The Younger Son | A Man Had Two Sons | Drew Ritchie

A man had two sons. The younger son told his father, I want my share of your estate now before you die. So his father agreed to divide his wealth between his sons. A few days later, this younger son packed all his belongings and moved to a distant land. And there he wasted all his money and wild living. About the time his money ran out, a great famine swept over the land and he began to starve. The young man became so hungry that even the pods he was feeding the pigs looked good to him. But no one gave him anything. When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, At home, even the hired servants have enough food to spare. And here I am, dying of hunger. I will go home to my father and say, Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. So he returned home to his father. And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming, filled with love and compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. His father said to the servants, Quick, bring the finest robe in the house and put it on him. Get a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet. We must celebrate with a feast for this son of mine was dead and is now returned to life. He was lost, but now he is found. Your brother is back. The older brother was angry and wouldn't go in. Your brother was dead and has come back to life. He was lost, but now he is found. Good morning, everybody, and welcome. If we haven't gotten a chance to meet, my name is Drew Ritchie, and I am honored to be here with all of you, whether you're joining us online or in person at one of our four campuses, soon to be five, all across DFW, it is great to be with you today. Let me start with a story. When Catherine and I brought home our oldest daughter, Landry Jo, home from the hospital, I remember them saying, Hey, you're free to go home. Just we're a little worried about her Billy Rubin numbers. She's getting close to being jaundiced. By the way, I had to practice that because I don't know what any of those words mean. But basically what it meant was like, if those numbers didn't get better, we were going to have to take her back to the hospital.

She was going to have to be under one of those heat lamp things, like a tanning bed, just lay there. And we were not about to have to go back to the hospital. So Catherine and I were like, we are going to make sure that her Billy Rubin numbers get better. So our top strategy was for me to go into the backyard of our rent house, and I would just hold her up like Simba to the sun. No, I'm just kidding. I did not do that. But what I would do is I would take her into the backyard, and I would walk around with her, and we would just have a conversation. And I did most of the talking. And I'm sure you're thinking like, how could Drew possibly come up with enough to say he's so quiet and doesn't say much? No, and we're just chatting, me and her. And it hits me like a ton of bricks. You've never heard the gospel before. I remember thinking that. She is two or three days old, and I realized this epiphany. You have never heard the good news of Jesus Christ, and I am about to get to tell you that for the very first time. And it was one of those cool moments where you take for granted, well, you know, maybe they've heard of it. Maybe that person knows about Jesus. I know for a fact you've never heard the whole story of Jesus. And so I got to tell her. Today we are starting a three-week series where we're gonna get to hear a story from the greatest storyteller who ever lived telling us the greatest story ever told. This is Jesus's masterpiece. It is his longest recorded story in the Bible. It is his Sistine Chapel, his Ninth Symphony. This is what we call in Luke 15, traditionally, the parable of the prodigal son. And one of the reasons I've been excited about this series because I love to get to preach, but more than that, for the first time in my life, probably, I've been leading up to this series. I've been a youth minister. I've been a preacher. I've been in church my whole life. And yet for the first time in my life, I have come to church thinking there is a very real chance that there is someone online or at one of our services who has never heard this story before. And I have the honor of telling them a story that literally, if the Spirit is at work and if they're listening, it can literally change their life. How crazy is that? We get to do that today. And I'm talking to a room full of people that have maybe heard this a hundred times. You maybe thought, I've heard this story over and over. But the power of God's Word is that sometimes the hundred and first time can change your life or the hundred and second. And so it's

just, I'm so excited to be here with all of you. I'm excited to talk about this story. And in week one, we're going to focus kind of on act one of the story. We're going to look at the younger son. Next week, you're going to have to come back because we're going to focus on the older son, act two. And then third week, I'm not going to tell you. we're gonna talk about yet, but you're gonna wanna come back, it's gonna be worth it, and it's in this story. So before we read the story itself, we've gotta look at the context in which Jesus is telling the story. Why did Jesus start to tell these three stories in Luke? So turn in your Bibles with me to Luke 15, we're gonna start in verse one, and you can open your Bible, stay there, we're gonna be in Luke the whole time. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus, but the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, this man welcomes sinners and eats with them? Then Jesus told them this parable. Jesus is going to tell a story of a lost sheep, a lost coin, and lost sons, and all three of the stories are in response to this opening. The good religious people are upset and they're not happy with the fact that Jesus is spending so much time with the bad sinner people. And Jesus wants to respond to that,

and instead of a speech, instead of opening up a dialogue or asking them a question, he tells these three stories. And the first two stories are amazing, like they are worth having their own sermons about. They are the fellowship and the two towers, they are incredible. And yet, we have to know that they are building towards the third story. Because we see, Jesus actually, the way he tells the stories are pointing everyone to go, now this third one is the, this is the main event. We see that we have 100, as the numbers go down, we have 100 sheep, 10 coins, and two sons, but the stakes and the percentages get higher. You have a sheep, a coin, and a human being. You have 1% is lost, 10% is lost, 100% is lost. So everything that Jesus is doing is trying to get us to this crescendo of the third story. And it starts in verse 11, and that's where we're gonna pick up. Jesus continued, there was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, father, give me my share of the estate. So he divided his property between them. Every single person listening to this story, listening to Jesus tell this story in the original audience

would have been shocked. They literally would have gasped hearing this because of how shocking and hurtful this would have been for a son to do this. More hurtful and shocking than the Luca trade, if it's easy for us to imagine. The son, he isn't simply just saying, listen, I want some money. I want you to imagine if one of your kids came up to you and said something like this. I want what belongs to you. I want your stuff, but I don't want a relationship with you. I wanna go. And then comes an even bigger shock to the original audience. The father actually grants his request. There's a great book written by Kenneth Bailey where he's a man who actually lived, a Christian who lived in the Middle East for decades, and he wrote a book saying that he went around to places in the world that still kind of look like Jesus times, where people are still shepherds and things like that, and he interviewed person after person and said, I'm gonna read a story to you, and I want you to tell me how you would react if this happened in your town, or if this happened in your family. And person after person, when he asked,

what would the father do here if this happened? What would a father not only probably do, but be expected to do? And the answer over and over was, the father would beat his son. The father would disown his son and would cast him out of the family, and not only the family, but the community. This is what the father's response would be expected to be. But he doesn't do that. He divides his property between them. And to give his son his inheritance, his inheritance wouldn't have been maybe like some of our inheritance, maybe where it's very liquid. We can easily go to a checking account or something and give out some cash. All of his assets would have been tied up in his family land. And if you've read the Bible at all, if you look in the Old Testament at all, the promised land, the covenant land, passing from generation to generation was everything. The son is basically asking for the father, not just to give him money, but he's asking the father to give from his livelihood, his legacy, his very identity. Verse 12 has an awesome clue of the significance of this because it says that the father divided his property. And Jesus could have used a lot of words in Greek to express the idea of property,

but the word he uses is bione, where we get the word biology or bios, which literally means life. And so the son has said to the father, I want you to tear your life apart for me. And the father, shockingly, does so because of how much he loves his son. Verse 13, not long after that, the younger son got together all he had and he set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild. living. It's easy for me as someone reading this, even for the first time, or reading this for the 100th time to think, why is the younger son doing this? This seems so obviously dumb. We can all see where this is headed, but for the sake of this sermon, I tried to picture what could have possibly made the younger son want to do this. Why does the younger son want to leave? And I think after processing it, I think it's because the younger son believed something that's pretty common. He believed life was better out there. If I can just get out there, life will be better. If I can just get somewhere where I can make my own choices, where I can determine for myself who I am, when I can get away from the father's authority. And whenever we put it like that,

that sounds a whole lot less dumb, and it sounds a whole lot more like something you or I have done before, which might mean it's still dumb, by the way. But our first big idea, and something that I'm gonna try and show, it's not just in this section, but it's gonna get explored over and over again throughout this, is that you are more lost than you think. It is basically a fact in social science, everywhere you looked, that we as people are very bad at recognizing when we're wrong at something. I remember in school having to read a book called Being Wrong by Katherine Schulz, and I don't remember a ton from the book. I remember some examples, but I mostly remember her thesis. And in preparing for this, this came to mind. Now, by the way, any of you who have a bingo card for Drew is preaching this week and know one of the squares is he's gonna have a super long quote, get ready to check off that square of your bingo card. So here it is. A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right,

basically all the time, about basically everything, about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient. That's a good quote. That was worth it. Drew, that was really worth a long quote. Thank you, I appreciate it. Okay. If we as people always think we're right, then it's almost impossible for us to not realize when we're lost. Let's keep reading, verse 14. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in the whole country and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. I wanna pause here

because I think there's a good word for us from Jesus that we need to notice. Pay attention that the younger son's situation is both self-inflicted and circumstantial. Jesus says after he had spent everything, that is the result of his bad choices. And it says then there was a famine, a severe famine. That is something completely outside of his control. Jesus is subtly teaching us and reminding us that our deepest seasons of lostness are usually a combination of our own choices and stuff that we can't control. I don't know who needs to hear that today, but I think sometimes, and I've been like this, I've been judgmental and I've looked at people in lostness and I've thought, man, they really screwed up their life and I give all the blame to that person when really there was probably some circumstantial in it. And I know there's probably gonna come times in my life where I look at where I'm at and I think, man, this is all circumstantial, all this stuff I'm going through, I had nothing to do with it and I have to be arrinded. No, you probably made some choices that led to this place.

I don't know who needs to hear that. But we see at this moment, what we call rock bottom. The son is hungry, he's alone, he's ashamed and for all the Jewish audience listening to this, he's unclean, feeding pigs and living with them. And every single person who is listening to Jesus tell the story is thinking this one thing. Good, that guy deserves this. Did you see what he did? Did you see what he told his father? This is what he had coming. And not a single person listening to the story is thinking, man, I really hope he turns it around and comes home. And yet, that's where the story goes. Verse 17, when he came to his senses, he said, how many of my father's hired servants have food to spare? And here I am starving to death. I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. So he got up and he went to his father.

Here in verse 17, if you were to step back and look at this first act that we're focusing on, the dead center of it, the turning point, the hinge on which the whole story turns is this one line, when he came to his senses. I need you to hear that. I want you to think about, have you had times in your life when you came to your senses about something? I've got a couple examples that I wanna just share with you and the first one, I've got a picture to show you. This is me and my wife Catherine at summer camp when we were in high school. And I know what you're probably thinking, is he gonna tell us about how crazy he was to let his hair get that long? No, that's not what I'm pointing out. What I'm pointing out is, you may be thinking, why in the heat of summer is Drew wearing like these baggy, khaki pants to summer camp? But what you don't know, and the next picture's gonna show you, those are cargo shorts, okay? Look at those, man. Every time I see this picture, I think, me and all my friends thought those were the coolest things. We thought we were in style wearing those and now I look back and go, what was I thinking? And thank the Lord, either I came to my senses or I got married and Catherine said, you're not wearing that anymore, right? But I know, I know, every single one of you

could pull out a picture of a time where you could look at your hair and what it looked like or you could look at your clothes and you could say, what were we thinking? What was going on? Why did we think that looked good? By the way, it makes me wonder, what are we wearing today that people 20 years from now are gonna go, what were they thinking? And I've got a good guess. It's all these sunglasses I see teenage boys wearing that look like ski goggles on their whole face. Like, parents will be like, what were we thinking with those sunglasses? But anyway, that's just a guess. There's probably some other examples. When you are lost, the first place that you have to start to come back home is in your mind. Before the son ever takes a step back home, something changes in his thinking. The word that we see throughout the New Testament for repentance, if you've ever heard that word before, over and over, Peter in Acts says, repent and be baptized, every one of you. That word, repent, it literally means a change of mind for the better. Repentance, if you had asked me as a kid growing up, I probably would have told you repentance means stopping doing bad things. But, and by the way, that's important,

but repentance is not just stopping bad behaviors, but it begins with starting to think new thoughts. This is why Paul talks about this over and over. He writes to the church in Corinth, take every thought captive. He writes to the church in Rome and he says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. He writes to his friend Timothy in 2 Timothy and he says, gently instruct those who oppose the truth. Perhaps God will change those people's hearts and they will learn the truth. Then they will come to their senses and escape from the devil's trap. For they have been held captive by him to do whatever he wants. But by the way, when we read the story of the prodigal son, we think it's whatever we want to do. My question that has been really plaguing me during out this whole thing, the thing I wanna figure out is, I wanna know what led the son to come to his senses. And I wanna know this because I'm hoping that someone listening to me right now at one of our campuses needs to come to their senses. I'm quite confident that there's at least one person. And I don't know the answer, like Jesus doesn't tell us this is what made him come to his senses. But I have two really good guesses based on the story. And the first one is, is that he finally saw the emptiness of the far country.

He had been there long enough to see, what I thought was gonna give me freedom has not satisfied me. The life that I imagined was gonna bring fulfillment has not delivered. Everything that he thought would give him what he wanted has now left him empty, ashamed, alone and hungry. And the second thing that I think helped him come to his senses is that he finally noticed just how good his father's house was. So this is one of those sermons where I've actually got two invitations for you. And here's the first, will you come to your senses? You may be sitting there thinking, I'm not lost. I don't need this point of the story. Remember, you are more lost than you think. You may be thinking, well, I haven't lived a life like that. And friends, you need to hear that younger sons aren't just addicts and runaways. The core lostness of the son is not his wild living. Notice, Jesus actually doesn't give us any details about what wild living looks like. He's leaving it open to all of us to go, that could look like so many things. The key lostness of the son is that he wanted to live on his terms away from the father, which is the core sin, the first sin on page one of the Bible. You may be thinking, I'm not lost, Drew. I'm finding myself.

I'm on a journey of self-discovery. But Jesus says that the younger son was lost, by the way, he's actually lost. they're gonna say the younger son was dead because you can't find yourself in the far country. Jesus is all in favor of self-discovery and of you finding yourself, but he knows you can only find yourself in the Father's house. As Cooper said so well two weeks ago when talking about identity, your true identity is who the Father says you are, and you need to be in his house so that you can hear him tell you that over and over. And so now the younger son, he's come to his senses, praise God, and he's starting to rehearse his speech for the Father, and he sets off for home, and we will get to see who the Father says that he is. Continuing in verse 20, but while he was still a long way off, by the way, that sounded so Texan, but while, while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. The son said to him, I picture the son's face is pressed up against his father's chest, tears on his eyes,

Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. But the father said to his servants, quick, bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found. So they began to celebrate. That's good news. Our next big idea is the beating heart of the greatest story ever told by the greatest storyteller who ever lived. You are more loved than you believe. The father hasn't forgotten his son. The father hasn't moved on. That's hey, good riddance, I'm moving on. He's been scanning the horizon every day and every night. I can just picture him doing all his chores, hearing a sound and thinking, wait, is that him? Every moment he hears something, he hears a cart coming down the road and thinking, is that him? He's been waiting and hoping for his child to come home. And when he sees him, he is filled with compassion. He runs, he throws his arms around him, he kisses him. And every one of those actions would have probably been even more shocking to Jesus's audience than the first part of the story.

Distinguished fathers did not run back then. Dishonored fathers did not pursue rebellious children. That's back then and that happens today too. And the father doesn't care what people think if it means he has a chance to have his child home again in his arms. The son, he begins his carefully rehearsed speech. He says, father, I've sinned against heaven and against you, but he can't even finish it. The father literally interrupts him before he gets to any part about being a servant now. There are no questions, there's no lecture, no probation, no repayment plan. The father doesn't even address the son. His words, his actions are loud enough. He addresses the servants and everyone around to publicly make sure the son knows not only are you reinstated with me, but hey, everybody, this son is good with me now. Let's throw a feast and celebrate. The father displays the gospel of Jesus Christ by saying, I'm not waiting until you've paid off your debt. I'm gonna pay it. I'm not asking you to wear your shame. I will cover you with my robe. The God of ages stepped down from glory to bear my sin and wear my shame. The cross has spoken, I am forgiven. The king of kings calls me his own. By the way, I'm not gonna sing,

so there's another box on the bingo card. You don't have to check off that one, but. Isaiah 61, the prophet speaks to this. I am overwhelmed with joy in the Lord my God, for he has dressed me with the clothing of salvation and draped me in a robe of righteousness. This kind of love and grace is crazy, and the audience would have been expected to protest. Listen, if fathers did that, our whole society would fall apart. You just can't do that. By the way, if you come back next week, you will see that someone in the story does protest at this kind of love. But it brings me to the title of this parable, what we've traditionally called the parable of the prodigal son. All the summer when people have asked, what's your series about? I'll tell them the parable of the prodigal son because it's easy for us to know, oh, I know what he's talking about. But that's actually a very unfortunate name for this sermon for a variety of reasons. One, there's two sons in the story, and we're gonna read about both. But another reason why is because the word prodigal, does anybody know what the word prodigal actually means? If you had asked me when I was in middle school, I would have said, I have no idea it's about

that one guy in Luke. I would have said, I guess based on context clues, it maybe means, prodigal means someone who runs away and does a whole bunch of bad things. What the word literally means is someone who is recklessly spendthrift. Say that with me, recklessly spendthrift. And so maybe we've given the wrong person this title all along. Because the irony is is that the younger son may have been prodigal with his inheritance, but the father is even more prodigal with his love toward his son. And God is prodigal with his love towards you and me. I do this thing with my kids, I've done it ever since they were born, where we'll just be sitting around in the living room, or we'll be out and about or something, and I'll say, hey, Marshall, come here. And I'll call my son, Marshall, and he'll come and I'll whisper in his ear, I just want you to know I love you so much. And he'll kind of smile, and then he'll run off and keep playing. But now it's gotten to the point where I do that enough that maybe I'll call my daughter, Landry Jo, hey, come here, I've gotta tell you something. And she'll get halfway and she goes, are you gonna tell me you love me? And then she'll go, pfft, Dad, and then run off.

Or what'll happen is they'll come all the way and I'll tell them, hey, I just want you to know how much I love you. And it's like, Dad, stop, you tell us that all the time. And I know, by the way, nothing makes me happier than looking up and seeing Catherine after that because we just know there's no way we could say that too much. There's no way we can make enough deposits in their life of who we see them as, how much we love them, because there is going to come a day where my kids do something or where something happens in their life and they will think, I know Dad's told me a million times how much he loves me, but does he still love me now? Does he still love me after what I've done, after who I've become? And by the way, that's the same question that we think all the time about God. We think to ourselves, I know God says throughout his Bible, I know I've been taught Jesus loves me, but does he still love me now after what I've done? And God shows us through his son Jesus. Jesus tells us through the cross and through this story, there is no sin that can keep me from loving you and calling you forward and whispering in your ear, I just want you to know how much I love you. There is no person that you have become and no life that you have lived that will stop him from running to you

and throwing his arms around you and saying, this is my son, this is my daughter in whom I love. He cannot, there's nothing you've done that he cannot run to and restore. Paul writes in Ephesians three, he's desperate for the people in the church in Ephesus to recognize how knowing and grasping the love of God can transform your life. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. And to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. I've got kind of one last section of this sermon. I think we've seen now the evidence of how God loves us more than we can believe. And there's one more section in the story that I have never noticed before that I think is more evidence of just how much God loves us. Luke describes the son's actions after he comes to his senses in one simple sentence in verse 20, so he got up and went to his father. I think Jesus, with this story, as a master storyteller, is trying to make the point that you are closer to the Father's house than you imagine. Sometimes after we come to our senses, by the way, praise God when we come to our senses. After first service, I talked to a man in the atrium

who literally came up to me, said his name, and he said, I just want you to know, I remember where I was when I came to my senses, and he started crying and he couldn't say anything else. Praise God if that has happened. But sometimes when that happens, we look around and we think we're so far off that we make coming back home so complicated. We think, I've gotta clean up my life. We think, I've gotta prove that my transformation is sincere. I've gotta earn my way back. But in the story, the journey from the pigsty to the Father's embrace is one sentence. So he got up and went to his father, that's it. Jesus could have elaborated when he described the journey back. He could have extended the story and told all sorts of ways that the Son did all these things before he got back home. But he doesn't. He gives us one line. And so some of you listening to me today, I pray that you come to your senses. And you can tell that the far country is not living up. You can tell that out there has not been better. You're starting to really believe that true life is found with the Father. But you haven't gotten up yet because you don't think you deserve it.

A book that a lot of me and my friends were reading was when I was in college, had a quote that always stuck with me. It says, you choose the love you think you deserve. You think you've wandered too far. You think there's still too much for God to fix before He could ever welcome you. But listen to the story. The journey home is shorter than you imagine. Get up, go to the Father. You will discover He has been watching for you all along. He'll run to meet you before you can explain yourself. He will embrace you in His arms before you can earn anything. He will call you son. He will declare you daughter. And He will do it in front of everyone so that everyone knows who you are in Him. And He will throw a party because what was lost will be found and because the love of God has the power to bring the dead back to life again. And all we have to do is get up and come to the Father. So please don't spend one more day in the far country. Let's pray. Father God, this whole story is just one big love story to us. The whole Bible is just one big story, God, of you over and over whispering in our ear, I just want you to know how much I love you.

I just want you to know how much I wanna be with you. I just want you to know that you're my son. I want you to know you're my daughter and that's all that matters. And yet we make it so complicated, God. God, I pray that you would just speak to the hearts of someone at one of our campuses, someone listening online, that they would come to their senses and that they would actually believe the truth, that it is not far to get to you, that you are right there. You tell us, God, that you are closer to us than our very breath. If we would just turn and come to you, you are waiting. God, I pray that we can see that, that your spirit would move at all of our campuses and it's in your sons and we pray, amen.