[The Love Of God] The Prodigal Son Sample

The Older Brother

Maybe we have been the kind of people who have always followed God and never drifted away from Him—never ventured into the distant country. Maybe we are like the older brother. He did everything the father wanted, but with a hard heart. An obedient life with a hard heart is totally empty. Maybe we have been following God and doing the right thing for decades because our mom and dad did it, and our grandparents did it. We have always been church people. We have all the right things checked on our lists, but there is a distance in our relationship with God.

Our heart is not soft toward God. We have got rules, but we do not have a relationship with the Father. We do all these things right, but we are not spending time with God. We are not praying; we are not fasting; we are not reading the Bible; we are not yearning for a relationship with God. We are good people, but we have a hard heart. We are wondering why our lives feel so empty.

What we miss in this story is that the older brother took his part of the inheritance, too. He was just as greedy as the prodigal son. In Jewish culture, whenever you had two sons, two-thirds of the assets went to the older son, and one-third of the assets went to the younger son. The older son got more than what the younger son wasted. However, because of the lack of relationship with his father, there was bitterness hidden in his heart. He was upset and hardened. 

On the inside his heart was hard, despite his outward obedience. How does that happen? It happens when we begin to lack gratitude. Instead of being grateful for all that he had, the older son was bitter because he did not get one fattened calf and a party. Whenever we lack gratitude, we begin to have entitlement. We are not grateful for what we have and feel entitled to what we do not have. We expect things should be done for us and given to us, just like what the older brother thought.

The older brother did not know that everything his father had was already his. He could not thankful for what he had, he could not be happy with his father, he could not love his brother—because his heart was hard. 

Thought of the Day: We are all God’s children. Jesus gave His life for all of us. All He wants in return is for us to love Him with all our hearts—soft hearts— and for us to love each other with the same love He first loved us. May we always be grateful and celebrate what He celebrates with joy!