GIVE ME MINE!

When Kathy Keller heard Tim’s message on this parable, she told him it was the most important sermon he’d ever preached. It certainly is a paradigm changer. I panicked a bit when I realized we’d done it before, but looking back, it was just a one-week overview. Yet it was remembered! So the day has come to go deeper with this wonderful group. I know it will help us all.

The Sin Beneath Every Sin is Always Idolatry:

Instead of trusting our Father to meet our needs, we run to His gifts or to our own sinful way of solving problems, rather than His pure way.

This is running to another god. This is idolatry.

Idols help us at first, and then cut us to pieces. That clever retort, that first potato chip, that sexy movie may seem harmless, like a playful dolphin…

But too late you find it’s a shark that cuts you to pieces.

Click below to listen to the sermon:

https://gospelinlife.com/sermon/give-me-mine/

My comments are in blue.

Sunday:

1. How have you experienced the love or presence of the Lord during the last week?
2. Where do you tend to:
   1. Run when you feel stressed or sad?
   2. When you aren’t sure what you should do about a problem?

Monday: The Text

3. Read again Luke 15:1-2 . What two groups is Jesus addressing?

4. Read Luke 15:11-14

A. What is the first thing we are told in verse 11 and why might this be a clue to the meaning of the parable?

B. What does the younger son ask of his father, and why is this disrespectful?

C. Why do you think the son wants this so badly — what lie might he be believing?

D. How does the father respond? Why do you think God allows us to go down a hurtful path? 

This is written as a parable, not a treatise on parenting. Often a wise parent does not give into a child’s foolish demands. This is a parable showing us our foolishness, whether it is bad boy rebellion or good boy rebellion, in not trusting the Father’s love and, instead, looking for love in all the wrong places and hurting ourselves and one another.

E. What did the younger son do, and what was the result? 

Tuesday: An Assault on Community

Listen and also read (if you like) the text below. Answer questions. Blue comments are mine.

For seven weeks, we are looking at Luke 15. In Luke 15, we’re learning how the gospel creates a special kind of community, how the gospel creates a new kind of community. Today, we start looking at the last of the three parables. It’s the most famous. It’s the longest, and we’re going to look at it for six weeks. This is just an overview, really, and an intro, though I hope it will be a convicting one.

We don’t have to say everything about it here, but I’d like you to think about this story (it is a familiar story, is it not?) in a slightly different way than you probably want to do. I’d like you to consider the story is giving us a picture of an assault on community because of idolatry which is only overcome by agony. It’s an assault on community through idolatry, and it’s only overcome by agony. This is our first avenue into understanding this very rich and important text.

1. This is an assault on community

Maybe you don’t see it that way. That’s probably because we’re modern Western people, but if you look at it, certainly most people in most times and places and cultures in the world would realize what this story is about is about the dissolution of a family. This is about a family that is unraveling and coming apart.

There are two great assaults on the integrity and the cohesion of this family. The first great assault comes from the younger brother, of course, because the younger brother comes to the father and says in verse 12, “Father, give me my share of the estate.” The older son in those days and in those places always got a double portion of what every other sibling got.

Since there were two sons, the younger brother would have had coming to him when the father died a third of the estate, so he was coming and asking for a third of the estate, but the operative words here are when the father dies. One commentator put it like this. In Middle Eastern culture, to ask for the inheritance while the father is still alive is to wish him dead. A traditional Middle Eastern father can only respond in one way. He would be expected to strike the boy across the face for his insolence and drive him out of the house with verbal and physical blows.

Why is this an assault on the family? First of all, it’s a huge assault (we’ll get back to this in a second) on the economic status of the family, because the father is going to have to liquidate a third of the estate. Even more than that, this would have been an absolute humiliation. Everyone in the town and everyone around would know what the son had done, and in a Middle Eastern, patriarchal society that was absolutely unheard of. It was over the top. The name of the family had now been assaulted.

Most of all, of course, the son was saying, “I want out of here. I don’t want you to be my father anymore. I want to live without a family. I’m gone.” This is an enormous assault on the cohesion in the family. But that’s not all. As you know, and we will again get to this in some detail later on, hope beyond hope, it’s a miracle … In the middle of the story we see the younger brother brought back in, the father embracing the younger brother, and it looks like there’s a reclamation project that’s about to restore the family.

At the moment of the greatest triumph, it’s the elder brother now who assaults the integrity of the family. When the elder brother refuses to go in, what he’s saying is, “I don’t want to be part of the family like this. I’m the heir now. All this inheritance is mine, and I refuse to let you do what you’re doing. I will not be part of the family with him in it.”

That’s why there’s a crisis now, and the story at the end is at just as much a crisis point as it was in the beginning. You know that. Anyone who understands the family is the basic human community, and especially in those days the listeners would have been like, “What is the matter with these kids? They’re both assaulting the family.” And they are! There has been an assault on community. What is causing the assault? What is the underlying cause for the disruption? What is it that is tearing this family apart? The answer is here if we read the text carefully.

5. What stands out to you at first and why?

6. How is each brother assaulting the integrity of the family?

Though I’ve done this study before, I am really seeing how, as John Donne says, “No man is an Island.” If I am speaking badly to another about a brother or sister in our congregation, I am assaulting our community. Even those who claim, “What I do in the privacy of my own bedroom is my business” are wrong — for it affects their heart, and a rotten heart is an assault on the community.

7. Where in your life might you be assaulting your community at home or at church? How might you replace your sin with a good practice from the Lord.

This New Year I am taking my judgmental thoughts captive and praying for the person, or singing praises, or revising my memory work.

Wednesday: The Sin Beneath the Sin

Idolatry. You say, “Where’s the word?” The word doesn’t show up, but let me show you how this works out narratively. First of all, the younger son for many years has been part of the family. He’s obeyed the father. He’s talked to the father. He’s eaten with the father. He’s been doing what a son should be doing. He’s been relating to and obeying the father’s wishes and so forth as a Middle Eastern ancient son in a family would have done.

But when he says, “I’m tired of waiting for you to die, so give me my money now,” it means all along, or at least for a very, very long time, the son had actually been after the father’s things rather than the father. He wanted the father’s things more than the joy and the happiness of the father. He wanted the wealth. He wanted the estate. He wanted the comfort and the prestige and the independence that comes with having that.

He must have come to some kind of “Y” in the road. Something showed him he wasn’t going to be able to have his relationship with his father and still have the money he wanted. For a long time, he was playing his cards so, “I can have my father and the money, but what I’m really after is the money,” but when it looked like in order to use the money the way he wanted, he was going to have to cut out.

He came to a “Y” in the road, and he chose the father’s things. Why? Because all along his heart had been set not on the father, but on the father’s things. That is a definition and that’s a narrative representation of what the Bible says one of the main problems with all of us is. It’s idolatry. Why?

Do you realize you can be in church, you can read the Bible, you can pray, and you can obey the Ten Commandments? In other words, you can be obeying the Father and you can be relating to the Father and you can be praying to the Father, and all along have actually put your heart on the Father’s things rather than on the Father.

What are the Father’s things? You want blessing. You want health. You want your life to go well. You want your children to be fine. In other words, you’re asking God for things, as if, “That’s what I’m here for.” As a pastor, I’ve seen this happen many, many times. Younger-brother idolatry (that’s what this is) is a very, very hard thing to see. It’s actually easier than elder-brother idolatry. We’ll get to that in a second.

For a long time it’s not easy to see, because you say, “Well, I’m living the life, and I’m obeying God, and I’m believing God. I’m doing everything right,” but then you come to a “Y” in the road, and there’s a love or there’s money or there’s power or there’s status or there’s something you set your heart on, that if you’re going to get it, you’re going to have to disobey the law of God.

Do you know what? You say, “Give me mine. I’m out of here.” At that point, it’s pretty obvious you’ve been using God. You’ve been using the Father to get the Father’s things. If there’s a choice between the two, you’ll take the things, because that’s where your heart has been set.

8. Why would Middle Easterners be shocked by this story?

9. Where was the younger son’s heart set?

10. What does Keller mean when He says he wanted the Father’s things and not the Father. Give illustrations of two scenarios of this that have been true in your life.

You say, “Well, that’s not me. I can’t identify with that because I’ve never cut out on God. Look! Here I am. I’m listening to you.”

But there’s another kind of idolatry, and it’s elder-brother idolatry. You say, “What do you mean, elder-brother idolatry?” Let me show you something. When the elder brother found out the younger son was back … You don’t have to have a PhD in psychology to realize this is the greatest day of the father’s life.

When he kills the fattened calf, the fattened calf would have been able to feed 75 to 100 people, and back in those days you almost never ate meat at a meal anyway. It was a delicacy. The fattened calf, as you know (you can sort of tell), was an incredible delicacy because it was extremely lavish. You never did it.

Basically, by killing the fattened calf, he was throwing a party for the entire village. It was probably the biggest feast the village had ever seen that he had ever thrown, but it was a way of expressing the fact … It’s so obvious. If you lose a son like this and he comes back, you embrace him. This was the greatest day of the father’s life!

Anybody could have seen that. Even the elder brother could see it, and it didn’t matter to the brother, because all the brother could see was the father was deploying his inheritance now in a way he didn’t approve of. It clearly shows his heart had been just as much set on the father’s things as the younger brother’s, because he is ballistic now.

He is furious, and he’s humiliating his father on the greatest day of his life, and he’s making his father, the Middle Eastern paterfamilias, come out to him. He won’t come into the feast. This is absolutely awful. This is terrible! Yet, he’s so angry he doesn’t care what he’s doing to the father. He doesn’t care because he’s not that concerned about the father’s heart; he’s concerned about the father’s things.

Here’s what is so weird. Younger-brother idolatry shows itself in immorality. “I’m going to go do what I want.” Elder-brother lostness shows itself in self-righteousness and lots of anger. Why? “Because, you see, the father owes me. I have been good. I have been slaving. I have obeyed the Ten Commandments. I’ve gone to church. I’ve read my Bible.”

The anger at the father if things don’t go right shows you set your heart not on the Father but on the Father’s things. You’re not obeying him because of the beauty of who he is and the worth that he is due. You’re not obeying him just to resemble him and to delight him and to please him and to get near him. You say, “I signed up for some blessing, and where is it? I’ve been a good guy.”

There’s bad-boy idolatry and there’s good-boy idolatry, but both destroy community, and they’re destroying this family. They are tearing it to pieces. How is it idolatry tears up community? There is no better expositor of this, and I mean this, than Saint Augustine. In fact, he’s the original.

11. How does the older son show he also does not love the father? Find everything you can.

12. What is bad boy rebellion and what is “good” boy rebellion?

Thursday: Inordinate Loves

When you’ve heard me talk about and quote Luther or Jonathan Edwards or whoever else, it all comes from Augustine. I would like to just take a little time here, because those of you who come to Redeemer have heard this theme before. Those of you who are newer have not heard the theme before. I want to make sure even those of you who have come get a take you haven’t heard before.

To get ready for this sermon, I basically re-read Saint Augustine’s (one of the greatest books ever written) Confessions. I hope you’re satisfied. I had to read Confessions just to get ready for this sermon. Please, give me some credit. As I read it I was amazed. I was amazed. It’s about this!

Context … Saint Augustine had a lot of trouble with two things: food and sex. At first, I said, “Nobody in New York is going to be able to relate to this,” but I decided to go ahead anyway. He’s one of those great figures. I know it’s hard to relate to somebody like this, but please think. In other words, as he put it, he just couldn’t get enough of beauty. He loved beautiful bodies, beautiful smells, and beautiful tastes, but he began to realize because he was so driven by beauty, three things were happening to his life.

First, he was always empty and unsatisfied. Secondly, he was constantly doing things he didn’t really want to do, but he kept doing, and he couldn’t seem to stop. Thirdly, his relationships were always breaking up. He was trying to figure out what was wrong with him, and he came up with a couple of things. He came up with a theory. It’s a theory that all of our problems come from what he calls disordered loves. Listen. Here’s the first place in Confessions very early on.

13. What three ways was Augustine being destroyed because of his inordinate loves?

14. Now, how does an inordinate love that tempts you destroy you in these three ways as well?

To paraphrase, he says, “So you say a man has murdered someone. Well, what was his motive? Either he desired the man’s wife or his property, or maybe he was afraid of losing something to this man he held dear, or maybe he had lost something to him and now he was burning to be revenged. So let’s ask this question again. Why does any man commit murder? Every man who commits murder does so because he loves something, because he loves something too much, and that is the motive for his crime.”

Isn’t that interesting? You say, “What?” That’s right. When you see murder, it’s because somebody loved something too much. He goes on and explains. He basically says, “There’s a splendor in all bodies that are beautiful to the eye. The senses of touch and taste have their own power to please. Worldly honor, too, has its own glory, as does the power to command.

The bond of human friendship has a sweetness all its own binding souls together. But it’s in the way we seek these pleasures that sin is committed because we have an inordinate love for the goods of a lower order and neglect the better in the higher order, neglecting you, our Lord God, and your truth and your law.

For these inferior values have their delights, but they’re not equal to you, my God, who has made them all. Therefore, when we inquire why a sin was committed, we do not accept the explanation unless it appears how his heart was set on some of those values which are inferior to the superior and the celestial goods.”

Material things (money, possessions) are not as valuable and as important as human beings. Right? Human beings are a higher order of good. A great roasted chicken is good, but not as important as a human being, but human beings are not as important and as glorious and as valuable and as good as God.

If you put (this is what everybody in New York is doing) money and possessions over relationships, over people, over family, over friendships, that’s a disordered love. You’re loving something as if it was first or second when it should only be third. It’s a disordered love, but, he says, if you love something (human beings, which are second) as if they were God, as if their love, their honor, and their beauty is the ultimate beauty that is going to satisfy your desire for love and honor and beauty, that’s a disordered love.

All disordered loves lead to brokenness, and all the problems you have in your life and all the problems we have in the world come from disordered love. You say, “How can that be?” Here’s how. Because disordered love (making a good thing into an ultimate thing) creates three problems in you. He says it starves you, it emotionally enslaves you, and it divides you. First of all, it starves you. You know Augustine’s most famous statement in Confessions, but let me read you the run-up.

I’m paraphrasing a bit, but he says, “What does ambition seek except honor and glory? But only you, Lord, have a glory forever that can never be lost. What does power of the mighty desire except to be feared? But none has power that can ever be seized and stolen but you. What do the lonely and anxious long for except a love that they cannot lose?

But who can give a love that does not fade and die but you? What does weariness seek except rest? But what sure rest is there apart from you? Thus the soul commits adultery whenever it turns from you and seeks these things that it cannot find except in you. O Lord, you made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

15. Why does an inordinate love starve you?

Here’s what sin is. It’s not sinful to want honor. It’s not sinful to want love. It’s not sinful, even, to want power, and it’s not sinful to want rest. The sin in our hearts makes us seek a kind of honor, a kind of power, a kind of love, and a kind of rest in creatures, in creation, in the Father’s things rather than in the Father.

We put our highest hopes for honor in how we’re doing in our work. We put our highest hopes for love in some other human being or human beings. That will destroy them and you. Why? First of all, they can’t give it because that’s empty. Right? Secondly, emotionally enslaved. There’s a place, and I won’t read it to you, where Augustine says when you see something you love, you want to repose in it. You want to rest in it. The problem is there is no source of honor and love and power and rest you can absolutely rest in except in God.

This was the problem of the elder brother, because you see, his heart was, “I’m going to get all this money. I’m going to have the whole thing. I’m going to get everything now.” But when it was jeopardized, he goes ballistic. Why? Here’s why. If you want a good name and someone ruins your good name, you’re mad, but if you make a good name into the ultimate honor because you really don’t really know God, you’re getting your self-image from what people say.

If you make a good thing into an ultimate thing and somebody ruins your name, you go ballistic. You may kill them! To know that suddenly your father is giving away part of your inheritance and you were expecting to have this much and now you’re only going to have this much, that will make you sad.

It would make me sad! It will make you sad, but when that is the ultimate thing in your life, when that is how you feel good about yourself, when that is actually the thing you’ve mainly set your hope on and somebody starts to shrink it, then you go ballistic, and you might kill. That’s what Augustine means.

16. What is the difference between seeing someone or something as an ultimate thing versus a good gift?

Friday: The Illustration of the Trinity

Here is the ultimate reason why this divides us, why idolatry kills community. There is nobody like Saint Augustine at explaining the beauty of the Trinity. I know the Trinity hurts your mind when you think about it. I know it gives you kind of a brain lock as you try to think, “Three beings in one God? There’s only one God, but the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are all divine persons in the one God. What does all that mean?”

Augustine says if the world is here by accident (if there is no God), then ultimate reality is basically impersonal, and you’re here because of powerful, accidental eruptions and forces. Secondly, he says, if there is a unipersonal God (a God who is only one personality), that God would not have known love until he created the universe filled with angels and human beings, because you can’t have love unless you have more than one person.

If there was one God (a unipersonal God) before he made the universe, he would have had power but not love and only felt love later. Love would have come in second. Love would have been peripheral. Right? Therefore, if there’s no God, then what life is really about is power. If there is a unipersonal God, then power is more important than anything else. It’s first.

But if God is the Christian God, if God is triune, then that means before they exercised their power to create the world, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit … God was a community, a community of beings knowing and loving one another and communicating with each other. That means community and loving relationships are the ultimate meaning of life. It is ultimate reality.

It comes before achievement. It comes before building. It comes before power. It comes first, and the infinite happiness of God and of the love of God works like this. We know from what Jesus has told us that the Father glorifies the Son, and the Son glorifies the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit glorifies the Father and the Son. What does that mean?

Each divine person serves the others, glorifies the others, and adores the others and does not take glory but gives it. If we were made in the image of God, that God, then there are two bottom lines for our existence. First, your life is about community. Your life is about loving relationships. That’s what life is all about.

15. How does our Triune God illustrate true love?

16. Describe what it would look like in your life to love and serve like the Trinity.

If you come to New York City and do what pretty much everybody does, you put individual achievement, money, status, and advancement ahead of community, ahead of friendships, ahead of relationships, and ahead of serving other people, you’re going to dash yourself on the rocks of ultimate reality. You were not built for that. There’s going to be brokenness in your life.

If you’re made in the image of that God, it’s not just that relationships in general are important, but you were built to do with God what God does within himself. Each of the divine beings center on the others. They don’t say, “Me, me, me, me, me!” Each one gives glory and adoration to the others.

If you were made in God’s image, you were meant to put God in the center of your life, to say, “I’m going to serve God and not myself. I’m going to meet God’s desires and not my own.” If you do with God what God is doing within himself, you will know the joy, because he will fulfill those great, deep needs for beauty and for love and for honor and for power and for rest.

Then you’ll be able to give them to others, but if you try to seek for those things in other finite human beings, do you know what’s going to happen? You’re going to be too broken up, too needy, too angry all the time like the elder brother and too addicted like the younger brother to care about others. You have to have your disordered loves healed so God is the beauty of your life and the center of your life.

You can’t just believe in him. You can’t just obey him. Then you might just be a younger brother or an elder brother. You have to center your life completely on him and say, “I don’t care what you give me. I don’t even care how many prayers you answer. I love you. I find you not just useful to get things; I find you beautiful, and I serve for you for who you are in yourself.” Finally … I did tell you this was an intro to the whole. There are so many features of the story we haven’t even begun to touch on, but let’s just look at one more.

 The assault is only overcome by agony

Do you remember what the commentator said a Middle Eastern patriarch would have done when the younger son came and said, “You must give me my third of the inheritance”? He should have slapped him across the face and should have driven him out with physical and verbal blows.

I’ll tell you why most of us would do that, even if you’re not a Middle Eastern patriarch. When you’re hurt badly by someone, you want to staunch the wound, and the best way to staunch the wound is to turn your admiration and your desire for that person into anger and bitterness and sour grapes.

You want to start saying, “That person? Why did I ever see anything in him? Why did I ever see anything in her?” What you want to do is you want to close your heart. You want to harden your heart. You want to fill it with anger and bitterness because that stops the hurt. If he had done that, if the father had done that, there never would have been a reconciliation. The son would have never probably come back, but even if he had tried to come back, the father’s heart would never have been open.

17. Contrast the natural and supernatural response to being hurt.

I always remember Lee Ezell, who considered abortion but kept the baby conceived by rape, saying. “The wrong response seems easier at first and leads to great heartache. The right response often feels so hard at first but leads to joy. 

This is what I see in this parable – the joy of the younger brother and the Father, and the agony of the older brother.

18. With this in mind, how might you apply this to your life?

What does the father do? One of the things the commentators always find fascinating is it says there after the younger brother says, “ ‘… give me my share of the estate.’ So [the father] divided his property between them.” The Greek word property there is not the ordinary word for capital or property or possessions. It’s very strange. All commentators point it out.

For some reason, Jesus’ story uses the word bios there. It’s the word for life (bios, biology). It’s an intriguing word, because here’s what it’s saying. The only way for this father to have really given this son a third of the property is … They didn’t have cash. You didn’t have ATM windows. It didn’t work like that. They didn’t have banks. Better for them!

The only way he could have given a third of his estate would have been he would have had to sell his land. He would have had to sell his ancestral land. Even in the movie Oklahoma! there is a line that says,

We know we belong to the land

And the land we belong to is grand

How sweet! Did you hear it? It doesn’t say the land belonged to them. Did you hear it? It said they belonged to it. In ancient times, in older times, even in the time of Oklahoma!, a family’s land was their identity. “That was my family land, my ancestral land.” Therefore, what the text is telling us is the younger son, because of his sin … The only way the father could keep open the possibility of salvation was for him to tear his life apart. He divided his life. He tore his life apart.

The way we would have dealt with this is with agony. We would have thrown the agony on the son. We would have hit him. We would have beaten him. We would have turned our heart away from him, and that would have helped, but not this father. This father suffered for his son’s sin. He suffered for the possibility of redemption. He bore the agony of his son’s sin so eventually they could be reconciled.

Near the end of Confessions, Augustine finally tells us how his soul was healed. There’s a place where Augustine basically says, “It’s all about beauty, because if I just sit there and say, ‘Well, I guess I’d better love God more and put him before my family, or otherwise, I’m going to screw my family up.’ Okay. I have to like God more and serve him more than I like making money, because that will make me worry too much or do unethical things. Okay.”

He says you can’t do that with an act of the will. You can’t just say, “Well, I guess I’d better serve God first before everything else.” What are you going to do? What he does says is we’re made for beauty, he says (this is Augustine saying), “When you see a beautiful body go by, when you see a beautiful human being, you cannot but be attracted to that human being and want to go over and talk to him or her.”

In other words, when you see beauty, it automatically attracts you and engages action. The answer to all of our problems, the answer to the breaches in community, the answer to all of our disordered lust is, “I have to see God beautiful, not just believe in him in some general way.” This is what happened.

Finally, he gets to this place in Confessions where he says, “How you have loved us, O good Father. You did not spare your only Son, but delivered him up for us … How you have loved us. [Lord Jesus who though equal with the Father] ‘became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross!’ ” This is an amazing section.

“[Father, your Son] … became to you both Victor and Victim—Victor because he was the Victim. For us, he was to you both Priest and Sacrifice, and Priest because he was the Sacrifice. Out of slaves, he makes us your sons, because he was born of you and served us. Rightly, then, is my hope fixed strongly on him, that you will ‘heal all my diseases [of my soul].’ ”

There is nothing more beautiful … There is no more beautiful sight or even thought than that an infinitely perfect and happy being would descend into this world and sacrifice everything for ungrateful, undeserving human beings like us, that an infinitely happy being who doesn’t have to do it would tear his life apart for us.

If you even get a glimpse of the beauty of that, it will heal the diseases of your soul. You’ll have to go after it. It will have to engage action. It will center you on him, so you are finally free to love everyone around you. Let us pray.

Our Father, one of the reasons why we take the Lord’s Supper is it is physical. It’s palpable. It helps us take abstract thoughts and make them real. You have promised in your Word you would be present with us at this Table, so we pray you would make the sacrifice of your Son so real to us that we see the beauty of it and, like Augustine, we begin to get healed.

19. What did Augustine say was the secret of overcoming idolatry?

We thank you … It’s amazing that 1,500 years ago somebody could write the things that are so absolutely relevant. We thank you that you are the same God yesterday, today, and forever. It’s the same gospel yesterday, today, and forever. It’s not a matter of our modern Western culture. It’s a truth that has come down out of heaven, the gospel, and it will change us. We pray you would help us in some small but significant ways to be changed by it right now. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

Saturday:

20. What is your take-a-way and why?