sleep to care for this man who was dying, and that would have been enough. But then he leaves some money with the innkeeper. He says, I have a thing to do. Here's two denarii. Here's 200 bucks. Take care of him. I'm going to come back through town. When I come back through town, you spend whatever you have to to help him get right. And when I come back through town, I'll pay you back for whatever you have to spend. Remarkable love by the Samaritan. And Jesus finishes his story and he looks at the young lawyer and he says, now you tell me, which of these three love their neighbor? And the young lawyer can't even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He simply says, the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus' response is remarkable. He says, yeah, now you go and do likewise. You go and love like the Samaritan did. Often we make the point of this parable that our neighbor is everyone, even somebody that we should justifiably dislike or have disdain for, even people who are mean to us, even people who are different than us, even people who are different ethnicities or backgrounds or heritages than us. We should love everyone, and we kind of make that the point of this story. But I don't think that Jesus makes that the point of the story. I think when we sink into the nuances of the story, what we see is that there's a lot more going on there and that the way Jesus ends it, the point that he's making to the lawyer is not trying to define the neighbor, it's trying to define love. And the way that Jesus defines love is very simple. I'm stealing this from a speaker and an author named Bob Goff who has a book by this title, and I think it is the point of this parable. And I think the point that Jesus is trying to make is that love does. Love does. Love acts. Love doesn't make excuses. Love doesn't walk past. Love doesn't explain away. Love is not convenient. Love does. Love helps. Love is my father-in-law. He's driving down the road in the middle of winter. He stops at an intersection and there's someone spinning a sign on the side of the road on a particularly cold day. And this person doesn't have a jacket. And a lot of people might just pray, God, help that person feel better. I hope that shift is done soon or give them genuine empathy on their way by. But my father-in-law pulls over his car, gets out, takes his fleece off and hands it to him and says, here, you need this more than I do. That's what love does. Love acts. I think so often we think loving thoughts. We want to do loving things. We have loving ideas, but we don't put them into action. And Jesus' instruction to the young lawyer is not to say, hey, everyone's your neighbor. It's to say, you go and you love like the Samaritan did. And so what we see in this story is that loving our neighbor is easily excused away, but love doesn't make excuses. Loving our neighbor is easily excused away, but love doesn't make excuses. I have a friend whose wife is a nurse. She's been a nurse their whole marriage. They have three boys, one's in sixth grade, and then they go on down. And she only works at the hospital about once every two weeks, whatever the minimum amount of time is to keep up with her licensing and her employment and all those different things. And in the midst of COVID, it came to be her turn to come in and do a shift. And she could have very easily excused away, I've got boys to think about, I've got a family to think about, my mom and dad live in our neighborhood, we see them sometime, I don't want to expose myself and expose them. She could have excused away what she needed to do, but she felt at the end of the day that loving her neighbor was to go in and care for the community that needs care right now more than any other time in our life, was to go in and give a break to the nurses that have been exposing themselves to this danger and to this threat on a daily basis. She could have excused away what love was and stayed home and no one would have blamed her. But love does. Love acts and it doesn't make excuses. We've all done this. We're driving down the side of the road, we're walking on the sidewalk, someone asks us for money and we think, we feel a tinge that we should give them something, we should care for them in some way, but then we excuse it away and we explain it away and we say, well, they're just going to use it to make poor choices. We're on the way home. Somebody's on the side of the road and it looks like maybe they need some help and we think that we could pull over, but then we remember, well, you know, dinner's on the table. The kids are expecting to see me. The family's ready. I don't want to inconvenience them, so I'm going to go on. And the parable of the Good Samaritan reminds us that, yeah, love is easily excused away. We can explain those things away if we want to, but that love doesn't make excuses. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see that love is messy. Loving our neighbor is messy, but love gets messy. Whatever, I don't know what the Samaritan was wearing that day, but they were good. They were probably decent tribal clothes, and what he didn't want on them was dirt and blood and grime. But he knelt down, and he cared for this man that was beaten to within an inch of his life, and he got messy. He lost a night's sleep. He got down into this person's problems with them. And we know that love is messy. When you're sitting in your office and you ask someone who passes by, hey, how you doing? And they come sit down in a chair and they go, well, we kind of internally go, oh, I did not bargain for this. I have a lot of things to do because we know that we're about to get messy. We know that they're about to start telling us some stuff and we're about to get in the middle of this thing. And so often we kind of refrain and we go, I don't want to make their problems my problems. I don't want to get in their business. I don't want to make this messy. I don't want to get involved in that. And so we kind of keep to ourselves. But what loving our neighbor means is acknowledging that loving our neighbor is messy and that love gets messy. This is why I love our Stephen ministers so much. At Grace Raleigh, we have Stephen ministry, and we have different people in the church who are Stephen ministers, and that's what they do. They get messy with people. Stephen ministers are trained to go in during hardships, during difficult diagnoses, or during losses, or in the face of addiction, or in the face of depression, or just times of high anxiety. And they go and they sit with people week after week, hour after hour, and they get in this mess with them, and they trudge through life with them, and they love them back to wholeness. They get messy with them. It may be that you feel that you need a Stephen minister right now. You need someone to talk to. You're anxious, and you need to share that. If you'll go to our website, graceralee.org slash care, you can find everything you need there to raise your hand and go, hey, I need to talk to somebody. Or if you want to love your neighbor by joining the ranks of Stephen ministers, you can sign up there and email our leader, Bill Reith, and get involved in loving your neighbor that way. But this story of the Good Samaritan shows us that loving our neighbor is messy and that love gets messy. Finally, in the story, we see that loving our neighbor is costly, but that love invests. Loving our neighbor takes something from us. It took the Samaritan's oil and wine. He gave him 200 denarii and said, I'm going to come back and pay this man's debt. Sometimes love costs us something. I remember when this lesson smacked me in the face a couple of months ago. We just recently moved, but before that we lived very close to the corner of Falls and Spring Forest. And there's a Harris Teeter Shopping Center in there. And there was somebody opening up a store for pets, I think called Pet Wants or something like that. And there was individuals who had been working in there for several days. It was late at night. It was like nine o'clock at night. And they're still in there trying to get ready. And I always root for locally owned places. I always root for people who have invested all of their savings and their hopes and dreams and opening up this thing. And it really kind of pulled on my heartstrings to see them in there working late and pouring their hopes and dreams into this place and their misguided affection for pets. And so I thought, man, I really want to encourage these people. So on my way into the grocery store, I knocked on the door and they kind of looked at me and I just kind of waved and they opened the door and they said, hey, we're not open yet. And I said, no, no, I know. I just want you guys to know that I'm rooting for you. I hope this goes well. I know that you've poured a lot into this. I've seen you working hard and I'm really rooting for you in this. Just wanted to encourage you. And they said, wow, great, thanks. They said, we're gonna open tomorrow. You can come back. We're giving away free yada, yada, yada. And I said, yeah, okay, great. And I walked away and I thought, I'm not coming back tomorrow. I'm not buying stuff for my dog. That's Jen's department. But I got to feel good because I was a good neighbor and I wished them well. But by the time I got back in my car and drove off, I thought, if you really love them, you'll go in there and you'll buy some dog treats. If you really want to support them, you'll go in there and you'll spend some money. If you really want to show them love, then it's going to cost you something. This is not about your ego boost and feeling good about yourself. This is about actually doing what they need you to do to love on them. And now, in light of the story of the Good Samaritan, I realize that love invests. Love is costly. It takes from us. But Jesus says that if the Samaritan was the one in the story that showed love, that we ought to go and do likewise. So grace, we're called to be good Samaritans. And that doesn't just mean that we're called to love everyone. That means that we're called to a love that acts, to a love that does, to a love that doesn't excuse things away, to a love that gets messy, to a love that invests. And now some of you, you may feel like the person that was left for dead. You may feel like COVID and the economy and the markets have just attacked you and robbed you and left you. You may need some people to love on you right now. And I would say this to you, if you are a part of Grace or you're watching this at all, and you feel like that person who's just been left on the side of the road, you're feeling beat up, if you're facing joblessness, if you are anxious because some of the jobs that you had lined up are getting canceled or are getting deferred and you don't know if you're gonna make up that income, if you're worried about being able to pay your bills, would you please let us know? Would you please tell us? If you're watching this on our website, on the live page, at the bottom, there's a space where you can submit a prayer request. Please tell us. On our website, you can find the email addresses of the staff. Email us. I don't want anybody, listen to me, I don't want anybody in our church hurting, facing job loss, not knowing how they're going to pay their bills, facing this time by themselves. I don't want it to be a secret that you've lost your job and you don't know what you're going to do and you don't know how you're going to care for your family, tell us. Let your church love you. Let us invest in you. Let us wrap our arms around you. I would hate to know that any of you are carrying a private anxiety or a private stress and we aren't able to do anything about it. Please let us love you if you feel like the person who's been beat up and left behind. For the rest of us, what a unique time to love our neighbor. If you have the means and you can, go support, go spend money at local places, go do the curbside pickup things, go get meals that you could just make at your home if you can afford it, if you can support in that way, go and do it. It doesn't seem like this is going away anytime soon, so we've got weeks to think about how we can love our neighbors and what love can do in the midst of this crisis. Let's right now, Grace, in whatever capacity we have, be the good Samaritans that love our neighbors well. And let's remember that love does, it goes, it acts. And let's take action. Let me pray for us. Father, we understand that you have made us conduits of your love, that we are able to love others because you love us, because you invested in us. Your love for us was costly and you paid that cost. Your love for us is messy and you got messy. Your love for us could have been excused away, but you didn't do that. You didn't make excuses. You came down here and you loved us and you continue to love us. And God, give us the power and the faith and the courage and the vision to love people like you love us, to love people like the Samaritan loved that person that day. Give us eyes to see the needs around us. Give us the courage to meet those needs. Let us in this time be defined by being a church that loves well. Be with us throughout our weeks, God. Be with our families. Give us grace and patience with each other. And it's in all these things, in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. Here we are again. I'm so glad to be able to share this with you. Before I jump into the sermon, I just wanted to let you know that we are opening up elder nominations right now through the end of April, through April 30. So you have a month to go online to graceralee.org slash elders and fill out a nomination form if there's something you think would make a great elder of the church. Our church is elder-led. The elder board is hugely important to me. At the end of this year, two of our elders, Andrea Hounchell and Burt Banks, will have completed six years serving the church in that capacity, and it will be time for them to roll off. At the end of last year, another elder, Bill Reith, rolled off, and so that means that going into 2021, we can add up to three elders if we wanted to. I will also tell you that we are really hoping to add some women to the elder board. Andrea, like I said, is rolling off at the end of this year, and that will leave us with one woman, Allie Snyder, on the elder board. So we would love to add some ladies to the board and get that good and helpful perspective as we continue on as a church. So if you have someone that you think would make a great elder, please go online to that website, to graceralee.org slash elders, and get that nomination in to us. We would really appreciate that. Now, as I launch into the sermon, last week we took a break from our series, Storyteller, where we are talking about the parables that Jesus, one of the greatest storytellers to ever live, we're talking about the parables that he told. And again, a parable is a short fictional story that makes a moral point. This week, we're jumping into a parable found in Luke chapter 7. So if you have a Bible there with you at home, I hope you'll open it up and look at verse 36. That's where this story starts. This week is going to be a parable embedded in a story. I've been doing vocational ministry now for 20 years. Just recently, I turned 39, and so it's depressing to know that when I was 19 years old, I took my first job in ministry with a ministry called Young Life. So for 20 years, I've been doing ministry vocationally. And during those 20 years, I've seen a lot of things change. I've seen a lot of examples of how to do ministry in some ways not to do ministry. But one of the constants that I've seen is the zeal of a fresh convert, the zeal and the passion for Jesus of someone who's coming to know him for the first time. There's a similar zeal for someone who has grown up in church or grown up considering themselves a Christian, but maybe wandered away or ventured away from the faith. And there's some sort of event that brings them back to Jesus and they have this fresh passion and this fresh zeal for him. For a lot of us, maybe that's our story, that we grew up as believers, and at some point in our life, we wandered away, and then we came back, and we were filled with that zeal and that passion again. And for me, I've been a believer. I've claimed a faith for literally as long as my memory goes back. I accepted Christ at a very young age and don't have much of a memory of what it was like to be in life without faith. And for some of you, that's your story too. And if that's your story, then you can probably relate to me that when I see the zeal and the passion of a fresh convert or someone who's coming back to the faith after a long time away, I'm often jealous of that zeal. I want some of that, you know? I want that passion for Jesus. I want that passion for the Father. I want to be as excited about the faith as they are. And often I'm not just jealous, but I'm convicted. And I wonder, why don't I have that zeal? Why don't I have that passion? It seems like after years or decades of walking with Jesus, of growing closer to the Father, of being guided by the Spirit, that we would have a more natural, deep passion and exuberance for God. It seems like that should grow over time rather than diminish. And if you can relate to that, if you've felt a diminishing in your own life of zeal for Jesus, then I think it would be great to look at the parable that we find in Luke chapter 7 and learn from Jesus what it means to be passionate for Him and try to identify what it is that fuels that passion. In Luke chapter 7, Jesus is invited over to a Pharisee's house. The Pharisee is a guy named Simon. He's invited over for dinner, and you can look in your Bible there in verse 36. He's invited over for dinner, and we pick up the story. He's reclining at the table. The tables back in the day were low, and so you would kind of lay on them with your shoulders towards the table and your feet behind you. And so Jesus was reclining at the table. He's talking to Simon, and as he's talking to Simon, a woman shows up. Scriptures say that it was a woman of the city, which is a nice way of saying that she was a prostitute. So in the middle of this dinner, a prostitute shows up, and she kneels down behind Jesus at his feet. And she begins to weep and cover his feet with her tears. She pulls out expensive perfume, alabaster, and dumps that on his feet. And she wipes his feet with her hair and she kisses his feet. And I can only imagine how awkward that would have been for Simon and Jesus and any of the other guests that were there to watch this woman do this for a prostitute, just to come sweeping into a dinner party and begin to act in that way towards one of the guests. Can you imagine how awkward it would be if you were at someone's house for dinner and in the middle of dinner, a prostitute walked in, a woman of ill repute came into the room and knelt down at the feet of someone and began to cry at their feet and wash them and kiss them? It would be super weird. But that's what's happening at this party with Jesus, at this dinner gathering with Jesus and Simon the Pharisee. And Scripture tells us that Simon muttered to himself, if he knew, if he were really a prophet, speaking of Jesus, then he would know who this woman was and what she did, and he would not allow this to be happening. And it's at this point that I think, before we continue with the story, that it's valuable to try to identify and empathize with what's going on in the hearts and the minds of the people in the story. I think for the prostitute, it's really clear. We don't have to do a lot of work to try to figure out what's going on in her heart and what's going on in her mind and her life. Can you imagine the gall that it would take to go into a house party like that and fall down at the feet of one of the guests and begin to weep and kiss his feet? I've never in my life cared so little what other people thought of me that I would be able to do that. She had to totally brush aside any sense of dignity that she had. She had to be willing and know that the Pharisees, which we'll learn in a second, were the upper crust, the high society. She had to know that those people were going to judge her, that those people were going to think that she was crazy. And she had to make a calculated decision to not care because this is Jesus, the Savior of the world. This is the one that's going to save me from my sins. And so it didn't matter to her, and she threw herself at his feet with reckless abandon. And you juxtapose that with the mindset of the Pharisee. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were the church people. They were the pastors and the elders and the deacons of the day. They were the leaders. To become a Pharisee, you had to know the law incredibly well. A Pharisee was like a senator, except in a religious senate. And so they had most of the Old Testament memorized. They knew it backwards and forwards. They were the ones that were entrusted by God to lead his people. They were the ones that were responsible for understanding scripture, for teaching scripture, for imparting knowledge on people. They were the ones in charge of leading Israel, God's chosen people. And what I think is worth acknowledging about Simon is that he likely thought that he was being magnanimous and generous in spirit to even have Jesus over to his house to begin with. We only see, to my knowledge, one other Pharisee dealing with Jesus on a personal level, and it's Nicodemus in John chapter 3, maybe the most famous of the Pharisees. And Nicodemus, even as open and as willing as he was to have a conversation with Jesus, he would only do it by himself under the cover of night. Yet here Simon is inviting in this radical teacher, this rebellious revolutionary into his home to hear what he has to say. Jesus's message ran counter to the Pharisees. It ran counter to what was accepted in that culture. It was a big, bold move for Simon to have Jesus over to begin with. Which is why, again, I think that it's very likely that Simon felt he was being generous in spirit. Almost a sense of, look at me, look at how open I am, look at how progressive I am, look at how open-minded and generous I can be that I would invite in this rebellious revolutionary to come in and peddle his teachings to my friends. There was probably some piety and some pride there. He allowed Jesus to come into his life, but not so much that he reacted like the prostitute and fell all over himself and fawned all over Jesus, but in a dignified way, in a way that he was in control and Jesus was his guest. And even though it was a big, generous thing for him to do to allow Jesus to come, he probably felt like he was doing Jesus a favor, like he was lending some credibility to Jesus's movement, that this was an echelon of society that Jesus had not been welcomed into yet. And we see even amidst that pride, a bit of skepticism from the Pharisee. We see in the passage that he mutters to himself that if this man were really a prophet, so he didn't even understand Jesus to be the son of God. He didn't accept him as a good teacher. He thought maybe he was a prophet, but now he even had his doubts about that. So he very skeptically allows Jesus to kind of come into this portion of his life and feels, I would argue, that he is being generous in spirit to do so. And it's at this point that I think it's worth asking, to which person do you most relate? The Pharisee or the prostitute? To which person in this story so far do you most relate? If you were to be at a party and Jesus were to show up, when Jesus does show up in your life, when you have an opportunity to praise him or to respond to him, to which response do you most relate? Do you respond to Jesus more like the Pharisee or more like the prostitute? Do we fall at his feet with reckless abandon, not caring at all who is around us and what they think? That prostitute only cared what Jesus thought of her and no one else. Is that how we respond to Jesus? Or do we respond like the Pharisee, feeling a sense of generosity and magnanimity of spirit that we allow him into our lives? Look how open-minded I am. Look how good I am. Look at, even in the face of all the different worldviews, I continue to stay staunch in the faith. Look at how good of a person I must be. Are we sometimes skeptical of Jesus, preferring to maintain our dignity in front of the other people that might be with us rather than fall at his feet and only care what he thinks? I know it's a difficult comparison to make. I know it's a convicting question to ask. But I also know that for me in my life, I relate far more to the Pharisee than I do to the prostitute. And my responses to Jesus and the way that I live out my faith, I relate far more to the Pharisee, caring what the people around me think, puffing my own self up with the sense of generosity that I would allow Jesus into my life, accepting him with some decorum and opening up my door so that he can come in, but not fawning all over him, not falling all over myself, not caring what anyone else thinks. And this story so far, if I'm being honest, I relate far more to the Pharisee than I do the prostitute. And I don't know where you are on that spectrum. I would imagine all of us are in the middle somewhere. Very few of us respond to Jesus like the prostitute, just fawning all over him the instant we encounter him. And very few of us are as cold as the Pharisee. Maybe we're a little bit warmer than that, but on the pendulum, on the spectrum of responses, I'm far closer to the Pharisee than the woman. And I wonder where you are. It's important to answer that question because of the way that Jesus responds to the muttering of Simon. When Simon says, yeah, when Simon is muttering and says, if he were really who he says he is, he would not be responding this way. And if I put myself in that moment, I would probably be turned off by what was happening too. I would probably be looking at that woman and judging her. Get yourself together. Come on, this is not the place. This is not the time. Have some dignity. Have some pride. I feel like I would agree with the Pharisee more than I would empathize with the prostitute. But look at what Jesus' response is to the Pharisee as he mutters these things to himself. And maybe what his response is to us as we side with the Pharisee in the story. This is when Jesus tells the parable, starting verse 40, and Jesus answering to him said, Simon, I have something to say to you. And he answered, say it, teacher. A certain money lender had two debtors.. One owed $500, the other owed 50, and the debt collector canceled both debts. Which one was more grateful? Which one loved him more? And clearly the answer is the one who was forgiven of the $500. And Jesus says, yeah, that's correct. And then he says this, this is great. Then turning towards the woman, he said to Simon, do you see this woman? I entered your house. You gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little loves little. I love this passage. The prostitute responds to Jesus with the zeal of a recent convert, with the zeal of someone who is very aware of their sin, who feels the weight and the shame that she carries every day and looks to Jesus as the relief of that shame, looks to Jesus as the one who can forgive her of that shame, where the Pharisee goes through his life and he's a pretty righteous guy. He feels like he's a pretty good guy. He owes God a little bit, but it's more like $50 and less like $500. And so when his debt is forgiven, he feels almost this sense of entitlement that he deserves it. And what we realize is that this woman, the point that Jesus is making is she is reacting this way because she is aware of the depth of her sin. And you are reacting to me that way because you're not. And then he compares them. He said, when I came into your house, you wouldn't even give me the most basic of greetings. You're supposed to wash my feet. You didn't do that. She is crying on my feet. You could anoint my head with oil. You chose to not do that. She's anointing my feet with perfume. You could have greeted me with a holy kiss like you're supposed to, like it's customary, but you didn't do that. You wanted to hold me at arm's length. She is kissing my feet. What we see from this parable is that our passion for Jesus operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him. Our passion for Jesus, that zeal that we talked about at the beginning of the service, at the beginning of the sermon, why is it that recent converts and people coming back to Christ seem to have a greater zeal than those of us who've been walking with him for a long time? Well, the answer is that our passion for Jesus operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him. That prostitute was very aware of her sin. She was very aware, acutely aware of the condition of her heart and her capacity for evil and that her life had offended the creator God. That Pharisee thought he was squared away. He thought he was pretty good. He was what I think of. He fell victim. He fell into the trap that many longtime church people and believers fall into. He fell into the trap of pretty good. He fell into the trap of going, listen, I've got my things. I deal with some pride. I've got some ego stuff. Sometimes I lose my temper and I've got these quiet sins in the corner of my life. But on the whole, I'm a pretty good guy. And once you start to believe that, you start to think that somehow you're not as sinful as someone like a prostitute. Like somehow your sins aren't as great as theirs. Like, yeah, I'm sinful, but the volume of her sins is so much greater that she deserves, she is going to require a greater forgiveness than I do. We almost have this sense of entitlement that God owes us a forgiveness or that because we're pretty good, because we don't have any glaring weaknesses or glaring sin that people can point to, that we must be pretty squared away. And it's when we fall into that trap of pretty good that our passion for Jesus begins to wane because we forget our capacity for sin. And the point that Jesus is making in this parable, this is very important, the point that he's making in this parable is not, she has sinned so much more than you, Simon the Pharisee. This prostitute has committed so many more sins than you, so she's going to respond to me like this all the time. And you just can't because you're a pretty good guy and you'll never understand the depth of sin that she does. That's not what he's saying. What he's trying to get Simon to see, and I think what he is trying to get us to see, is that the difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute was not the volume of their sin, but rather his awareness of it. The difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute was not their capacity to sin. It was not their history of sin. It was not their total offenses against God, but rather it was simply their awareness of their sin. The sin of the prostitute is obvious. It takes five seconds of reflection to identify why she would feel like she wasn't worthy of God, to identify the shame that she walked around with, and to see the volume of her sin and understand her awareness of it. But it doesn't take much longer to identify the capacity and the volume of the Pharisee's sin either. I don't know about Simon in the Bible. He may have been a nice guy. He may have actually been generous of spirit. And it's possible that I'm being unfair to him. But the Pharisees on the whole were a disappointing lot to God. If you read through the gospels, you don't see Jesus be mean to anyone except for the Pharisees. And then sometimes he gets exasperated with the disciples, but he is hard on the Pharisees. He calls them a brood of vipers. At another time, he calls them whitewashed tombs, meaning you look good on the outside, but you're rotting away and dead on the inside. He actually tells some parables to the Pharisees to help them understand that they were the ones that were left entrusted with God's people, and they have run them into the ground. They have done a terrible job of leading God's people, and they have misrepresented the God that they are supposed to represent to his people. The Pharisees did a terrible job with the responsibilities that were entrusted to them. And so if you think about the life of an individual Pharisee, someone who on the outside looks like they have it all together and seems like they're doing pretty good, no major egregious sins, I would wonder how many people had their piety damaged? How many people had a Pharisee turned off to a God that he was supposed to represent because he portrayed through his actions and through his judgment, he portrayed God as someone who was in heaven looking down on people as kind of this cosmic cop making sure that you didn't get out of the lines and exacting revenge on the ones that disappointed him. Because of the model of faith that the Pharisees lived out, how many people had they turned away from the faith? Because of the way that they judged others and they held themselves in higher regard and esteem than anyone else, how many people did they make feel terrible just for having humanity in their life? If you were a Pharisee and you showed a sliver of humanity, you showed weakness, the people around you show weakness or the propensity to sin, they were ostracized. They were cast out. They could not be in the high society, the upper echelon of people. They had to put on airs. And how many, how much damage did that version of faith do, that legalism and that prideful faith that they lived out? How much damage did it do over the years? What we see in this story with this parable embedded inside it is that Jesus is gently, in that miraculous way that only Jesus can do, helping Simon see, Simon, you are every bit as capable of sin as this prostitute is. Your heart is just as unhealthy, is just as dirty, and is just as capable of the most egregious sin as hers is. The only difference between you and her is not how much you've sinned, it's simply your awareness of your sin. And through the centuries, this parable speaks to us too. And it serves as a reminder that maybe some of us have fallen victim of pretty good. Maybe some of us know how to present a pretty good front and make it seem like we have it all together. Maybe some of us have very neatly tucked away the secret sins and our private struggles so that we can put forward a front of this is a version of Christianity that everyone ought to live up to. And maybe we've been doing it long enough that we've even had the audacity to forget our capacity to sin. But Jesus reminds us that all of our hearts are just as capable of sin as anyone else's. That the most egregious evil is two or three bad weeks away from all of us. So, if you relate to me at the beginning and are jealous of this passion and this zeal that new converts seem to have for Jesus, and we wonder, is it possible to recapture that? I would say to you, yes, it is. And that if we want our passion for Jesus to increase, that we need to understand that it operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him, of our need for his salvation and our gratitude for his forgiveness and the sense of delivery when he takes away our shame and that when we fall into the trap of pretty good, we forget that we need those things. And when we're told that we're saved and when we're told that Jesus loves us and when we're told that we're God's children, sometimes that falls on deaf ears because we feel in some ways entitled to those things. But this parable reminds us, no, no, no, the difference between us and the recent convert, the difference between those of us with muted passion and those with exuberant passion is not the volume of our sin or our capacity to sin. It's our awareness of our own sin and our own need and condition before the Father. So if we'd like a heightened passion for God, if we want to move through 2020 and everything that it holds with this undying passion and zeal for Jesus and who He is and what He's doing, then I would say it begins with a simple prayer that I would encourage us to pray on our own every day this week. Jesus, make me more aware of my need for you. It's a bold prayer. It's a courageous prayer. It's a bold thing to do to say, God, I want to see my ugliness so that I appreciate what you've delivered me from. God, I want to see my capacity. I want to understand who I am. I don't want to turn a blind eye to the capacity of sin in my life. I want to see it and understand so that I am more grateful for who you are and the salvation that you offer. I hope that you'll do that. I hope that if you came into this service this week and you would have agreed 30 minutes ago, yeah, I just don't feel the passion for Jesus that I'd like to. Reclaim that passion. Listen to the point of this parable and pray that God would make you increasingly aware of your need for him. And as he does that, I promise you will feel forgiven of more and more and your passion will increase and increase. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. Lord, I pray that you would make us ever aware of our need for you. That none of us would fall into the trap of pretty good. That none of us would feel a sense of entitlement that we somehow deserve your forgiveness, but that we would marvel that you offer it. God, may none of us ever walk in the pride that we are so squared away, that we are so good, that we follow the rules so well, and that we live for you so faithfully that we forget who we are and what you've done for us. Father, as we go throughout our weeks this week, make us increasingly aware of our need for you so that we might have a burning passion and desire for you. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.