Found - Worth Celebrating

This message takes us deep into the parable of the lost sons, showing how both the rebellious and the religious can find themselves estranged from the Father. Through personal story, Scripture and the beauty of grace, we’re reminded that God doesn’t shame us — He welcomes us, restores us and calls us His own. It’s a powerful invitation to stop performing, stop pretending, and start living in the freedom of the Father’s heart.

Transcript

In 2001 my dad invited us all as a family to go on a cruise together, the whole family. I think there's a picture here of the family. We're all looking a bit younger back then but all my brothers and sisters we all went. But my dad announced that the cruise was going to be to the Balkans. I was thinking, dad, couldn't you have gone to the Caribbean or something like that?

It's a bit hotter. Rather than going to the Balkans. It sounds cold there. Yes, but he's Scottish and he likes the cold and I'm Scottish and it was a free trip so I went as well. And I had recently started a new job coming on staff at MKCC as it was then Venture Church it is now.

Just a few months earlier I'd come on and started this and I was having second thoughts. I used to work in finance, liked my job, loved my job, was reasonably good at it and I was struggling a little bit in this new role. It felt like my whole personality and gifting wasn't really suited to life as a pastor, you know, I mean I'm not really a people person. Okay, you know what I mean? Kissing and hugging people, not really me, that's Mark.

And so I'm happy in my own skin and you know, I mean I'm an introvert. I'm not very. I like to be by myself with a book or something like that, reading it. So being with lots of people a lot of the time and speaking to lots of people, it tires me out. It doesn't mean I don't like doing it but it just tires me out and so I need to recover.

And I've also got a spiritual gift. It's not mentioned in the Bible, Paul didn't mention it. I've got a spiritual gift of opening my mouth and putting my foot in it. Do it regularly, all the time. And I've also got, I believe, a God given innate talent of critical thinking.

I don't mean being critical about things but looking at situation and looking at things and trying to make them better or this will happen or that will happen. And that was always a useful thing in the job I was in. But here I was now working as a pastor who wasn't so keen on people, kept putting my foot in my mouth and was a bit critical. Doesn't really go very well, does it? And so I was really thinking do I go home from this two week holiday and go back to finance because I was equipped for it and I was really good at it as well?

Or do I stay being a pastor, which I'm not really equipped for, and I'm not sure if I'm really good at. But honestly, beneath all that, there was something else going on.

I was born in 1963. Makes me 62 now. And 63 is the sort of crossover point between the baby boomers and Generation X is the next one. And that's like, in the middle. And, you know, my generation, particularly those who were grown up in church, we kept on being told what we should do, we knew what we should do, but we continually failed at doing what we should do.

And then everybody told us off for not doing what we should be doing, that we knew we should be doing. You with me. And it was like you told exactly what I mean, there was no question of. This is what the Bible says. You've got to do it, and when you don't do it, we're going to beat you up.

And, you know, when Jesus came, he came and he mentions. It's mentioned in John 1, I think it is that Jesus came in truth and grace, truth and grace. And unfortunately, and this happens in church all the time, there's this pendulum that swings. My generation that was growing up, we grew up under truth, and we'd almost detach grace from truth. So there was no grace, no love.

It was just truth. And if you don't measure up to the truth, you're in trouble. And who knows? It's very difficult to measure up to the truth. Yes.

And so we grew up with guilt. We were experts at guilt. And, you know, that's my generation. What I see now, just as an aside, is that we've moved and we swung from this thing of detaching grace. We have now elevated God's love, his one attribute of love, over everything else.

And we've detached a bit of truth, and we've made God's truth our truth. You have the words. It's my truth. It must be right. All truth is subjective.

And we've detached truth from God's truth and made it our truth. And then we've elevated God's love way up above everything else. It actually happened in the Bible. It's called antinomianism. That's a long word.

And we've got to understand that God is love, but he's also truth, and his truth remains forever. Doesn't change with current situation or circumstance. So we've got to work with God's truth and God's love. One of the problems with guilt is that it morphs into something else. It's called shame.

So we know what we should do. We can't do it. We get told we're not doing it and then we are not only guilty, we are shameful because we believe we should be better. So we retreat into ourselves and hide and put on a mask. Haven't you ever been there?

And I was thinking, can I put on a mask and be a pastor? I'm not sure I can live in that place because sometimes I'm in hiding. So I'm in this two weeks holiday and I'm trying to decide what I should do. Do I stick with something that I'm really good at and qualified for or do I do something that's going to be a test for me and I'm not sure where I should go. And so every morning on this cruise, the great thing about a cruise, you wake up in a different country every day.

It's fantastic. Try one if you I've never been on one. And this day we were in St. Petersburg and so I crept out the back of the at six o' clock in the morning, Nikola and the kids were still sleeping. I went up to the stern of the boat and just sat there looking out over the sea and had my breakfast. Just lovely, just a great time.

Got my Bible and I had this book with me that I'd read before, but I was reading again. It's called what's so Amazing About Grace? By a guy called Philip Yancey. So here I am in this place where I'm struggling with all these things about what should I do, where should I go, how can I work this out? And I was reading through the Bible and I was reading this book, I was reading about the lost son.

And that day I was reading not about a lost son, but a lost daughter. And he tells this little story in his book and I'm going to read a little bit to you. But there's this young girl and she's a bit rebellious and finally she leaves her mom and dad and runs away from Traverse City to Detroit and Michigan. And after a period of time being there with nobody around to help her or care for her, she ends up in the wrong company. And basically she ends up in what we would call now, in a situation of grooming gangs.

And she gets locked into this situation and after many months she's sitting alone by herself, being abused almost nightly, thinking, even the dogs, even my dad's dogs get treated better than I'm getting treated now. And so she thinks I need to go back home. But I don't know if my mom or dad will accept me. I don't know if they'll want me back. So she rings up no mobile phones back.

Then she rings up and rings a couple of times and the answer phone clicks in and she hangs up and then she rings again. The same happens and then she rings for the third time and she thinks this time I'll leave a message. So she leaves a message, says, mom, dad, I'm jumping on the bus. I'm going to be home at this time. If you want me back then turn be at the bus station, but if you're not there, don't worry, I'll just keep on going up to Canada.

And so she's on the bus going home and it finally dawns on her what if they never got my message? What happens if they never got that message and I just keep on going to Canada? So she's working all this through in her head. Let me read this bit to you. When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, 15 minutes, folks, that's all we've got here.

15 minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smooths her hair and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and wonders if her parents will notice if they're there. She walks into the terminal, not knowing what to expect. Not for a thousand scenes she had played out in her mind could prepare her for what she sees.

There in the concrete walls and plastic chairs. Bus terminal of Traverse City, Michigan stands a group of 40 brothers and sisters and great aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmother and great grandmother to boot. They're all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noisemakers. And trapped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer generated banner which reads welcome home. Out of the crowd of well wishers breaks her dad.

She stares out through the tears in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech. Dad, I'm sorry. I know. He interrupts her. Hush, child, we've got no time for that.

No time for apologies. You'll be late for the party.

A banquet is waiting for you at home. Isn't that amazing? The lost son that was found. The lost daughter that was found. And there I was, going out on a trip with my dad around Petersburg with his stories floating around my head.

And one of the places that we went to in St. Petersburg was the Hermitage Museum, full of incredible artworks. We took us hours to go around it and see all the statutes and everything. It's just fantastic place. We almost finished the trip and our guide was taking us out. And I turned the corner and there was this massive painting, 2 1/2ft meters high by 2 meters wide, painted by Rembrandt 330 years before, called the Prodigal or lost Homecoming.

And it was like, God, you're speaking to me. You spoke to me in the morning. And now I'm seeing the most incredible sight to see the father welcoming home, even though he still smelt like pig unclean. But he's welcoming him back in, not to the position of a servant, but that of a son. He brings him in, he doesn't give him a station of a servant, he gives him station of a son.

And earlier in the story that we read earlier, it says the father, when he sees the son a long way off, he runs out to him. And you know, I mean, even to the people listening to him, this is crazy, because old distinguished fathers didn't run anywhere because they had to get the robe up and everything round about and then the legs exposed and running down the road, it looks a bit undignified. So they didn't do it. But there the father is going, that's my son. I'm off to see him.

But there's another little thing that we miss in the story as he's telling this, because everybody around him would have realized that there's actually a little ceremony that goes on in that culture at the time about when people do that and walk away from the village and walk away from family and they're asham. And if they ever come back, the ceremony is that they take this red pot and they go out to meet the person coming back and they smash the red pot at the person's feet to say they're still shamed and they're not welcome. And everybody in that audience would have been thinking that because it was part of their culture and we miss it today. But I think as the son saw the father running towards him with his legs all over the place, I think he's also looking at his arm and his hand to see if there's a red pot there, because he's not sure if he's going to get shamed and sent away. But when he arrives, he thrusts his arms around him and pulls him close and pulls him back in.

He'd gone off to some strange place, got in all sorts of ways, but the father is still pursuing him. And God was saying to me, I reaffirm your status. Put on the ring of authority. You Put on the shoes. You're not a slave, you're a son, not a slave.

Special meal. All that stuff was going on. So that's the lost son that we know so much about. But it's interesting to me, and I understand that it's an unwinnable battle. But we always call this story the Parable of the Lost Son or the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Yes, I think it's misnamed, because if you even just look at the Bible and read what Luke says about it, and he said there was a man who had two sons, not one son. He had two sons. So this is the parable of the two sons we've talked a little bit about the one that went away, but there was also a son at home all the time as well. And this is a parable not of one lost son, but of two lost sons. Both were lost, both were estranged in different ways.

Because there was two audiences listening to Jesus at that time. If we go back to the start of Luke 15, it says now the tax collectors and sinners. That's one audience. Yes. Were drawing near to hear him.

And the Pharisees and the scribes, they grumbled. So you've got these two audiences. You've got the tax collectors and sinners. Then you've got the religious people, the scribes who wrote the law. And the Pharisees were like pastors who helped the people understand what the law said.

Yes, like they were preaching. So you got these two audiences in the different place. And the religious people, the Pharisees, the pastors, the. They were grumbling that these other people came to Jesus. Strange, isn't it?

It's madness to think that it worked like that. So they had these two audiences, those who were looking for God and those whose job it was to help people find God. But the job of the people, the people whose job it was to help people find God had misconstrued God. And so we're giving the people a wrong picture of God. And so the whole thing of God had all got mixed up and it had become warped and different.

And Jesus told these stories to reframe in people's minds what God was like. I'm sure you've all picked up things along the way in church or wherever about what you think about God. And sometimes what we think about God is not who God is. Yes, you're looking at me a bit. It's only me that's experienced that.

And sometimes we've got to be helped to understand how this we've got to change our ideas and understand what God is really like. And these people had completely misunderstood what God was like. And he's trying to help them to understand that the Son of Man came to seek and to save that was lost. It's like a crazy shepherd that's got 100 sheep. He loses 1, he leaves 99 and he goes after the 1, leaving the 99 by themselves.

Crazy idea. It's about a woman that takes all the stuff out of her house and throws every bit of belonging that she has onto the street so everybody else could nick it to find one coin. And now he turns down. And, you know, at this moment in time, I believe he turned away from the tax collectors and sinners. When he now starts to move from the one lost son to the other lost son, he actually turns and looks full at the Pharisees and scribes and he starts to speak to them and trying to help them understand what God is like.

And he's almost saying, this is you.

And he starts to talk to them. I haven't got time to read it all through today, but what you find is the father welcomes him back and then the brother, the elder brother, comes home and he's full of jealousy and resentment towards the other brother. He's going, dad, you killed the best calf and you didn't even give me a goat to share. Maybe everybody liked goat curry. I don't know.

You didn't do anything. He's filled with anger, it says, and bitterness. And you see, the thing about this is both sons were lost.

The son who stayed at home had access to everything the father had, but yet he didn't access the father's heart. He didn't understand what the father was like, and he had a misconstrued idea of what the father was all about. You know, it's possible to live in the same place with somebody but have no intimacy. It is possible to be around somebody, to be near somebody and not be connected. Proximity doesn't mean intimacy.

And I believe that we need to see lost people come back to God that have like the testimony we had today. An atheist who came to God, who was welcomed into his family, not beat up or kicked because of all the thoughts and everything he had. But we need to see people like that coming into God's kingdom. But also, I think sometimes we who are associated with all the trappings of Christianity can think our proximity is about intimacy. And it's anything but.

I mean, yesterday I said to Nicola, Nicola, let's pop down to Nero's and have a coffee together and a chat. So we drove down to Nero's and sat across from each other, table in between. And then we both got our phones out and scrolled for 15 minutes and then said, we're finished. We'll go home now.

You know, proximity doesn't equal intimacy. You can live in your father's heart and still. So you can live in your father's house and still miss your father's heart.

Sorry, I'm pausing particularly just to let you think about that for a few seconds.

You could live in the father's heart, father's house, but. But still miss the father's heart.

We can have proximity, but not intimacy and friends. I don't want us to live like that as individuals or as a church or his people together. That we need to understand that even though we're close, that's not enough. We need to capture God's heart.

And when we see somebody coming to Jesus, we throw a crazy party. Hey, the angels do. And we need to as well.

The grace of God is probably the most unbelievable thought of the whole of the universe. That we who were sinners were not treated in the way that we should be treated. But in his grace, he sent his son to die in our place. And his wrath and his anger was poured out on his son so that when he looks at us, he looks at us with love and grace.

And that love and that grace should drive us to pursue God with all our hearts. You will do more for love than you will ever do for fear.

And a glimpse of God's grace in that Hermitage museum crumbled my heart yet again.

And I understood that I was looking at what I want and what I had rather than what God had.

I was thinking that God was disappointed in me.

But the truth is he loved me.

So if you're a million miles from God this morning and for some reason you've turned up here today, it doesn't matter what you've done. God's grace is waiting for you. He's not going to send you away. He's not going to smash a pot at your feet. He's going to put his arms around you and welcome you in.

And then his elder brothers, we have a choice. We already know the Father. We're around him every day.

We see his face. We hear his words.

We see everybody else interacting with him. It's all going on.

The elder brother had captured Heart of the Father. I would urge you not to become familiar with the things of God. Father God, we thank you for opening your heart to us when we didn't deserve it. We thank you for your grace and we thank you for your love. Thank you that you pull us in close and you're always ready to forgive us.

Help us up. Go today to live in the beautiful light of your incredible grace into our lives. In Jesus name. Hey, if you want prayer today in any way, there's going to be some people down my left and my right. Please come down.

Please don't rush off. They would love to pray for you. God bless you. Have a great week.

Sam.