Well, isn't that cool to see what God is doing in Guatemala? And I even see some of the faces that were in the video. It's cool. Good to have all of you back this morning.
Oh, good morning, Mindem Hills. If you're wondering what I'm doing up here, so am I. If you don't know me, my name is Isaac Amistef here at the church. If this is your first week here, please give us another chance after this is all over.
John is out with an invocation of this name this week. And so I am with you this morning. If you were here a couple weeks ago, you saw John show some pictures of some really cool castles. I wanted to bring you the picture of the castle.
I showed you this week, but it kind of pales in comparison. That was at Dutch Wonderland. And there was a castle there, too. We saw castles.
This is my third time ever doing this. And thankfully this morning, we'll get to it about our sermons about grace. So that's your job to give me grace. But it's been about two years since I did it last.
So you have to ask yourself, how well did it go then? But it took them two years to forget about. And I always joke with John. I say, worst case scenario, you never ask me to do this again.
I don't have to worry about it anymore. This summer, we've been journeying back into these sort of great classic praise and worship songs of the late 90s, early 2000s, of these, it was the era of the conflict between him and praise and worship. And I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, where it was hymns all the way. The only place where we had the reprieve from the hymns.
And I mean that with no disrespect. We had youth groups. So I want to say nights. We got to sort of do, I guess, whatever we wanted.
But I'm sure someone was in charge. I wasn't. But in 2003, I would have been in sixth grade. And in 2003, what I remember the song of youth group being was, your grace is enough.
It was one that I guess I heard all throughout my career in youth group. But I also being one of the people that played it, I think I picked it a lot. It was one of my favorite songs. So I think I was singing it all the way through being a senior in high school.
But most importantly, I had a very easy but cool sounding lead line to play. I say easy, but I'm not even going to be the one playing it this morning, Cola. But as a sixth grader, using only one finger, I could play the lead line. And I felt really cool being able to do that.
But today, we're going to explore the main claim of the song, your grace is enough. Is your grace enough? And is it enough for me? Have I made it enough?
I always feel weird standing up here. And I feel like my only like to stand on and telling you anything is really just to research something that I need to hear myself. So it feels less like I'm telling you what to do. And really reminding myself what I need more of and where I need to focus and be reminded of in my life.
And so much of my personal baggage and so much of the things that go through my head on a regular basis is the feeling and telling myself that I'm not worthy of God's grace. It's easy for me to tell somebody about the hope and grace of Jesus. But it's hard for me sometimes to remember it applies to me as well. It's like I'm out in the rain evangelizing about umbrellas, but I don't have one myself.
Or I'm a shoe salesman with no shoes. I'll just turn this into a stand up comedy hour. I'll just keep trying things until you laugh. I'll just have a big list and go through and just give myself some readings.
But this morning, we're going to go through the story of the prodigal son. And if you like me, you grew up hearing this story over and over and over again. And I think for me, it's easy as someone who grew up in church to hear, especially if maybe I shouldn't have already told you that it's about the prodigal son, because you're like, oh, got it. I know he's going to say, because that's how I feel a lot of times.
It's easy for me to turn my brain off and think, I already know about that. And I struggle with that. And I don't know what else to do with it. But in the last couple of years, I heard a sermon by Tim Keller.
I'm a big fan of Tim Keller. And I still listen to his podcast every week. I know he has gone. But they still release his old sermons.
And I enjoy listening to him and his teaching. But he has a really famous sermon about the prodigal sons. And it sort of shifted the way that I was able to view it. And saw some more depths of it.
And I think that's what he looks at the books that he references in that sermon a lot. And so if you hear anything in this that you're like, oh, I wonder where that came from. There's a book called The Cross in the Prodigal by Kenneth Bailey's New Testament scholar. But he also lived in the Middle East like his whole life.
So he has the context of this Middle Eastern culture. And then also Tim Keller wrote a book called The Prodigal God based on the story as well. So anything contextual is coming from that. I probably won't give it credit as I go through it.
But that's where it came from. So this morning, as we go into it, the context of Luke 15, this is Jesus speaking the two groups of people. He is sitting with the tax collectors and the sinners. And he is being judged by the Pharisees and the scribes, who are the sinners and the people who view themselves as holy.
So in this story, that is who we're reading about, and that's who Jesus is directing these stories to. So we're going to read it in its entirety before we go on. Luke 15, 11 through 32. So listen in.
Jesus continued, there was a man who had two sons. The younger sons said to his father, give me my share of the estate. So he divided the property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all that he had set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth in a wild living.
After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in the whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and he hired himself 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 father's hired servants had food to spare, and here I am starving to death.
I was set out and go back to my father and say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I'm not worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. 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. 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. But ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fat and calf and kill it. Let's have a feast to celebrate.
For the 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 to the house, he heard music and dancing.
And so he called on the servants and asked him what's going on. Your brother has come. He replied, and your father has killed the fat and calf because he is 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 dissipated your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat, so I could celebrate with my friends. But when the son of yours was squandered all of your property with prostitutes as come home, you killed the fat and calf for him.
My son, the father said, you are always with me. And everything I have is yours. We had to celebrate and be glad because his brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.
So the story begins with the demand. Father, give me the share of the property that falls to me. This is not an ordinary request. The father didn't have to respond in any sort of way and do the thing.
And in a Middle Eastern village, asking for your share of the inherent inheritance while the father was still alive is equivalent to saying, I wish you were dead. The wealth of the family wasn't just in money or a bank account. It was land, animals, buildings, relationships, and honor. The father would need to sell off a large portion of his estates to fulfill this request.
It brought financial loss and public shame to the entire household. The Greek word that the son uses is not for inheritance. I'm not going to try to say it. It's right here, the clarinomial.
But it's the word directly translates to inheritance, which implies he doesn't use this word, which would imply leadership and responsibility for the family. Instead, he uses the word bio, which means life, asking his father to divide his very life. And so it's dividing who he is and everything he's worked for. He's asking for the father's stuff.
I wish you were dead. I don't need you. I only want your stuff. And what does he do with it?
As soon as he has it, he sells it quickly and cheaply. He gathered all he had. He liquidated everything and left for a far country. This is land that's taken generations to acquire.
And it was converted to cash in a matter of days and it stripped the family of status and stability. And he walked away from home. And this burned his connection to his identity, this community, and his family. All to what?
So it's this generational wealth that's been built up, the father's life, the very thing that he's produced, is now liquidated, sold cheaply. And for what? He throws it all away. And it was interesting reading this week.
Again, I've heard this story so many times. There's this sort of misconception about how he spent his wealth. Or at least in my thought it is, because all I knew is what the brothers said, the prostitutes. But the text actually says he squandered his property in loose living.
The Greek word for squandered translates directly to scatter. It's used in military and agricultural settings, scattering grain, scattering the enemy. It's more of a picture of complete chaos and disintegration. It went to more or less nothing, nothing that mattered.
It doesn't say what he spent the money on. The older brother later accuses him of spending on prostitutes, but Jesus never does that. The reality is that we don't know what he spent it all on. But the money vanished.
And whatever joy he tried with it vanished quickly as well. Then came his famine and his hunger and desperation. He hires him out to a Gentile who sends him to feed the pigs. This was the Jewish way of saying that he is hit rock bottom.
There's not any lower than you could go than be feeding pigs for a Gentile family. And it's interesting because this is not all every step along the way when it comes to the younger brother. I just kept finding things where I was like, oh, I don't think I realized that. Oh, I think this is one of them.
That he came to himself in this text. Doesn't mean that he has some sort of deep moral repentance in that moment. It's a survival mechanism. He's hungry.
And he remembers that the food that his father's hired workers had informs the plan. Not a plan to come home and ask for forgiveness, but a plan to work his way back into solvency. He says, make me like one of your hired men. I always thought that he was telling his father that he would come be a servant and live with the servants.
But what he was asking for with this Greek word is Michthyos, a skilled worker who lives in the village and earns a wage on the family farm. Why this plan? Because Michthyos doesn't have to live on the family estate. He can earn, pay off debt, and avoid his brother at all costs.
It's a calculated move. He still doesn't want grace. He's not looking for forgiveness. He has a strategy, and he wants control.
Interestingly enough, this rehearsed speech echoes the words Pharaoh used in Exodus 1016, which is, I have sinned against the Lord, your God, and against you. Pharaoh said this not out of general repentance, but to manipulate Moses into stopping the plagues. He said this repetitively. And so this would have been a popular well-known phrase to the Hebrew people.
And it would have been Jesus sort of hinting at the heart of this younger son. It proves that his word was shaped more by hunger than humility, that he's not truly repentant. He's desperate, and he's looking away to fix things on his own terms. And so he's come up with this plan.
He's headed back towards the village. And his father sees him while he's still a long way off. And this has always been a significant part hearing this. Because for me, I've always pictured God angry at me, and it's all up to me to get him.
That's what my mind slips into. But according to this, we see God as the father who's looking for you a long way off, and he runs to meet him. And this running, this might sound normal to us. But again, in Middle Eastern culture, this is undignified for older men to be running around.
It would require lifting his robes. I've never won a robe, but I'm assuming you look kind of funny as you do it. And him doing that would be a huge sign of shame upon himself. Presumably, him running to meet him was to greet his son, but also to shield him and take on the shame that was coming to him from the village.
This would have been well known with the son just to his father, and his face to even be seen there would be something that he would be coming back to great shame. But the father took that shame, ran to him, and kissed him, embraced him. This is grace. The picture we're seeing is of grace.
It's not logical. It's not dignified. It's generous to those who haven't earned it. The son begins to speech, but he never finishes it.
Some say it's because the father interrupts. Some say it's because of the overwhelming outpouring of love of the father running and bracing and kissing him before a word is even spoken. In that moment, the son is stunned. What started as manipulation becomes a real confession and the father, when the father moves.
Then he calls for the best road, a sign of restored honor, a ring on his hand, likely the family ring of trust and authority, and sandals on his feet. Sons wore sandals, slaves did not. And then the fetticaff, enough to feed a village, enough to make a statement that my son is home. He was dead.
Now he's alive. He was lost. Now he's found. This is costly grace on the father.
His son doesn't deserve it, earn it, or even understand it. He simply receives it. And in that receiving, something changes in him, seeing the grace of the father. And this is a message not about cleaning yourself up to come home, not a story of earning your way back to God's good graces, but of a father who runs and meets you in your mess who bears your shame, who interrupts yourself, self-patient plan, and throws you a party instead.
Grace meets you there. And that is, for the most part, my familiarity with the story. And yeah, the other brother is upset, but like he has a right to be, right? I think that's where the story stopped for me.
And that's how I remember it. He's seeing this radical grace exemplified in the younger son. But it's wild when we start to look at the older son as well. While much of the parable on Luke 15 focused on the younger son, Jesus does not end the story there.
He's just a spotlight under the older brother, still out in the field working dutifully. The contrast is intentional and revealing. If the younger son is lost and rebellion, the older son is lost in self-righteousness. The older brother's entrance into the story begins with silence.
I never thought about this before. This was something I found in that book this week. When the older brother demands his share of the property, the older brother says nothing. In this culture, an older brother was expected to step in and be a mediator between a father and a son.
And he does not intervene. He does not tend to restore peace, which reveals there may already be a fractured relationship with the father. His silence is not passive. It's complicit.
When the father divides the property, this older son also receives his share. That's interesting. The older son in that culture would have had two thirds rights out of two brothers. And then the younger brother would have had one third.
The older brother gets two times what everybody else gets. So in this scenario in that culture, they had a system in place for the father died that he could hand over the rights to the property. But he would still retain the authority. So the younger brother got the rights and also the authority and sold the property.
The older brother got the rights but not the authority and said nothing. He could have said no, that's still yours. He could have stayed out of the situation. But he accepted part of this as well.
Coming back from the field, the older son hears the music and dancing. He's not excited. He's confused. And then furious, instead of going in the house, he stays outside forcing the father to leave the feast and complete with him.
Again, in their culture, this public refusal to join the celebration would have been a deep insult. It's rejection not just of the party, but of the father himself. And then we hear how he truly feels. Let's remember this.
Look, all these years I've been slaving for you. Never disobeyed your orders. You never gave me even a young goat to celebrate with my friends. But this son of yours comes home who has devoured your wealth with prostitutes.
Again, the only time that's ever said is by the older brother. And then you killed the fat calf. He addresses the father with disrespect by saying, look. In that culture, he would address his father with some sort of honoristic or some sort of title.
But by him just yelling look at his father. Again, it's more disrespect to his father and the accusation about prostitutes. This is where the rumors got started. I even believed them thousands of years later.
I believed the rumors that the brothers started. His words reveal this deep resentment, emotional distance, and demand for recognition. The real problem is revealed that he doesn't see himself as a son. He sees himself as a slave.
He says that I've been slaving for you. His obedience wasn't out of love. It was out of duty. He believed that if he followed the rules, he was owed something.
His relationship with the father was transactional. But the father responds with an astonishing tenderness, using a word to address the son that he hadn't used before. And then he says, my son, you are always with me and everything I have is yours, which we know to be literally true, because everything that is left, this two-thirds size farm is now all in the brothers' hands. He writes to everything that's his.
But we had reason to celebrate and be glad because his brother of yours was dead and his life again, he was lost, and is found. This is the grace extended again. It's costly. And it's vulnerable.
The father has already put more shame on himself, leaving the party and pleading with his son, who is humiliating him. And he reminds him not just of his access to the state, but his current ownership. All he has is his. And he says, and you are always with me.
The tragedy is that the older son never left home physically, but his heart was far from the fathers. He obeyed, but joylessly. He stayed, but resentfully, he was with his father, but he was never truly with him. And so at this point, where we can see the separation and who Jesus is talking about, the sinners and the tax collectors.
But now the second son is pointed towards the Pharisees, the religious leaders who are grumbling that Jesus welcome sinners and ate with them. They were the older brothers standing outside the feast, refusing to celebrate because it didn't operate on their terms. The parable ends without any sort of resolution. The father makes the invitation, but we're not told how the older son responds or what happens afterwards.
It's an open invitation aimed straight at us. Most likely in this scenario, that's us. We would not just repent of our sins, but of the pride that we take in our goodness. We would not let go of our need to earn and control, instead just receive what the father freely offers.
Because here's the truth. The younger brothers' return came at a crop cost. The road, the rain, the fad of calf, all of it now technically, is coming from the older sons and hairdos. Forgiveness isn't free, it's costly to the one offering it.
The father bears this cost twice. Once, for the rebel who ran and once for the rulekeeper, who resented, he runs to one and pleads with the other. His extravagant grace is for both. This is the gospel message, and it's not just for the immoral and the way where it is for those who are lost in their goodness, who believe that their obedience should earn them favor, who are keeping score instead of joining the celebration.
Jesus leaves the story open because the invitation still stands. The younger brothers far from home, and the older brothers standing just outside the door. And so this is the story of two brothers. And I think this morning, I think we can make it personal because we can look at ourselves.
And we can see ourselves in the story, and we can identify with either the younger brother spirit or the older brother spirit, because that's the two options. Maybe the story of the younger son feels a little too familiar for you. It's more of your story. Maybe you've never actually said the words, I wish God were dead.
But if you're honest, you've wanted freedom. You've wanted the blessing, the opportunity, but without the father, or without the relationship, without the limits, or without the responsibilities that come with being a child of God. You've chased what looks like freedom, but maybe that meant walking away from faith, or maybe just doing your own thing quietly and deciding whether you know best. But if you're honest, now you're tired, and you've been running, building, spending, improving.
And it's all unraveling. And you're all left with your choices. That's the younger brother spirit. You say, I'll figure it out myself.
I'll live life on my own terms. If something breaks, I'll fix it. If I run out of options, I'll make a new plan. I don't need grace.
I just need a second chance. I just need more options. Maybe that's where you are right now. You've made mistakes.
And you're trying to clean it all up on your own, and you've drafted your speech. You're ready to earn your way back, and you've got a whole restoration plan that keeps you at a safe distance, close enough to God for stability, but not close enough to require any actual surrendering and allowing his will to play on you. But you can't repair things with effort or clever plan. And the longer you try to fix it yourself along, you'll keep missing what he's offered.
Because the invitation of the father isn't a contract. It's not, come back and work real hard and start over as a worker. Come home as a son and a daughter is what he says. Come back to relationship.
The father's watching, waiting eager to run, and you don't have to finish your speech. You don't have to have it all figured out. You just have to turn toward home. I think when I heard that one time recently, it was, it's still, I tell you this is a battle I come back to myself, to not picture God as withholding grace.
And wanting me to come, he's eager to forgive, eager to forgive, he's eager to look into the distance and meet you where you are. And maybe the younger brother, or the older brother story, doesn't feel, or the older brother story feels more like you, right? You've stayed, you've never left, you've worked, you've done what was expected, you've followed the rules, you've kept your reputation intact, your family's reputation intact, you've done your best to live a good life. But deep down, something's off, and you feel like God owes you.
You don't say it out loud, but there's this quiet expectation that your obedience should lead to a blessing, that if you do your part, got to do his. You don't want to admit it, but maybe the idea of grace makes you uncomfortable, especially when it's given to people who didn't earn it, or who haven't worked as hard as you. And you see that they're on these smoother paths than you, and there's not as much friction for them, but you're doing everything right. That's the older brother spirit.
It's when doing the right thing becomes a way to control God, rather than to respond to him. It's just a different form of younger brother. One of the most impactful things I read this week in this book, The Cross and the Product One, was he was talking about the relationship with the older brother spirit in this concept of, I hate the versus I hate me. And he's talking about these two phrases that you fall back and forth to within this older brother spirit.
It captures the emotional turmoil that exists within the older brother. First, there's I hate the. It reflects the anger directed at God when life doesn't go as expected. The older brother believes that his obedience should be a guaranteed blessing.
When it doesn't, resentment builds. I've done everything right, and this is what I get. He sees God as unfair and withholding. You wouldn't say it out loud, but you're angry with God.
You're angry that he hasn't delivered you from what you feel that you've earned, and angry that grace is given to others who don't deserve it. And angry despite your obedience, you still face hardship, disappointment, and delay in the things that you're calling on and forth. So there's the I hate the spirit. And then you fall back and forth to I hate me.
It's the same idea. You start to question that your efforts aren't enough. Use your efforts matter, and they have to be enough. You start to look inward and say, well, maybe I'm the problem.
Self-loathing sets in, but you can't make sense of your suffering despite your moral record. You wonder if maybe you haven't done enough after all. You doubt yourself. You look at your life and feel shame, not for rebellion, but for not living up to your own expectations.
You feel empty despite doing all the right things. So you bounce back and forth, furious at God all the moment, disgusted with yourself the next. It's the torment of the older brother's spirit. It's life under a scoreboard, and no matter how hard you work, you're always behind.
At the heart of the struggle is still that same performance-based faith. And it's when obedience becomes a tool to earn God's favor, and rather than a response to his love. This disappointment will always fill your life when you live in that cycle of blaming God or blaming yourself and grace invites us out of that cycle into relationship. You'll done love and not build on merit.
So where do I fit in the story? It's interesting for me because I've always struggled to place myself in this. I joked with my wife this week. I said, maybe I'm just another guy who was on the farm.
It's all what'll happen. I was there. He was mad. Father's really nice, though.
He's a great guy to work for. It's because you can see yourself in a little bit of everything. But I think it's cheating a little bit, but I see myself in both. I see myself in the younger son.
I've rebelled and run away. I grew up in church, but I wasn't always in the church, or I wasn't always in the church in the right state. So I've run away. And I've come running back.
And I've felt the Father's grace. And I've experienced the party. I've had those emotional moments of complete assurance, no sense of debt. And the overwhelming love of the Father was so clear in my life that nothing could cloud the shame or nothing could bring the shame back to me because I felt that Father's love and embracing party and hug and that running of him to me.
I felt that. But lately, I mean, not just lately, but as life has gone on. I'm further from those moments, right? Those moments happened a long time ago in my life now.
It was probably when I was around 19 that I would say I truly gave my life to Christ. And I remember that feeling. But I'm not 19 anymore. I actually, unlike John, can say I'm a guy in and around my 30s.
That's all. But that was a long time ago. That's so lately, the more time between me and those things, it's easier for me to start remembering and valuing myself based on my rights and my wrongs. I can even recall pain and relationships that I've caused like that of the Son to the Father.
So for me, I started imagining it's like the younger son of a few weeks after the feast, he's standing on the family farm, noticing it's a little smaller. This place was at least a third bigger a couple years ago. I mean, there's a third of the cows. The cows they didn't cut.
They just gave a certain amount of them away. But assuming the older brother never had a change of heart, so you're walking by your older brother, and he's giving you some looks. Because he's still got the same attitude, maybe, and the off-handed comments, the doubts are creeping in. You go, I don't know, is that a matter of me?
The party was great. But what if he sees what I'm seeing? Our family's wealth is just an imp diminishing. I'm seeing the results of my decisions.
What if he's starting to see that too? In the same way, I catch myself wondering, am I really good enough? And I know I don't necessarily need to be. I know Grace exists, but am I good enough?
Is God still seeing you through that lens of Grace that I know he offers? I know I tell other people about that I sing about. I genuinely have to talk for two minutes at a time. But more and more, I slip into that mindset.
I'm needing to perform to be excellent, just to maintain a relationship. How are my kids going to see God through me if I don't perform, if I don't have the proper relationship? For me, there's more of a lot of time spent, and I hate me. I judge myself by what I'm doing lately.
I can speak Grace to others, but I forget it applies to me. When me and John were discussing what I was going to talk about this morning, and me telling him, I don't know what to do, and he's like, you're going to be fine. He's reassuring me. We're talking about different stuff, and we started talking about the idea of your Grace is enough.
And he mentioned this Hebrew word to me that someone was talking to him about recently. It's called Da'inu. The word Da'inu is Hebrew for it would have been enough. It's a century old.
Century is old refrain, sung during the Jewish Passover seder dating back to the ninth century, and maybe earlier, it lists the acts of God's kindness during the Exodus story, bringing the Israelites out of Egypt to providing man and the wilderness and building the temple in Jerusalem. After each blessing, they would mention one blessing, and then they would say Da'inu, which means it would have been enough. So every step of the way, if he would only have let us out of Egypt and not let us cross the river, Da'inu, it would have been enough. If he had only let us cross the river and not brought us to the promise line, it would have been enough.
They'll start the actual ones, but there's like 15 of them that they sing. It's the idea that if every step of the way that if he had stopped, it would have been enough. That deliverance was already enough. It's radical and simplicity.
If God only had done one of these things, not all of it, it would still have been enough. It's a declaration of humble gratitude. Rather than fixating on what's lacking Da'inu rejoices and what's already given, it's refusal to measure grace or goodness by quantity, timing, or personal expectation. Here's an example of what this would look like for the younger son.
If the father had only been watching the road waiting for his son to return, Da'inu, it would have been enough. If the father had only run to meet him, ignoring the shame and the scorn of the village, Da'inu, it would have been enough. If the father had only embraced him while he was filthy and broken, Da'inu, it would have been enough. If the father had only kissed him before hearing a single word of apology, Da'inu, it would have been enough.
If the father had only stopped his unbitched speech to spare him the shame, Da'inu, it would have been enough. If the father had only given him a servant's place in the household, Da'inu, it would have been enough. It would have been more than he deserved. Every step of the way in living in grace provided by God we can remember that grace has been imparted on us, and that God's grace is sufficient in itself and way more than we deserve.
You can sort of practice this and think about this in your life. How would this song go for you? Every time I started thinking about it, the only way this truly effectively that I could think of translates in my life, the only starting point that makes sense of what would have been enough is the fixation on God's grace. It would have started with God's grace and ended with the blessings of my children.
But there was no way that I could get to it would have been enough until I got to God's grace. In Second Corinthians 1219, we hear this from Paul. This is his response. He hears from the Lord when calling on him to remove what he calls the thorn in his flesh that was troubling him.
He says, but he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ's power may rest on me. The response from the Lord was no, my grace is sufficient. This is the heart of a dainu, is it's repeated decoration of contentment rooted in remembrance, that even one act of God's mercy, even if incomplete by our own standards would have been more than we deserve.
And that's exactly what God tells Paul. My grace is sufficient, it's not complete. Or it's not incomplete, it's not lacking, it is enough. Dainu, the younger son of Luke 15 experiences the sufficiency.
The robe is more than expected. The ring is beyond what he deserved. The kiss and the feast is insanely generous. But the message beneath it all is my grace is sufficient.
Not because we've done enough, but because he has. And think about Paul, this is the same Paul. Oh no, my printer ran out of paper. I didn't even check, it was printed, I pulled it off the printer.
It's on my phone, so it's fine. There was bound to be some point of awkward silence. Maggie, my hero. It's like the teleprompter turned off.
All right, so Paul, my grace is sufficient. So we think about Paul, this is the same man who as Saul, we learned I was the chief prosecutor of Christians. He's responsible for imprisoning and killing all these followers of Jesus. And I was thinking about him this week.
I was thinking every time he walked in and out of the city of Jerusalem, he walked past the place where Stephen was stoned, he was there for that scene. He would enter these towns, I'm assuming, of people that he wants hunted down and killed. He'd be passing the mourning families of the people that he was involved in tormenting. It's wild to think that he did those things.
But he didn't try to find peace in being exceedingly good afterwards. He found rest in the one truth he found to be true, that God's grace is sufficient. He was the only way that he could live with what he had been. He had trusted that grace was not just some sort of concept presented to him, but it was his calling, it was his confidence, and it was his cover at all things.
Grace was all he had left in the end, and it was enough. And then there's David, Israel's greatest king, a man. The description's called, a man after God's own heart. He was brave, and he was chosen.
He was anointed, he led with strength, worship with passion. But in a moment of unchecked desire and power, he threw it all away. He saw the Siba, another man's wife, took her for himself. She became pregnant.
He tried to cover it up. And then when it didn't work, he arranged for her husband, your eye to be killed in battle. Those two paragraphs don't even sound like the same person. So David, this man after his own God's own heart became an adulterer, a liar, and a murderer.
But God didn't abandon him. He sent Nathan the prophet to confront David. And David, to his credit, didn't deny or make excuses. He simply said, I have sinned against the Lord.
And in that moment, God extended mercy. Nathan replied, the Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. It's interesting when the daily audible hearing the story of David, we see that the consequences really were real and lasting, but also was the grace.
And David's story didn't end in failure, because even in his darkest, machineful moment, God's grace was enough. Grace doesn't pretend that the damage didn't happen. It doesn't erase the consequences of the farm. Still two thirds the size it used to be.
But it does say even now, even here, you are not disqualified. You are loved, and you are welcome. So this morning, I want to close by reading Psalm 103, which is David's reflection at the end of his life on the mercy and forgiveness of our Lord. If you find yourself this morning, like me, and either the older or the younger brother spirit, let's together be reminded of Psalm 103 says about the nature of God.
The Bible remains true. God has unchanged. What David found to be true about God is true about God as we celebrate worship who he is and the grace he's given us. Psalm 103 says, praise the Lord, my soul, all my inmost being.
Praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the Eagles. The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.
He made known his way to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel. The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse nor really harbor his anger forever. He does not treat us according to his or her sins to serve or repay us according to our inequities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far, he has removed our transgressions from us. As father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him. For he knows how we are formed here, but that we are the dust.
The life of mortals is like grass, the flourish like a flower of the forth of the field. The wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. But from everlasting to everlasting, the Lord's love is with those who fear him and his righteousness with their children's children. With those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts.
The Lord has established his throne in heaven and his kingdom rules overall. Praise the Lord, you his angels. You mighty ones who do his bidding, who obey his word. Praise the Lord, all his heavenly hosts.
You his servants who do his will. Praise the Lord, all his works everywhere his dominion, praise the Lord my soul. So if you're ever in doubt of God's thoughts and opinions of you, focus on Psalm 103. Now let's sing together in celebration that your grace is enough and if all we had was his grace, dying you.