Feel It In Your Bones

Luke 15:11-19

One of life’s big temptations is to not hurt, to not take the hard route or the narrow way or the suffering. Why persevere when you can escape? Why work for something when you can have it right now?

This is exactly what happens with the prodigal son in Luke 15. He’s out working in the field. He’s drenched in sweat and has a cramp in his back. He’s filthy. He lifts his head to feel a cool breeze and notices that none of the laborers in the next field is working. Everyone is milling around, drinking cold water, and eating fruit. Everything looks better over there, and they’re only hired workers….

If I’m a son and all this is really mine, why do I have to do all of this hard work? It would be so freeing to have my inheritance now. That’s what I want. I want what is rightfully mine, and I want it now.

That’s the lie the son fell for, and that’s a lie we’ve all fallen for.

So the prodigal son runs. Life is good at first. But he soon squanders all his possessions on wanton living. He discovers that the boundaries and the life that his father had given him were as good as it gets. Back home, he had been in the middle of everything he ever needed only to assume he was missing out on something better. When you drill down into his motives, he wanted freedom. That’s code for he wanted control.

The prodigal has all the blessings of a loving and even wealthy family. He knows what’s coming to him, but it’s not enough that his future is secure. He’s more concerned about his now. The son wants his share of the inheritance without submitting to the authority that would be in place until his father died. In other words, when he asked his dad for his inheritance, he communicated, “I wish you were dead.”

Too often we want what comes along with God but we don’t really want God. We want the peace and comfort and joy, but more than anything we want control. The way we live shows that we don’t want God to control our lives, and yet we still have the audacity to wonder, “How can I get all of that peace stuff too?”

The giant lie at the end of all of our own plans is that they’re still not going to take us far enough to satisfy. Usually when we’re running from God, the end game is not in mind. The now is in mind. It’s like watching the Epic Fail videos on social media. You see the teenager on the roof and the trampoline below him, you watch the horror unfold after he jumps, and you wonder, “What did he think was going to happen when he jumped? There is a place you have to go after hitting a trampoline from so high above, and that place can’t be good.”

Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son so we can see ourselves in it. The prodigal wanted the stuff of God. He just didn’t want God. He wanted the stuff of family, but he didn’t want family. He felt that the walls around his world were there to keep him in. He didn’t realize what those walls were keeping out.