The Great Sending, Chapter 18

by Reverand Dr. Robert Newton

Since Genesis 3 our God has been seeking His lost children, all of them. His question to Adam, “Where are you?” wasn’t intended as a question about his geographic location but his relational position before his God and heavenly Father. What Adam needed to say was, “I’m lost, Father, I really am.” However, his sin rendered him unable to think. Adam couldn’t even think that thought, let alone voice the tragic reality.

Like Adam, our sin, too, renders us, God’s children, unable to think and unable to voice where we really are in our relationship with our heavenly Father. And so our Father has and will forever seek after his lost children until He finds them.

Three times in Luke 15 our Lord Jesus impresses this truth upon His disciples and the church leaders of his day. His gracious and joyous words were set against the context of the scribes’ and Pharisees’ contentious grumbling: “This man [Jesus] receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). They had picked that bone with Him since the earliest days of His ministry (Matthew 9). They continued to chew on it all the way to Holy Week, when “[Jesus went] in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner” (Luke 19:7).

That should cause us to question, in the story of the Prodigal Son, who is the real lost boy? (See Luke 15.) Historically, the obvious answer seems to be the son who demanded his portion of the inheritance from his father in order to leave home and squander it on reckless living and prostitutes. The story indeed reveals the lost nature of our self-centered hearts while simultaneously revealing the unconditional love of our seeking Father. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20).

At the same time, however, we must not lose sight of the other lost son – the older brother. Consider what Jesus shares with us: First, the prodigal son eventually came to his senses, saying, “How many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.’”

The prodigal son was not so lost that he couldn’t remember his father’s kindness and generosity. He wasn’t so found that he understood the unconditional nature of his father’s love and incredible ability to forgive and restore. Children who are truly lost are never able to come to their senses. That’s the dilemma of being lost.

But don’t blame the prodigal son for his limited understanding. None of us are truly able to comprehend “the breadth and length and height and depth [of God’s grace], and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18-19).

The loving father in the story never went seeking after his younger son who ran away. In reality, seeking the lost was not his responsibility; it was the older son’s. Jesus tells us that the father “divided his property between them,” meaning that both sons received their inheritance on the same day. According to ancient tradition, the older brother received as much as 90% of the father’s property along with the full responsibility to look after his father’s extended family. He was now in charge of the estate, which included his younger brother. To better understand our Lord’s intention in his third story we might paraphrase His earlier question, “What man of you, having a younger brother who runs away, does not go after the one that is lost, until he finds him?”

Yet, Jesus tells us, once the younger brother returned, the father went seeking after his oldest son: “His father came out and entreated him,” to join the family celebration.

Note that as Jesus is speaking these words, He is standing among the unhappy religious leaders, seeking them to come inside and join the celebration of lost sinners – their spiritual brothers and sisters – returned. In all three stories Jesus emphasized the relationship between celebration and personal possession. Listen to the father’s response to the older son’s complaint: “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

The father did not say, “This my son was lost,” but rather, “This your brother… ” Jesus wanted to impress upon his hearers the shared ownership – between Himself and us – of all those who are lost.

The real problem, perhaps, was not in the older son’s inability to accept that he was his brother’s keeper, but that he was his gracious father’s son. And as his son he was the full heir of all that his father possessed, including his prodigal brother now returned. Listen to his bitter complaint: “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me [as much as] a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.” He thought of himself as a slave, not a son, as a laborer rather than a co-owner of the ranch. And though he served many years faithfully he never asked for anything, even as little as a kid goat, in order to throw a dinner party.

That shows he didn’t understand his father’s love, nor his place in his father’s family. Why did he think his father had to give him a goat in order to throw a party? Didn’t he already own the goat? Didn’t he already own all of the goats? After all, he was his father’s son. What belonged to his father belonged also to him. He wasted all those years slaving for his father out of servile obligation rather than serving with his father as beloved son and co-owner. Not understanding or choosing to disbelieve that he was the son of a gracious father closed his heart to celebrating his brother’s return.

Our missionary motivation – as Saint Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:14, “For the love of Christ compels us” – springs only from a deep and abiding understanding of our God’s unconditional love for us and for all people. It does not proceed, nor can it, from some sense of obligation based on a Divine Command (Commission) or from some debt we owe God for all His graciousness to us. Saint Paul sums it up this way: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).

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