Selfishness With God: The Prodigal Sons
On a whim today, I bought a book that I’ve been hearing great things about, The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller. I have to tell you, that after reading a third of it, that I am being rocked to my core.
Why? Because it strikes deep in the heart of what our motivations are with God. If you’ve known me long enough, you know that I’m someone who tries to get beyond the surface of problems and find the real root of the matter. It’s like a father who gets upset with his son, when in reality, there are pressures at work and he’s taking it out on the child. Getting upset with the son is the surface issue, the real root of the problem is what’s going on at work.
The reason The Prodigal God is rocking my core, is because it’s really making me look past the "surface" issues of my relationship with God and striking the root. If you’ve never heard the story of "The Prodigal Son," it talks about how this man has two sons. One son decides that he doesn’t want anything to do with the family and asks for his share of the inheritance (1/3 of his father’s properties) and goes off and squanders it on prostitutes and all sorts of non-kosher things. One day he realizes what he has done and wants to come back and work for his father to repay the inheritance he squandered. Finally he gathers up the courage to go back to his father and as the father sees his son over the hill, he goes running towards his son, forgives him, puts the best clothes on him, throws a big party.
What we’ve forgotten about here is the older brother, who’s been with the father all along. He’s the "good" one who has done everything right, played by the rules.
Can you guess where this is going? If you’ve ever grown up with siblings, you know that sometimes it can seem as if a parent is giving preferential treatment to one of the siblings, it doesn’t seem fair! And it doesn’t seem fair to the older brother that he’s stuck around all this time, done all the right things, and his younger brother gets to come back scot-free.
What struck me about this book and about the story of "The Prodigal Son" is that both sons had bad motives. The younger son decided to go his own way, embarrass the family, and lost his portion of the inheritance. But what we fail to forget is that the older brother is just as guilty. Why? Because his motives for doing all the "right things" were to look after his own interests, protecting the 2/3 inheritance that was his. Neither son really cared for their father, they just wanted the rewards that came from the inheritance.
Keller goes on to relate our relationship with God to the two sons. There are some who go off and break all the rules and bask in God’s grace when they come to repentance. Then there are those who do everything they can to not sin and do certain things to essentially earn brownie points with God. Why is this wrong? It’s wrong because their motivation for obeying God and doing certain things isn’t out of respect and reverence for God, but they use it like a rewards card. When things don’t go their way they come crying to God, "Why God? After all I’ve done for you, why would you let this happen?"
Do you see how selfish that is? They weren’t trying to please and serve God, they were doing it to serve their own selfish interests.
As I was processing this, Ephesians 2:8-9 came to mind, "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast."
Or to quote from The Message (a paraphrase), "Saving is all his [God's] idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing."
I was talking to my friend Faith the other day about how I had this radical change of mindset regarding work (this was prior to reading this book). I told her that I began to realize that I didn’t work for Grace Community Church, but that I worked for Jesus. To which she replied, "I like to think that I work with Jesus." Combined with what Ephesians 2:8-9 said, my viewpoint was changed. If I work for Jesus, that implies an employee/boss scenario and I’m working hard to keep my job. BUT, if I work with Jesus, I can almost hear him saying, "Hey Kiel, here’s what I’m doing, let’s work on this together!" And I have to tell you, I’d rather work with Jesus than for Jesus. Do you see my point?
The parable and this book are causing me to re-think how I relate to Jesus. For example, instead of working with kids at Shepherd Community because I believe it will please God; I now work with kids at Shepherd and enjoy it because I know it pleases God. Instead of going to school so that I can be "good enough" to do God’s work, I take comfort in knowing that God delights in me with or without Bible college… so I should delight in learning. When I feel like I’m doing all the "right things," I shouldn’t get disheartened when someone "less deserving" gets ahead in life, because I’m not doing the "right things" to earn God’s favor.
Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s all about perspective, it’s all about attitude. This new "revelation" that I’m having doesn’t discount what I’ve done in the past for, or should I say, with God. I know in my heart that good things have come out of those endeavours. But I also realize I’m growing and that God is showing me new ways to look at things.
So I have to give thanks to God. After seven years of being at church and over five years in Bible college, I’m starting to get it. 