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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Father and Child

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To Fyodor Dostoevsky, the parable of the prodigal son was a lifeline. Though an outcast in a Siberian prison, he found himself within this radical story of homecoming and a father’s heart. C.S. Lewis similarly alluded to finding himself within the parable: “Who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape?” It is a parable that unveils each of us in some way, whether we find ourselves as the prodigal asking for mercy or the jealous older brother looking for credit for good behavior. In any case, it is the image of the father that convinces us to remove the veil. He is both the subject and the point of the story Jesus tells.

The parable begins with a man who has two sons. The first half of the story focuses on the younger son who boldly requests his inheritance before his father had even died. He then ends up squandering his father’s money on the throes of his own appetite. When he has nothing left and is desperate with hunger, he turns back for home with the expectation that he can work his way back into the father’s house.

The second half of the story introduces us to the older son who did not leave the father and smugly points this out when the younger son comes wandering back home. The older son is the one who stays, who looks after the father, who works in his fields, and is disturbed by the younger son’s blatant disregard for the life their father has given them. He is angered by the celebration of his brother’s return, jealous of the father’s attention and forgiveness, envious of the celebrated position his brother is receiving. The father he loves deserved more than his brother’s selfish squandering, and so does he, as the son who stayed.

In both sons, there is good and bad, conceit and humility, selfishness and acknowledgment of the father, even if self-serving. The younger son is full of foolishness, and yet he exhibits some degree of wisdom in turning around. The older son is loyal and more conscientious, and yet he exhibits a great degree of selfishness and disregard in his reaction to the father’s character. Neither son is a clear example of the kind of person most of us want to be. Yet, both sons, in all of their major failings and minor virtues, are clearly sought out by the father. In the estimation of one of my wise professors, this parable leaves us questioning what on earth a father is going to do with two boys like that? And more importantly, what on earth is God going to do with people like us?

Yet to this wayward child who stumbles toward home, the father runs to embrace him, immediately saying to his servants: “Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fatted calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”(1) With every symbol of restoration, the father who was waiting embraces the son who was lost. This lavish grace of the Father is ours as prodigal children. Though we neither expect it nor deserve it, the celebration is thrown in our honor, over the return of even one lost sheep.

To the older son who fumes outside the party and accuses his father of unfairness, the father responds with patience and care, calling him to an awareness of heritage over inheritance: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” When we are the smug older children of the Father, his grace is jarring and disruptive, even as God reminds us that all God has is our own. God’s invitation to the feast is both awkward and demanding, a call to overlook the harm that our flagrant siblings cause—and their potential to cause it again. But the Father stands beside us with this request and his grace, though we are equally undeserving.

Whether we find ourselves in the shoes of the prodigal or treading the ground of the older brother, there is good reason to celebrate the unveiling and unsounded love of this Father Jesus describes. His story overturns lesser narratives: God’s unfathomable grace and mercy shatters our sense of who is worthy and bids us to see that God alone is our rescue. The Father invites us to a celebration of the kingdom regardless of where we now stand.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Luke 15:22-25.

Charles Stanley

Charles Stanley – Our Forgiving Father

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Charles Stanley

Luke 15:11-24

If we have an unforgiving spirit toward another person, we ourselves experience a form of bondage. An even worse type of emotional imprisonment can result from guilt over wrongdoing and the belief that God must condemn us for our sin. If that’s your situation, you don’t understand divine pardon.

The Bible teaches that forgiveness belongs to God. Today’s reading drives the point home with the parable of the prodigal son. In this story, the younger of two brothers took an early inheritance and wasted it foolishly. Eventually, he had nothing left and had to work among pigs, a despicable job for a Jewish man. When he returned home in despair, his father welcomed him with open arms and a celebration. The son had done nothing to earn his father’s pardon or joyful greeting.

If we are to understand forgiveness, we must realize that God’s motivation for pardoning sins is found only in Himself and His love. Like the prodigal son, we can do nothing to earn it.

The wayward son “came to his senses” (v. 17); that is to say, he began to think the truth about himself and the situation he’d created. We do the same when we repent—we agree that our wrongdoing was sin and decide to turn away from it.

Our forgiveness was fully taken care of at the cross, and it was applied to each of us personally when we received Jesus as Savior. But our fleshly patterns aren’t extinguished all at once. So anytime you sin, confess that your behavior was wrong (1 John 1:9). Then you won’t be burdened by guilt, and you can enjoy fellowship with your heavenly Father.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Flickering Minds

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Ravi Z

Gallery statistics report that the average time a person spends looking at a particular work of art is three seconds. To those who spend their lives caring for the great art museums of the world, I imagine this is a disheartening sight to behold day after day. It would have been interesting to hear the thoughts of the St. Petersburg curators who watched as Henri Nouwen sat before Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son for more than four hours.

I suppose most of us are more often like the three-second viewer than the captivated Nouwen, moving through our days with our eyes barely open. How often are we surrounded by creative mastery but unaware and unseeing—missing, in our absence, the bigger picture? One of my favorite poems begins with the lines, “Lord, not you, it is I who am absent.”(1) In a culture filled with tools and media whose very aim seems to be keeping us from being where we are, it is a brave and fitting admission for whomever you can manage to confess it.

The parable of the prodigal son is typically understood as a story that speaks to those who have wandered away in belief or obedience, content, at least for a time, in being absent. It is a phrase used in religious and secular settings to denote the black sheep and wayward souls of our communities. Others claim the title more personally to explain a specific time in our lives—a time of testing the waters, turning away from home or upbringing, experimenting with life or faith or philosophy. It is a parable that at one time or another describes many of us. Perhaps it is also a parable that describes us daily. In the daily struggle to see, in the constant battles for our attention and distraction, it is a daily effort to be present and conscious in this place. We come and go like prodigals.

The story as Jesus tells it explains that the wayward child had a plan for returning to his father’s house: he would confess his sin against heaven and against his father, and then he would ask to be treated as one of the hired servants. He would work his way back into his father’s life. But the father in the story doesn’t even give him a chance to fully present the offer. Upon seeing his son, he says to his slaves, “‘Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’ And they began to celebrate.”(2) With every symbol of restoration, the father who was waiting, embraces the prodigal child.

Gripped by the intensity of the massive painting before him, Henri Nouwen found himself becoming “more and more part of the story that Jesus once told and Rembrandt once painted.” Yet in Rembrandt’s painting we do not find the father eagerly rushing out to greet his wayward son as it is described in the Gospel of Luke. Rather, we find stillness; we find the parable’s characters at rest. Rembrandt slows flickering minds to a scene that captures a thousand words for our daily situation: “Lord, not you, it is I who am absent.” In this scene, the son has returned, and he is kneeling before his father in his ragged shoes and torn clothes exactly as he is: the one who insisted upon defining himself apart from his father, the one who was absent. But in pursuit of life beyond his father, the child lost sight of life itself.

In the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus invites a distracted world to slow down, wherever you are in faith or absence of faith, to taste and see, to be still and to be present. In this culture of absence, the Father is near; waiting, though we put off him off, keeping vigil over wandering lives and attention-spans, and running in grace toward those who even half-heartedly attempt to be present.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Denise Levertov, “Flickering Mind,” The Stream and the Sapphire (New York: New Directions, 1997), 15.

(2) Luke 15:22-25.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Voyage and Return

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A British journalist by the name of Christopher Booker argues that all of literature can be classified into seven basic narratives. Though many would deem the idea itself deficient, Booker exhaustively identifies each category in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. One such category he describes is the “Voyage and Return” plot. Here, Booker catalogs, among other works, Alice and Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Gone with the Wind, each of these stories chronicling a hero who travels away from the familiar and into the unfamiliar, only to return again with new perspective.

Among his list of “Voyage and Return” plots, Booker also identifies Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. He describes the parable as many of us understand it. The younger son demands his inheritance, travels to another country, squanders his money until he has nothing left, and finally decides to come home again pleading for mercy. When told or heard like this, it is a story that indeed fits neatly into Booker’s category, and perhaps neatly into visions of the spiritual journey. Journeys to faith or to God are often stories of coming and going and returning again.

But is this an accurate understanding of the parable of Jesus? Is the story of the prodigal son really about the son? Is the spiritual journey about our coming and going or God’s?

My story of faith and belief, like many others, cannot be told without some admittance of wandering to and from that faith, in and out of God’s presence, walking with and without Father, Son, or Spirit. When I think of my place among the spiritually vibrant, I am immediately aware of my drifting soul and less than perfect role in the story. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; prone to leave the God I love, sings the hymnist. I imagine my place in the assembly of the faithful as I might image entering a grand ballroom of crowned guests and beautiful robes only to realize I am wearing a t-shirt and old jeans. The world of beautiful souls—with its ardent disciples from early centuries and saints from today—does not seem a place in which some of us feel we belong. Sometimes I feel more like humorist Groucho Marx, who once declined the offer of membership into an organization with the reply: “I don’t care to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.” If I myself am the main character in my story of faith, this is the story I must tell.

But thankfully, I am not. In the Christian religion, the spiritual “journeying” is God’s. Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son is one more compelling reminder of this. The parable of the prodigal son is only a “voyage and return” narrative in the way Booker describes it if the son is the subject of the story. But any study of the father in this story makes that an altogether unlikely theory. Even our titling of the story as that of “the prodigal son” is misleading. Jesus tells us that it was while the son was still “a long way off” that the father saw him and “was filled with compassion for him” (Luke 15:20). Literally, this father was moved by his compassion. The Greek word conveys an inward movement of concern and mercy, but this man was also clearly moved outwardly. The father runs to the son, embraces him (literally, “falls upon his neck”), and kisses him.

Jesus describes a scene that is far more abrupt and shocking than the story we often remember of a son who wanders away and returns home again. It is not the wayward son who runs to the father but the father who runs to his wayward son, and at that, without any assurance of his son’s repentance whatsoever. In fact, the father runs without any promise that the son is even home to stay. What sort of a spiritual voyage and return journey would omit such a vital detail? Moreover, it is not the son who we find kneeling in the story Jesus tells, but the father. It is as if Christ is reminding us once again that all have indeed fallen short of the hope and promise and beauty of God, but that God has fallen to pick us up again and again, and to bring us home. Jesus tells a story whose merciful ending has far more to do with the actions of the father than any action of the child.

So it is with our own journeys. Our own voyage and return stories, our place in the story God tells, will never be valid because of our steps, but because of Christ’s. If we must use Booker’s headings to describe the journey of faith, the voyage was Christ’s, so that we might forever return to the Father.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Fair?

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“Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic” rails Ivan Karamazov against God in Dostoyevsky’s classic work The Brothers Karamazov.(1) Those who encounter—or are encountered by—the parables and stories of Jesus often feel a similar sentiment. For the parables of Jesus are often exceptional in upsetting religious sensibilities, are sometimes vague, and are many times enigmatic in their detail and content.

The parable of the laborers, as told in Matthew’s gospel, serves as a case in point. A landowner hires laborers to work in his vineyard. They are hired throughout the work day and all the workers agree to the wage of a denarius for a day’s work. The enigmatic and exceptional punch line to this story occurs when those who are hired at the very end of the day—in the last hour—are paid the same wage as those who worked all day long. The long-suffering laborers cry out, “These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.” Those workers that were hired first are not paid any additional wage. The first are not first, in this story. Instead, the landowner replies with a radical reversal: The last shall be first, and the first last.

Not only is the conclusion to this story exceptional and enigmatic, it also seems wholly unfair. For how could those who worked so little be paid the full day’s wage? Yet, this upending of any sense of fairness is a recurring theme in other parables of Jesus as well. Indeed, the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, while a familiar story for many, functions in a similar manner and upsets all expectations of what is fair and right, just as in the parable of the laborers. A careful reading presents an extravagant display of grace towards all wayward sons and daughters, even as it illuminates a human frugality with grace.

Jesus presented this story as a crowd of tax-collectors, sinners, and religious leaders gathered around him. All who listened had a vested interest in what Jesus might say. Some hoped for grace, while others clamored for judgment. “A certain man had two sons,” Jesus begins. The younger of the man’s two sons insists on having his share of the inheritance, which the father grants though the request violated the Jewish custom that allotted a third of the inheritance to the youngest son upon the death of the father.(1) With wasteful extravagance, the son squanders this inheritance and finds himself desperately poor, living among pigs, ravenous for the pods on which they feed. “But when he came to his senses” the text tells us, he reasons that even his father’s hired men have plenty to eat. Hoping to be accepted as a mere slave, he makes his way home. And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him.

The Pharisees in the crowd might have gasped at this statement. How could the father extend such grace towards a son so wasteful and wanton? Yet, this father is the true prodigal, extending grace in an extravagant way. His prodigal heart compels him to keep looking for his son—he saw him while he was still a long way off. And despite being disowned by his son, the father feels compassion for him. With wasteful abandon, he runs to his son to embrace him and welcome him home. The father orders a grand party for this son who has been found, “who was dead and has begun to live.”

The older brother in Jesus’s story provocatively gives voice to a deep sense of outrage.(2) In many ways, his complaint intones the same complaint of the laborers in the vineyard. “For so many years, I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours… But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with harlots; you killed the fattened calf for him.”  We can hear the implicit cry, “It’s not fair!” The text then tells us that the older son was not willing to join the celebration. He will not hear the entreaty of his gracious father both to come into the celebration and to recognize that “all that is mine is yours.” Thus again, the last shall be first, and the first last.

While not vague in their detail or content, these two parables of Jesus are both exceptional and enigmatic. If we are honest, they disrupt our sense of righteousness and our sense of fairness. Both portraits of the prodigal father and of the landowner present the radical fairness of God. God lavishes grace freely on those we often deem the least deserving. But perhaps we feel the exceptional and enigmatic aspects of these parables most keenly when it is we who are seeing ourselves beyond the need of grace.

Margaret Manning is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Cited in Mary Gordon, Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels (New York: Pantheon, 2009), x.

(2) Fred Craddock, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), 187.

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Charles Stanley – The Father’s Far-Reaching Grace

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Luke 15:17-24

Family-oriented movies frequently end by showing a warm reunion. We see loved ones with arms around each other in an expression of love and support.

The parable of the prodigal son paints a similar picture of our heavenly Father’s attitude towards us, His children. That well-known story illustrates the magnificence of grace. In Luke 15:20, the one who was sinned against is running out to eagerly welcome back the one who sinned. Be sure to notice how the one who was mistreated shows compassion to the one who was at fault.

And there is even more. The prodigal did not know that his full rights as a son would be restored. We as believers, however, know in advance what awaits us when we humbly return to our heavenly Father. Because of grace, we can count on acceptance no matter how long we have been absent from Him or how far we’ve wandered.

Grace guarantees that our the Lord will greet us with compassion and forgiveness, lovingly restoring us to full rights as His children. It is not our performance—in other words, not good deeds or even the right words of apology—that matters; it is our position in Christ. When God sees that we belong to His Son, He forgives us.

The parable of the prodigal son points us to the truth that because of Jesus Christ, we are forgiven even before we return. While this does not give us license to sin (Rom. 6:1-2), it does give us reason to celebrate. Our Father is waiting to welcome us home.