Everything I Have Is Yours

July 20, 2015

Everything I Have Is Yours

“His father said to him, ‘Look, dear son, you have always stayed by me, and everything I have is yours.”

Luke 15:31 (Parable of the Prodigal Son: Luke 15:25-32)

My Sunday School class just finished three weeks studying the Parable of the Prodigal Son. One outcome for me was a renewed appreciation for the Master Teacher, Jesus and his use of parables. This week my meditations will be on five of Jesus’ parables. First up, my thoughts on the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Jesus told this parable because the Pharisees objected to Jesus keeping company with tax collectors and sinners. The Pharisees were masters at living their life by PBA – Performance Based Acceptance. Not only were they adept at measuring their good works in keeping their religious rules, they were the ones writing the rules. From their lofty peaks of self-assurance, they looked down their noses at all the people who failed to meet their standards. Their whole sense of self-awareness was wrapped up in keeping the law. When Jesus told this parable, he hoped the Pharisees would recall Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37). In that vision Israel, who was lost, is made alive again by the power of God. Israel wasn’t made alive again by their own power. They were made alive by God’s Spirit.

In this story Jesus tells, the older brother represents the Pharisees. Not just the Pharisees who listened to Jesus, but the Pharisee in all of us. Like the older brother, we all are prone to find our identity, our sense of self-awareness, in the things we do, the things we own, and in how well we perform according to whatever standard we choose to measure our lives. When we fall into this trap we miss the whole point of the Gospel message. The Good News of Jesus Christ is that our life is not about our performance; our life is about our identity. At our core, our truest identity has been established, once and for all time, through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Through faith in Jesus, we are now and for all time the beloved children of God.

The older son’s confrontation with his father is a compelling vision of our life in Christ. The father, when he divided his estate between his sons, had already given to the older son all that was his. The older son sinned against his father by refusing to celebrate his brother’s return, and by denying his own kinship with his brother. Yet, the father goes out to him, and continues to affirm the older son’s identity as his beloved child, affirming that “everything I have is yours.”

God’s will for all of His children is that we would learn to rest in the assurance of His love and acceptance of us. God wants us to learn to live out of the reality of our true identity: we are children of God. This truth allows us to get off of the performance-based-acceptance ways of our culture. The unconditional love of God fulfills our needs to be loved, to be accepted and to be valued. When we know who we are in Christ, we can get off of the performance-based-acceptance treadmill. When you are resting in your assurance as God’s beloved, you do not need any outside validation of your identity.

Sē’lah

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(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com. The BLOG is also available on Amazon Kindle, by subscription.

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

·        Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

·        The second edition of  First Think – Then Pray is available on Amazon Kindle.

·        Meditations on The Story of My Life as told by Jesus Christ has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188.