Treat me as one of your hired servants. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.
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I am no longer worthy to be called your son. You'll get this book and many others when you join Bible Gateway Plus. Starting your free trial of Bible Gateway Plus is easy. The next step is to choose a monthly or yearly subscription, and then enter your payment information.
Luke 15:11-32
You can cancel anytime during the trial period. To manage your subscription, visit your Bible Gateway account settings. Upgrade, and get the most out of your new account. Try it free for 30 days. Luke 14 Luke Enrich your faith and grow in spiritual maturity with the incredible Bible study and devotional books listed below. Despite the breathtaking--and insulting --audacity of the younger son's request, the father grants it! This reflects the amazing indulgence that God shows toward us. Even when we are acting as selfishly as the prodigal son, God indulges us.
He yields what is his and allows us to misuse it out of respect for the freedom that he has given us. But he knows that the misuse of our freedom will have no better results than it did with the prodigal son's misuse of his freedom, and God trusts that we will learn our lesson and come back to him. In context, this means that he abandoned the Holy Land to go, voluntarily, into exile into a gentile, pagan country where he could live loosely without being censured by fellow Jews living all around him.
He wanted to get out of God's land so that he could live in sin and fund his sinful lifestyle by what he took from his father. But eventually the resources he had were exhausted and a hard time came. If he had not spent what he had on loose living as we will later learn, on prostitutes , he would have had the money he needed to weather the hard time, but he didn't. Thus he was reduced to a state of hunger and had to subject himself to a pagan humiliation 1 and to feed the pagan's pigs humiliation 2. He would have been happy just to eat as well as the pigs humiliation 3 , but nobody gave him anything to eat, not even from the pigs' slop humiliation 4.
Having been brought to such a low state, he recalled how his righteous father treated even his hired servants better: Even being treated as one of his father's hired servants would be better than the treatment he is receiving in the gentile world.
Parable of the Prodigal Son
If we are bent on leaving God, things will go badly for us. We will be humiliated in the uncaring world. The farther we get from the Father's loving care, the worse off we will be, and our best course is to return to God and his forgiveness. While he is still at a distance, the father sees him, has compassion upon him, runs to him, hugs him, and kisses him. This is far from the humiliating reunion that the son might expect based on his previous audacious and insulting treatment of his father!
Rather than treating his younger son as a mere servant, he turns to the actual servants and orders a celebration. He is to wear a fancy robe! There is to be a fancy feast for everyone! There is to be music and dancing! There is usually at least one major lesson per parable for each major figure in it, and now we come to the lesson that the older brother can teach us.
When that happens, we discover that he's not just angry with his brother, he's angry with his father, too. He points out that he has never disobeyed his father's commands but that his father has never given him a kid a young goat so that he could slaughter it and have a party with his friends. In contrast, the younger brother has "devoured your living with harlots" wasting a third of the father's estate! The older brother sees this difference in treatment as a manifest injustice toward him and is angry with his father because of it.
As we will see, he even seems to be worrying about his own security in the family since the father is showing such seeming favoritism to the younger son. First, he tells him: His place is secure. Second, he tells him: The younger soon took his third, so the two-thirds that remain will go entirely to the older son.
12 things you need to know about the Prodigal Son
This means that the current celebration does not represent a threat to the older brother or his inheritance. Instead, it is a celebration of joy occasioned by the return of the son.
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Thus the father thirdly tells him: If you like the information I've presented here, you should join my Secret Information Club. If you're not familiar with it, the Secret Information Club is a free service that I operate by email. Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant pastor or seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible.
But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith. Eventually, he entered the Catholic Church.
What the Prodigal Son story doesn't mean
There is more to the story of the prodigal son than meets the eye. Here are 12 things you should know about it. On the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the gospel reading is the famous parable of the "prodigal son. But there is more to the story than meets the eye. Here are 12 things you need to know. What does "prodigal" mean? It's basic meaning is "wasteful"--particularly with regard to money. That's what the prodigal son does in this story. Why does Jesus tell this parable? This question is answered at the beginning of Luke 15, where we read: Actually, Jesus tells three parables: What's happening in the parable?
What is the prodigal son asking for? In this parable, the younger son demands "the share of property that falls to me" v. What does the father's reaction teach us? What does the prodigal son do next? He thus plans to return to his father and say three things: