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.