Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - The Prodigal Sons

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

For centuries this famous passage has been called the parable of the prodigal son. But it’s a great mistake to think it’s a story about one son. It’s a story of two sons, of a younger and an older brother. If you don’t compare and contrast the two, you’re going to miss the radical message.  Jesus is saying every thought the human race has ever had about how to connect to God—whether East or West, ancient or post-modern, religious or secular—has been wrong. Jesus shatters all existing human categories.  Let’s look at the story, and then see three things Jesus is telling us: 1) Jesus redefines God, 2) Jesus redefines sin, and 3) Jesus redefines salvation. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on September 11, 2005. Series: The Vision of Redeemer. Scripture: Luke 15:1-2, 11-32. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. This month, we've selected a special set of sermons and talks from across the years that Tim Keller preached at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. This month's messages highlight themes like rest, idolatry, and integrating our faith with our work, each one rooted in the truth that the gospel truly changes everything. Tonight's scripture can be found in Luke chapter 15 verses 1 through 2 and then 11 through 32. Now, the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear him.

But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, This man welcomes sinners and eats with them. Jesus continued, There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, Father, give me my share of the estate. So he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth and wild living. After he'd spent everything, there was a severe famine in the whole country, and he began to be in need.

So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. out to a citizen of that country who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, How many of my fathers hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death? I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired men.

So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. The son said to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. But the father said to his servants, Quick, bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again.

He was lost and is found." So they began to celebrate. Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So we called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. "'Your brother has come home,' he replied, and, "'Your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back, safe and sound.'" The older brother became angry and refused to go in.

So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, "'Look, all these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours, who has squandered your property with prostitutes, comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him. My son, the father said, you are always with me and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found. This is God's word.

Tonight we're going to look at a text that's been crucial in my life and crucial in the life of Redeemer. And by the way, if I sound hoarse, whenever I come back after doing all the study and all the vacation in the summer, my voice is a little out of shape. For two weeks I'm hoarse and I get back, so I'm fine. But, you know, I'm just getting back in shape. The voice is a muscle, you know. This parable that was just read to you is famous and for centuries it's been called the parable of the prodigal son, the son. That's a great mistake to think that this is a story about one son. It's a story of two sons.

It's a story of a younger and an older brother. You are meant to compare and contrast them. And if you don't compare and contrast them the way Jesus wants you to, you're going to miss the radical message of this parable. And it is radical. Jesus is saying here this. Every thought the human race has ever had about how to connect to God, whether East or West, whether in the ancient modern postmodern era,

in every religion, in all secular thought, it's been wrong. Every human idea of how to connect with God is wrong. Jesus is here to shatter all existing human categories. A historian once said that if you, it's hard for us to grasp this, but when Christianity first arose in the world, nobody called it a religion. It wasn't seen as another religion. It was called the anti-religion. It was seen as anti-religion. The Romans called the Christians for 200 years atheists. And the reason for that was the Romans understood that what Christianity was saying about God was so different than

what any other religion said that it really shouldn't be given the same kind of name. It's in a whole other category altogether. And they were right. And this passage tells us why they were right. Let's tell the story first of all. Let's make sure that we understand the story and then let's draw out the three things I think Jesus is trying to tell us in this story. First of all, let's take a look at the story. The story is in two acts actually. Act one, title, The Lost Younger Brother. Act two, title, The Lost Elder Brother. Now in act one, act one begins with a speech and the younger brother comes to the father and says,

Father, give me my share of the estate. Now the original hearers, when they heard this, would have been absolutely astounded. See, if you had two sons, then when you died, the estate would be divided two-thirds of the elder, one-third of the younger. The reason for that was of the elder, one-third to the younger. The reason for that was because the rule of thumb was that the oldest got a double portion of what all the other children got. So if there was only two, the eldest got two-thirds,

the youngest got one-third. But that happened when the father died. When the son came and asked the father for his share of the estate now. The original hearers would have been astounded. One of the commentators, a scholar who knows something about the history and culture of the time, put it like this, to ask for the inheritance while the father is still alive is to wish him dead. while the father is still alive, is to wish him dead.

What the younger son is saying is, I want your stuff, but I don't want you. I want the father's things, but I don't want the father. My relationship with you has just been a means to an end, and I'm tired of it. I want my stuff now. Unheard of. But even more unheard of is the second half of verse 12. Because if the original hearers were amazed at the speech in verse 12a, they were absolutely astonished by what the father did in verse 12b. Because this commentator goes on and says, again, the commentator who knows something about history and culture at the time says, a traditional Middle Eastern father could

only respond in one way. He would be expected to drive the boy out of the house with verbal if not physical and violent blows. But this father doesn't do that. What does it say? So he divided his property between them. But you know, the translation uses the word property, but the Greek word that's used here is the word bios from which we get our word biology and it really says the father divided his life between them. Why would he say that? We do not understand the relationship that people in the past had to their land. To their land. This father's estate was his land. His wealth was his land. He would have had to sell off a third of his land to give his son that part of the estate. Now, if you really want to understand this, you could always read a whole lot of books like Wendell Berry has written a lot of books

about this. But if you would like a little bit briefer glimpse, you can always look at the musical Oklahoma, Rogers and Hammerstein. And there's one of the lines in the theme song that goes like this, oh, we know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand. But did you notice what it says? The land we belong to, it doesn't say the land belongs to us, we belong to it. And we don't understand that. But they identify with the land. Their very identity was bound up with the land. To lose your land was to lose yourself, and to lose part of your land was to lose your standing in the community, which was tied to how much land you had. This son is asking his father to

tear his life apart, to tear apart his standing in the community, to tear himself apart and he does. The hearers had never seen a Middle Eastern patriarch respond to such an insult like this. You know, what this father is doing, he is enduring. He is enduring the worst thing a human being can endure, rejected love. the worst thing a human being can endure, rejected love. See, when someone treats us like this, what we do is we get mad and we retaliate and we reject and we do everything we possibly can do to diminish our affection for the person

so we don't hurt so much. But this father maintains his love for his son, even under these circumstances, and endures the agony of rejected love. So the son goes off, and he squanders everything he has, and when he's literally down in the mud, literally down in the pigsty, he realizes how stupid he's been, and he comes up with a plan. And his plan is, first of all, I realize I've been stupid, I will go home and confess to my father. But notice there's another part to his plan. He says, I will go back and say, father, I've sinned. I'm no longer worthy

to be called your son. Make me one of your hired men. Now, that's not the same thing as asking to be a slave. A slave or a servant worked in the estate, lived on the estate, but a hired man was a craftsman and lived in town and had to be apprenticed to learn a skill and therefore made a wage. And most commentators think that what the young man was doing was very simple. The rabbis taught that if you had violated the community mores, the only way back into the community was not just an apology, but you had to make restitution. And what the son is probably doing is he's coming back with a plan and saying, father, if you will apprentice me to one of your hired men and teach me a craft, I know I can't be your son, I know I can't come back into the

family, but at least I could begin to pay you off, pay you back a little bit for what I've done to you." So he has a plan. So he comes back, and the father sees him far off, and he runs. Middle Eastern patriarchs did not run. Children ran, youth ran, women would run, but not fathers, not owners of estates. You'd have to pick up your robes and bare your legs and you didn't do that sort of thing, but this one does. Many commentators have said that this father doesn't act like a father, he acts like a mother here. Middle Eastern fathers did not act like this, mothers did.

He runs to his son, he shows absolute emotional abandon and kisses him. And the son tries to roll out his restitution plan. You can imagine, he gets out of PowerPoint and he says, Dad, I've got to, you know, he starts to roll out his compensation plan. Father won't even hear it because he says, get the best robe. The best robe would be the Father's robe and this is what he's saying, I'm not gonna wait for you to clean up. I'm not even gonna wait for you to take a bath. I'm not certainly gonna wait for you to prove yourself.. I'm not certainly going to wait for you to prove yourself."

He says to his servants, cover my sons' nakedness and rags with the robe of my office and honor and we are going to feast. You're not going to earn your way back into the family. I'm bringing you back. When the elder brother hears about it, he's furious. And as you see here, he's particularly upset about the cost. Well, now, they may not be as obvious to you as it will be in a second. Did you notice that the big deal here is this calf? You know, the elder brother says to the servant, what's going on? And the servant says, your younger brother's back, and the father gave him the calf. And the elder brother comes to the father and says, you gave him a calf.

And you know, we're sitting here reading this and saying, I know this means something, but I don't know what it is. And the brother says, you never even gave me a goat, and you gave him a calf. What is this all about? Well, Middle Eastern people at the time, in that time and place, you almost never had meat for a meal. It was a delicacy. And if you ever had meat, it was a party.

But the greatest delicacy and the most expensive possible thing to do was to slay a fatted calf. The whole village would have been there. It was the sort of thing that most families wouldn't do as a private party ever, it was so expensive. And therefore, the older brother is saying, how dare you use our wealth like this? I have obeyed you.

I should have some say in this. In other words, I had some right over your things. How dare you do this? And he insults the father because now in verse 29 he doesn't say father, he says look, which is a kind of English translation that gets across the fact that this is a deliberate insult. He doesn't give any address to his father at all. He's basically saying, look you. It's the most incredible insult. He publicly humiliates his father by not going into the greatest feast his father's

ever thrown. Makes his father come out. He publicly humiliates him by refusing to call him father. But what does the father do? He responds with a very tender word. He says, my son, actually it could be translated my child. My child, I still want you in the feast. Almost everybody else, every other father I know would have disowned you already for what you've just done. But I still want you in. And as we're on the edge of our seats, asking the question, will in the

end the family come together in unity and love? How will the other brother respond? Will they all come together in the end? And Jesus ends the parable, never tells us. Cliffhanger. Now, why and what is Jesus trying to get across? I told you Jesus is telling us three things and they are so radical. Jesus redefines God, Jesus redefines sin, and Jesus redefines salvation. Yeah. First of all, most briefly, he redefines God. There's an awful lot, I mean an awful lot of people who really struggle with this idea, this concept of in the Bible that God is a father. I've shown you, however, that Jesus, who more than anyone in history called God father, he was the first person to ever address God as Father, and every single time he ever addresses

God in the Bible, except one, he calls him Father. And this idea of God as a Father in the Old Testament is very, very rare, fairly rare. But Jesus lifts it up, but here he defines what he means as Father. See, people struggle because a lot of people say, I just hate this idea of God. It's too patriarchal. Father. I don't like the biblical idea of God as a father. It's patriarchal.

Fathers are hard and they're harsh and they're condemning and they mean rule and control and I want a loving God, a sensitive God, a God who cares, a forgiving God, a God who longs for reconciliation and relationship, a sensitive God. You know what Jesus is saying here? Jesus Christ gives us a Father unlike any father of that time. His emotional abandon, his generosity, his willingness to receive the agony of rejected love.

And here's what Jesus is saying. He says, I'm sorry, I know a lot of you you had fathers like this, but my father's not like that. For all of his power and majesty, he's all of these things too. He is loving, he is suffering, he is longing for your love. He loves you. Jesus brought together traits and attributes, the meekness and majesty of God, the power and tenderness of God, and said that's who God is and no one's ever described God in those ways. He redefines God. Secondly, he redefines sin.

The brilliance of the rhetoric of Jesus here is that in the first act, the younger brother act, Jesus gives us a picture of sin that is very traditional. Any Pharisee, any religious person, anybody, you could look at that and say, yeah, that's sin. You know, prostitutes, right? Insulting his father, pigsty, down in the gutter, you know, dissolute, self-indulgent, that's sin. But then in the second act, he turns the table, because when you get to the end of the second act, this is what you're left with. There are two sons. One is very, very good. One is very, very bad. And they're both alienated from the father's heart. Each one of them, one of the father's things, but not the father.

Each one of them, listen carefully, used the father to get what they really loved. They didn't love the father. They used the Father to get what they really loved. The status, the wealth, the things they really loved. But one of them did it by being very, very good and one of them did it by being very, very bad. They're both lost. The bad one is lost in his badness, but the good one is lost in his goodness. And in the good one is lost in his goodness. And in the end, it's the bad son that's saved and the good son, as far as we know, that's lost.

And that goes against what anyone's ever believed. The lover of prostitutes is saved, and the man of moral rectitude is lost, and it gets worse. Because when you see why the good son was lost he was not lost in spite of his goodness He was lost because of it He says it he says here's the reason I won't go into the feast of the father Here's the reason I reject you father. I have never disobeyed you It's not his sins keeping him from the father

It's his goodness. He's proud of his goodness. It's not his sins that him from the Father. It's his goodness. He's proud of his goodness. It's not his sins that are keeping him from the Father. It's his righteousness. God has worked through Tim Keller's teaching to help countless people discover Christ's redemptive love and grow in their faith as they learn how the gospel is the key to every aspect of life. This month, we're featuring a brand new book by author Matt Smethurst titled, Tim Keller on the Christian Life. In it, he distills biblical insights from Tim Keller's nearly 50 years of sermons,

books and conference messages, including each of the sermons we've highlighted on the podcast this month. The book explores foundational theological themes from Tim Keller's work, like grace, idolatry, justice, prayer, suffering, and more. It's a resource that we hope will help you apply the gospel more richly to your everyday life. We'll send you a copy as our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the good news of Christ's love with people all over the world.

Just visit gospelonlife.com slash give to request your copy. That's Gospelonlife.com slash give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. The reason we read the first two verses, it tells us there were two people around Jesus, two groups when he told this parable. Tax collectors and sinners, Pharisees and teachers of the law. And all of a sudden you begin to realize who these two guys in the parable are. Sinners are younger brothers. They've run off. They live any way they want.

Pharisees, religious teachers, moral people, religious people, they're the elder brother. And what you have in front of us here are the two basic ways that human beings try to make the world right, to put themselves right, and to connect to God. Moral conformity and self-discovery. Moral conformity and self-discovery. Moral conformity and self-discovery. Moral conformity, people say, I'm not gonna do what I wanna do, I'm gonna comply, I'm gonna submit, I'm gonna be good, I'm gonna work hard. Self-discovery says, I'm gonna decide what is right for me,

that I'm gonna decide what is right or wrong for me, I'm gonna do what I wanna do, I'm gonna live as I wanna live, I'm gonna find my true self. Each side says me. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to live as I want to live. I'm going to find my true self. Each side says, this is the way the world will be better. Each side says, this is the way that you'll be happy. And Jesus says, you're both wrong, both wrong. You're both lost. You're both making the world a terrible place

in different ways. See, the elder brothers of the world divide the world into two. They say the good people are in and the bad people, you, are out. And the younger brothers do as well. The self-discovery people also divide the world into two. They say the open-minded, progressive-minded people are in and the bigoted and judgmental people are out, you. And Jesus says, neither. He says, it's the humble are in and the proud are out. He says, it's the people who know they're not good or open-minded and they need sheer

grace are in and the people who ever think that they're on the right side of those divides are out. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not religion or irreligion, it's not morality or immorality, it's not moralism or relativism, it's off the scale, it's not halfway in the middle, it's something else. And now you see what Jesus is saying about sin. Now you see how different it is. There's two ways to be your own savior and lord, just like there were two different ways

to get control of the father's stuff. One son tried to get control of the father's stuff, not loving the father, but trying to use the father to get what he wanted. One son tries to control the father's stuff by living a bad life, but the other son tries to control the father's stuff by living a bad life, but the other son tries to control the father's stuff by living a very, very, very, very good life. And so there's two ways to be your own savior and Lord.

There's two ways to try to control God and the people around you and your own life. There's two ways to stay in control. One is by going off into the blue and living any old way you want, and the other is being very moral, very religious, reading your Bible, obeying the Ten Commandments, praying all the time. Flannery O'Connor in one of her novels described one of her characters like this. She said there was a dark nameless understanding in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. She nailed elder brotherness. You know what she's saying? If you think,

if I love people and if I'm good and if I pray and I read my Bible, then God has to bless me. Jesus might be your rewarder, he might be your example, he might be, you know, a lot of things but he's not your savior, you're your own savior. You're avoiding Jesus' savior by avoiding sin. You're trying to control God through what you're doing. All your morality, all your obedience is a way of getting God to give you what you really want and it's not God himself. Religious people obey God to get things. Gospel people obey God to get God,

to resemble him, to love him, to know him, to delight him. You see why elder brother lostness and younger brother lostness are both terrible. Younger brother lostness with its self-indulgence and its addiction, it brings a lot of misery into the world. But elder brother lostness, you can see it. Look at his judgmental. Look at his anger. He's always angry. Why is he angry? Because he's lived such a good life that God, the Father, owes him to do things his way. And, of course, since your life never, except for a few years at a time, ever goes the way

you want, if you're living a good life because you think that therefore I deserve a good life, you're always going to have an undercurrent of anger. You're always going to be looking down on other people. According to Jesus' definition, religion is the source of a tremendous amount of misery and strife in this world. And it all comes down to motivation. Of course, if you love the Father, you're going to obey him. But why?

The elder brother doesn't obey out of love. The elder brother obeys to get stuff. How can motivation be completely changed around? So the reason we do this stuff we do is not as he says to slave out of duty, mechanical, joyless, creating judgmentalism and superiority, but out of love and gratitude. Last point, Jesus also in here redefines salvation. He doesn't just redefine God, he doesn't just redefine sin, he redefines salvation. Do you now see that Christianity cannot divide the world into good and bad people? Moral conformity and self-discovery don't go deep enough.

The default mode of every human heart, whether moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, self-discovery or moral conformity, the default mode of every human heart is self-justification, being your own savior and lord, trying to control things, trying to control people, and either both self-discovery and moral conformity doesn't go deep enough to get at what's really wrong with the world and with you and me. So how can we be saved?

Jesus says we need three things. Not moral conformity, not self discovery. We need three things. Number one, we need the initiating love of the Father. Do you notice that the Father goes out to both sons in order to bring them in? He goes out to both sons. He goes out to the younger brother and he kisses him before he repents. The repentance does not trigger the kiss.

The kiss facilitates repentance. You're never gonna seek him unless first he seeks you. And in many cases, by the way, even tonight, some of, he might be seeking you right now. That might be the reason why you're feeling the way you feel at this moment. But notice that the father goes out to the older brother, and this is amazing, because if you remember that Jesus is telling this story to Pharisees, and that Jesus knows that the religious people are the ones who are going to kill him.

The religious people are going to kill him, the religious leaders. And he knows that. Because the gospel is every bit as offensive to moral and religious people as it is to immoral and self-discovery people. Every bit is offensive except the religious people usually have more power. And yet he has the Father go out and plead with the Pharisee to come in. He's not a Pharisee about Pharise in. He's not a Pharisee about Pharisees. He's not self-righteous about the self-righteous. It's amazing. You know the red states think the blue states are the trouble and the blue states think the

red states are the trouble and Jesus says, you're all in trouble and I love you. Secondly, besides initiating love of the Father, you need to learn how to repent for something besides sins. I said that carefully. You have to learn to repent for something besides sins. See, the younger brother comes back and he's got a lot of sins to repent of. And you and I, almost everybody in the world says, oh, that's what you do. That's how you get right with God. You repent of your list.

But you see how radical this parable is? The elder brother is lost, but he's got nothing on his list. He says, I have always obeyed you. And the father doesn't, you know, doesn't contradict him. So how does a person who's lost with no sins on the list get saved? And of course there's no such thing as a person who is sinless, we know that. But here's the point, when Pharisees sin, and they do sometimes, of course they repent, they feel terrible about their sins, but when they're done repenting they're still Pharisees.

The difference between a Christian and a moralist is this. Christians also repent of what they've done wrong. Surely you do, you have to. They repent of what they've done wrong, but a Christian is someone who's also learned to repent for the reasons you did right. Come on, I know almost none of you understand what I just said. Let me say, don't sit there like New Yorkers saying, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christians of course they repent for what you've done wrong, but they recognize that the reason for even the right things that they do is self-justification and a desire to control God and others. And when that penny drops, when you begin to see the desire to be your own savior and Lord, not only under the bad things you've done, but also under the good things. And when you say that's gotta change,

when that epiphany happens, when that penny drops, that changes everything, everything. Everything in your life changes. The way you handle criticism, the way you see people who are different than you, everything changes. The way you live, the way you relate to God, everything, it's called the new birth because it's so radical. Do you know how to do that? Have you done that?

So first, you need the initiating love of God. Secondly, you need to learn how to repent for something besides sins. And thirdly, you need to learn how to repent for something besides sins. And thirdly, you need to be melted and moved by what it costs to bring you home. Now you see, I just said the key difference between a Christian and a Pharisee is motivation. The Pharisee obeys God to get things. The Christian obeys God just to get God. Why? Because something the Christian has seen has melted his heart toward God so he loves the Father

finally, or she loves the Father finally. What is that? You have to see what it cost God to bring you home. Well, you say it didn't seem to cost him anything. You know, the kid came home with a kind of, you know, desire to compensate, we think, but the father wouldn't let him, so it was free. It didn't cost anything. Oh, it didn't cost him anything, but it cost somebody else a lot. At the very end, Jesus gives us the hint. The last verse, when the father says, everything I have is yours. That's literally true. Why? Because the younger brother had liquidated and now had spent every bit of his inheritance and now every single thing that the father had belonged to the elder brother. Every robe, every ring, every fatted calf belonged to

the elder brother. The younger brother could only be brought back into the family at the enormous cost and expense to the elder brother. It's not free. It's not simple to be saved. Somebody has to pay. The elder brother has to pay and he's furious about it. Now why does Jesus put in such a nasty elder brother? Because he's showing the Pharisees what they look like. But what would a true elder brother have done? A true elder brother would have seen the agony of the Father and said, Father, I'm going to go out and look for my brother. And if he has ruined himself and he's squandered all of his inheritance,

I'll bring him home even at my own expense. That would have been a true elder brother. Poor kid. He doesn't have a true elder brother. But we do. Jesus Christ gives us a bad elder brother so we'll long for the right one. We don't just need an elder brother to go out into the next town to find us. We need someone to come from heaven to earth. We don't need an elder brother to go out into the next town to find us. We need someone to come from heaven to earth. We don't need an elder brother who brings us into God's family just at the cost of his wallet, but at the cost of his life. Because on the cross, Jesus Christ was stripped naked so that we could be clothed

in the robe of honor that we don't deserve. On the cross, Jesus called called my God, my God, the only time he never called him Father because at that moment he was not being treated as a son so you and I could be. There he paid the debt that deep down we all know we owe. And because everything he had, he had everything the father had, but he shares it with us and he brings us home at enormous expense to himself. And when you see that, to the degree you see that, it will change the absolute motivation, your whole approach toward God.

And you won't be into self-discovery or moral conformity. You'll be a Christian. Application, very quick. It's hot, but here it is. A lot of you would be younger brother types, why? Because where do you think younger brothers go? They go to New York. Where do you think this guy went? He left Ohio, he left Alabama, he went to New York. And a lot He left Ohio, he left Alabama, he went to New York. And a lot of you, a lot of people in New York say the problem with the world to a great degree is religion. The problem with the world is the moralism, the problem with the world is the self-righteousness,

the strife. That's the big problem with the world. And guess what? This parable says, Jesus says, you're right. But guess what? Your self-discovery mode hasn't really been working real well lately. But you know, I want to go back into Christianity.

That's just another religion. And Jesus says, you're wrong. Would you start to reconsider it? If this is the first time you've ever been to this church, would you keep coming to reconsider and realize maybe you're wrong? That Christianity isn't just like the other religions at all. You may have had a lousy home. You might have had the kind of father that everybody else thought this guy

should be. This is the love you need. Secondly, this parable is really to elder brothers. You know why? Why do you think it ends the way it does? Jesus is basically speaking to Pharisees and he's inviting the elder brothers to listen to this appeal and to put yourself in and respond. It's participatory theater. And there are a lot of you that you've got an elder brother type of heart. And so you're always mad. You're mad at those people who have hurt you, and you're mad at people who have hurt you, and there's classes of people you look down on, and mainly you feel like my life's not going the way it ought to, and I'm the good one

in my family, and why is it everybody else is broken in my parents' heart, and they're happy and I'm not? And the reason you're so unhappy is because of your goodness. The main thing between us and God is not our sins as much as our damnable good works. And you're mad at people and you're mad at things because I've tried hard, I've tried hard and my life's not going right. Lay your deadly goodness down, down at Jesus' feet. Stand in him and him alone, gloriously complete. We'll never stop being elder brothers until we see and are melted by what our true elder

brother did for us. And lastly, hey, if you're going to be in a church that believes this is Christianity, we're going to be always misunderstood because there are going to be things that we do here, attitudes we have, practices we do. Some people are going to say, well, no, wait, that sounds like a liberal human institution. Other people, no, that sounds like a conservative institution. And of course, that's the way it's going to be.

We're going to be misunderstood all the time. People are going to try to stick us in the human categories. And though, of course, since we aren't Jesus, to some degree we have a tendency to go into human categories. But ultimately, you're not going to be able to stick a church that cares about the gospel like this into those categories and we're going to be misunderstood, but that's all right.

Jesus understands and he is our true older brother. Let's pray. Our Father, tonight in this hot place, we are listening to what your Son has told us and in my entire life and in all of my reading, in all of my study of the scripture, this is the place where you have most clearly shown me the uniqueness of the gospel and its transforming power. And I certainly couldn't be true of everybody else

out there, other people, you'll speak to other people through different passages of the scripture. But I pray that you would change some lives tonight I pray there be some people who will never forget this sermon as long as they live Not because it was so eloquently expressed But because it'll keep jumping out of The pages at them as they read it over the years and they'll see How much you can change our lives.

Father, thank you for this time. We pray it all in Jesus' name, amen. I'm Kelli on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel-centered teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership allows us to reach people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit www.gospelinlife.com slash partner. That website again is www.gospelinlife.com slash partner. Today's sermon was recorded in 2005.

The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.