Is God's Heart Your Heart?

I’m not sure if I have ever had so many things happen in a short time that would point to this being the very passage I need to teach from today.

For example, about 10 days ago we received a prayer letter from missionaries we support in the Netherlands, the Van Dillens. They had mentioned in a previous letter that two of their young adult sons were estranged from God and largely estranged from them. I’m always concerned about the spiritual welfare of the children of believers, so I replied to them to ask if there had been any contact with their two sons at Christmas time. I immediately received a very sad reply from Sandra Van Dillen that it had been minimal. One of her sons only contacts them when he needs someone to watch his dog. The other had blocked them from all his social media accounts, had sent back the monetary Christmas gift they had sent to him, and had been bad-mouthing his parents to their mutual acquaintances. The heartache she was experiencing for her babies was palpable.

And then last week as I was engaged in a Bible study with three godly women in our congregation, I asked for prayer requests to start out. All three were involved in similar situations in which adult children were not only estranged from God but also from their parents.

It is such a common theme among Christians of our generation. I see it on the prayer requests that I receive from all of you every week. Every week there are multiple requests for adult children who have strayed from the Lord, and sometimes even have rejected relationship with their parents.

And for those and other reasons this morning, the Parable of the Prodigal Son seems like a message that I’ve been prepared to preach this morning, because it is so relevant to so many of us here.

It’s famously known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but more appropriately it might be called the Parable of God’s Heart.

And my question for each of you this morning is this: Do you have God’s heart for his straying “children?” Do you have God’s heart for His babies who are lost and want nothing to do with Him. He feels about them the same way you do about your own estranged children. He yearns for their return and rejoices when it happens. God’s heart, as we’ve seen from these three parables in Luke 15, bleeds for the estranged and lost among his offspring.

In Luke 14, Jesus has just stated the exacting demands of being one of his disciples. For instance, in Luke 14:33, He had just said, “none of you can be my disciples who does not give up all his own possessions.”

Not exactly a way to win friends and influence enemies, is it?

But guess who shows up to hear him in the wake of those comments. And it’s not whom you would think. It’s not the religious people, or the godly, that are showing up to hear more from Jesus. Of all people, it’s the non-religious people, the people of ill repute who are held in contempt by every religious Jew. It’s the proverbial tax-collectors and the sinners who were coming near to listen to Jesus.

Now the self-righteous religious leaders are there as well, but not to hear Jesus but to criticize Him. And it’s on this very point that they are critical. Verse 2: “Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, “this man receives sinners and eats with them.” Again, Jesus is accused of being a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners. The tax-gatherers were hated because they were the agents of the Gentiles, namely the Romans, against their own people, and they made themselves rich at the expense of their own people, by charging far more for taxes than the Romans required. More than that, they associated with Gentiles, which was not Kosher. The rabbinic teaching on the matter was that righteous Jews were not to associate with non-law keepers and especially Gentiles even if it was motivated by a desire to bring them into obedience to the Jewish Law. And then there were the sinners, the people that every religious Jew knew paid no attention to the Law, they were the spiritual rabble, unclean because of their obvious involvement in sin. So the common phrase “Tax gatherers and sinners” was used of people who were held in contempt by the self-righteous religious elite of the day--the Pharisees and scribes, who were scrupulously devoted to following not just the Old Testament laws, but also all the man-made rabbinic traditions which had been handed down to them. So, they grumbled about Jesus’ association with these sinners, because, in their view, if He were the godly man, even the prophet, He was claiming to be, He would have had nothing to do with such spiritual scum.