The Prodigal God

I picked up The Prodigal God by Tim Keller a little bit ago and it has certainly made me think.

I was going to share a few quotes from it that describe the condition I and many others, I do believe, have, but was surprised by another thought, an answer to prayers of sorts.

For clarification, the book is about the story of the Prodigal Son, or rather, as Keller calls it, the parable of the two sons. in it, he goes into a description of the parable and goes on to discuss the conditions of the two sons, primarily the elder son, the morally right. In a rather revealing commentary to me, he discusses how jaded both sons are to God, that the sin of the sons is not merely doing good or doing bad, as if it were, the elder son would be justified, rather, it is a wish to have control. Well, here, he explains it better.

Here, then, is Jesus' radical redefinition of what is wrong with us. Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.

Not only this, he goes on to explain that he believes the condition of the elder son, the moralist, is a much more desperate condition than the one who is "doin' all the wrong." This, the condition of the moralist and self-righteous yet still self-seeking "Christian" is surely what I have been.

So, as I have been reading through this book, my kind of off and on prayer has been, "Well, God, if I'm in this condition, how do I fix it? How am I changed so that I do things out of a love for you, not out of a want for my own good? For surely, even though You promise good to those who come to you, our hearts must be changed so that they desire You above all things, even our own good!"

What was His answer? Well, I certainly expected a lengthier wait for any response from God, as it seems that with regards to His work I always seem to think I'll have to wait years for things to change. But He hit me with a thought. If the end of man is to glorify God, then our lives should be spent trying to seek out how we can do that, correct? With the hopeful consent of a dear friend, I shall borrow an analogy. If we are to be mirrors reflecting God's own glory, sin has fogged our mirror. What Jesus has come to do is un-fog those mirrors. His blood on the Cross and continued work in our lives is the Windex, if you will, to clean our mirrors that they may shine brightly the glory of He Who Created Us. (He Who Must Be Named? A Harry Potter joke..) Therefore, my question of, "How can I fix myself, how can I get out of this moralistic attitude?" must be addressed with a why? Why do I want to get out of this moralistic attitude? Is it merely because I know it's the right thing to want, or because true life is found in Jesus and to truly follow Jesus I must truly love God, and that cannot come of moralism?

Regardless, the answer that I came to was that perhaps it is not something I am obligated to fix. Perhaps I must make every effort to seek God truthfully and honestly, keeping in line with His commands and following His wisdom, but at the very heart of it all, depending on Jesus to cleanse me. Perhaps my job is not to worry about changing my heart beyond prayer. Perhaps I simply must continue to attempt to know God, but instead of relying on my own good, relying on the good of Jesus, the blood that He spilled in order for my mirror to be unfogged, my life to be full of what it's supposed to be, and believing that He is big enough, faithful enough, gracious enough to change me.

Whew.