Luke 15:11-32: The Parable of Two Sons

Luke 15:32 "It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found."

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most popular parable in all of scripture, but so often we miss the big picture. The parable surely is about a prodigal son who runs away and then comes back to find himself embraced and forgiven by his father. However, the story is just as much about the second son as it is the first. Let us look at the parable this morning and find out what it truly means.

The parable that Jesus gives here starts out like this: a son asks of his father to give him his inheritance before he dies. The father does so, and the son takes his inheritance and runs away. He begins living a reckless life, and before you know it, he is poor and destitute. He resolves to come back to his father that he might be one of his servants, but instead his father embraces him with loving arms and grants him a place in his kingdom.

This if often where the story stops in our minds, but Jesus keeps going. He tells of another son who has been with his father since the beginning, always obeying his father. This son is not pleased at all the rejoicing that is happening at the first son's return. He is rather bitter towards it, and tells this to his father, who gently rebukes him and encourages him to rejoice at the return of the son who is lost, but how is found.

So, what's the point of this story in its entirety? The parable of two sons (for which the parable would be better named) tells primarily of the overwhelming joy that God has over any sinner who repends, and secondarily teaches us how much love the father has for us and what it looks like to truly repent of our sins. Surely we won't be able to dive into all of those aspects thoroughly this morning, so instead, let us put ourselves into the story.

In this story, there are two sons. One is sinful and the other is self-righteous. The first, prodigal son is the sinful son who basically told his father that he was dead to him and after realizing his mistake turned around and asked the father to accept him even after he had sinned. The second son is the self-righteous son who is bitter at the father's acceptance of the sinful son. This son had been obeying his father since the beginning, and he thought he deserved what the father had to give him. The question I have for you today is this: which son are you? Are you an incredibly sinful son who has rejected God the Father? Or are you an incredibly self-righteous son who believes that he deserves God the Father's salvation?

Whichever son you are, let me tell you: the solution is repentance (see Luke 11:7). If we have rejected God, we must repent of our blatant sin against him. If we have been self-righteous, attempting to gain salvation on our own, we must repent of our legalistic obedience and bitterness towards God's mercy. Let me encourage you this morning: each of you are, or at least were in the past, one of these two sons. There is no other category of people. In our natural sinful state, we either reject God and run from him, or we try to obey him in a way that attempts to gain salvation on our own. But each one of these sons need to repent in order to be accepted into the Father's kingdom. I pray that you would repent today as well, and be embraced by the loving, merciful, and joyful arms of God the Father.