Every Single One of Us
Following a graveside service yesterday, someone commented about my writing, but said they were perplexed by the title, 7 Prodigals. Perhaps others have pondered the meaning of my weekly publication’s title. Please allow me to explain.
In Scripture, the number 7 most often represents completeness, fullness, or without exception; and the word prodigal literally means extreme or beyond reason.
From there, the title forks in two directions.
First, 7 Prodigals refers to God’s extreme, unreasonable love for every single one of us (without exception). Regardless of where we have gone, what we have done, or who we are thought to be, God’s love for us has no limits. He is the good Father. He longs for us to know his heart. That’s why he sent his son. That’s why we have the written record of his interactions since the beginning of mankind, which tells the continuous story of God loving, accepting, comforting and empowering undeserving people.
The cross and the resurrection are extreme expressions of his love for every single one of us. He wants us to know the depth of his all-inclusive love. His love is based on who he is, rather than who we think we are.
The second fork in the meaning of my title represents our relationship with sin. God wants an authentic relationship with each of us; and every authentic relationship involves choice. He could have created us as robots with no choice but to love and obey him. But he wants to be chosen. He wants to be trusted. To be chosen and trusted requires another option. That option is sin. To sin is simply to determine good and evil for ourselves, apart from God’s input. Sin is to choose anything other than God. It is to mistrust God and his word in favor of our own reason.
Knowing who God is, what he’s done for us, and what he promises us, it’s beyond reason that anyone would choose anything over the extravagant love of God. Yet, every single one of us (without exception) has done so.
In Matthew 16, Jesus warned his followers to
“Watch and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
Matthew 16:6
We know leaven as yeast, and most cooks know it takes a little bit of yeast to puff up a whole batch of flour. If you scroll through the interactions between Jesus and the Pharisees in preceding chapters, you’ll see that the teaching of the Pharisees that puffed them up was their strict extra-biblical moral codes.
Sociologists tell us that as people form groups, we most often look for highly visible, highly superficial ways to determine who belongs and who does not belong in the group. Just walk around a high school or college campus and you’ll see various groups distinguishing themselves from others with clothes, haircuts, accessories, tattoos, behaviors, mannerisms… all highly visible, yet highly superficial signs indicating acceptance.
Religious groups are no exception. Though most religious groups use our own moral codes and traditions to determine who is in and who is out. We define what is good or acceptable and what is bad, unacceptable, or even evil based on behavior.
That’s what the Pharisees and the Sadducees did! By using their own moral codes to define what was acceptable and unacceptable, they established who was acceptable and unacceptable. In doing so, their standards both overwhelmed others and served to puff up their own egos. Their own moral standards focused them on personal achievement rather than on their need to choose and trust God.
When we mix even a little morality with faith, the purpose of our faith becomes behavior modification rather than dependence on God. Then, our “faith” will rise and fall as we are overwhelmed by our inability to uphold the standards or affirmed by our achievements. Since every single one of us are prone to comparisons, we then assume the role of judge or judged.
My intention is not to deny that there are constructive and destructive behaviors. Nor is it to diminish the achievements of those who focused themselves on a life of piety or have broken patterns or even addictions to destructive behaviors. Instead, it is to unequivocally say that while one’s achievements may be the result of the gratitude that comes from choosing and trusting who God is, what God has done, and what God promises us, those achievements should not be understood as the means, steps, qualifications, or measurements of faith.
“We love because he first loved us.”
1 John 4:19
Surely, someone will push back - claiming that one’s behavior is a measure or indicator of one’s faith. Without debating that, I’d challenge you to consider what that thought says about your own yearning to judge. That’s what mixing morality and faith does. It makes us exclusive. Please let me encourage you to leave that burden at the feet of Jesus. Why take the weight of that responsibility upon yourself is he’s relieved you of it?
Perhaps we’ll explore the exclusive nature of leadership responsibilities in another post. But this post and the title of this weekly publication is about the absolute inclusive nature of God’s unreasonable love for every single one of us and the fact that every single one of us has, at times, unreasonably overlooked such extravagant love in favor of other choices.
As I have previously written, discipleship is the process of continually recognizing one’s own distractions and refocusing oneself on God and his love for every single one of us.
It’s in recognizing one’s own on-going failures to choose and trust God, AND his extreme, unreasonable, unrelenting, and trustworthy love for you still, that I hope you’ll find the greatest reason for celebrating this Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving Friends!
John Crosby