What keeps us from embodying the “running, extravagant, welcoming love” that the father shows the younger son in the Parable of the Prodigal Son? We are led to believe that this kind of love is what God shows us. Why can’t we show the same kind of love to other people? This was the question I asked myself in church this past Sunday.
The father in the parable was more than ready to forgive his wayward son. He had forgiven him! Although the son had treated him shabbily, the father chose not to hold against the son what the son had done.
We, I have found, are not so forgiving. We do not allow people to make mistakes or allow for their weaknesses. We are ready to pummel them for the tiniest slip.
This is what Jesus was getting at when he talked about planks in our eyes and splinters in the eyes of other people.
It may be the negativity bias that causes us to magnify other people’s mistakes and to exaggerate their seriousness. The negativity bias is our tendency to look for the worst in other people. If we cannot find anything, we imagine it.
The ability to love in such a generous way does not come naturally to us. I prefer to use generous rather than extravagant to describe this kind of love because extravagant can have a negative connotation.
God, however, allows for this weakness and supplies us with grace that enables us to will and do what we would otherwise not will or do. We on our part must make use of this grace.
God in the person of the Holy Spirit will prompt us to love in this way, but we must respond to the Holy Spirit’s prompting. It is here where our attitudes and beliefs can act as obstacles to our responding and can cause us to respond halfheartedly or not at all. They can act as obstacles to us loving others like God loves us.
Our attitudes are our feelings or opinions about a particular individual or people in general; our beliefs are what believe. They play an important part in whether we can make use of the grace that God supplies us.
In Romans 12: 2 the apostle Paul draws attention to the connection between how we think and how we act.
“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
If we allow God to influence the way that we think, we will also allow him to influence the way that we act. We will become a new person.
For example, we may decide not to forgive someone for something that they said or did or we imagined that they said or did. We may have misinterpreted their words or actions. We can misread people. This is not the same as gaslighting in which one person attempts to convince another that they are imagining things. Rather our feelings or opinions can affect our perceptions so we may distort in our minds what someone else is saying or doing in a negative way. We may hear as a criticism of ourselves a general observation of how people behave. We see no point in forgiving them because we have no interest in maintaining a relationship with them.
Our way of thinking, however, conflicts with Jesus’ teaching about forgiving others. Jesus teaches that we should forgive other people’s failings and not set a limit on how many times that we forgive them. He does not say that we can opt out of forgiving them if we decide that we no longer want them as a friend. Rather Jesus says that we should forgive them and treat them with grace and kindness regardless of what kind of relationship, if any, that we will maintain with them.
Jesus understands the human heart. He knows that we are capable of provoking someone else into saying or doing something that offends us, so we have an excuse to end our relationship with them. He knows that we may choose to misunderstand someone, in order to justify rejecting them.
Loving others as God loves us does not mean that we must become besties or bosom buddies with everyone, but it does mean that we should be gracious and kind in our treatment of them.
The reason then we are not embodying the love that God shows us is that we are not allowing God to rule our hearts and minds. We are not giving serious thought to what God teaches us through the words and example of Jesus and letting them guide what we say or do. Instead, we are allowing our feelings and opinions and our beliefs to sway us, feelings and opinions and beliefs, which are contrary to God’s teaching.
This happens because we have not full assimilated God’s teaching. We have not immersed ourselves in it and let it permeate our thoughts and our feelings. We have not absorbed God’s teaching to the point where it guides us without our needing to think much about it. It has not become second nature to us.
We may spend a lot of time in the Bible and learn all kinds of things. However, we may not acquire what is most important for us to be a disciple of Jesus. A disciple of Jesus is influenced by his teachings and tries to follow his example.
One of the weaknesses of Sunday School is its primary focus is upon study the Bible, not forming us as Jesus’ disciples. Studying the Bible and being formed as a disciple are not the same thing.
Sunday School classes are predicated on the notion that if we study the Bible, some good may rub off on us. We may learn something which may help us in living the Christian faith and life. The curriculum used in the Sunday School classroom, however, may not be specifically geared to our spiritual formation as a disciple of Jesus.
Sunday School was originally a scheme to teaching illiterate children of the lower classes to read so that they could read the Bible for themselves. The children worked as laborers in the factories and were given only one day off—Sunday.
A typical adult Sunday School class may have an enrollment of 25 to 30 members. A smaller number will attend the class on Sundays. The class format will be a lecture with limited discussion. It is noteworthy that Sunday School classes which are larger than 30 people tend to become complacent.
Spiritual formation is best done in small groups where the group leader’s primary role is to facilitate discussion and to keep the group focused on what it is studying. Rather than undertaking a general survey of the Bible or a detailed exposition of a book of the Bible, such a small group will look at only those parts of the Bible that are essentially to forming us as one of Jesus’ disciples. It is a much more focused approach.
Spiritual formation in small groups is closer to the lengthy catechesis, or religion instruction, that would-be Christians underwent in the early Church. Its purpose is to train and equip individuals as disciples of Jesus.
While a small group may have as many as ten to twelve people, research shows that three or four, at most five, is the optimal size for a small group.
“Anything more than five and the conversation does not work so well: one or two people tend to dominate; the conversation breaks into two, even three; frequently one person is entirely cut out of the interaction, and there is little energy in the group.”
Sermons cannot carry the burden of forming a congregation into disciples of Jesus. They can teach us new things and reinforce what we have already learned. A weekly talk, however, while it may be very edifying and inspiring, cannot meet that need by itself. This is not to downplay the importance of the sermon but to draw attention to the need for spiritual formation opportunities that supplement and support the sermon.
Churches often have ministry team leaders and volunteers who have a busy Sunday that does not permit them to take advantage of any spiritual formation offering on that day. They may be engaged in ministry of some kind during the sermon. While the sermons may be recorded on video, they may not have an opportunity to view the video. As a consequence, they may not benefit from hearing the sermon. Even if they do view it, they may have other things going on in their lives, as do other members of the congregation, which may exercise a stronger influence on them.
John Wesley realized that it took more than listening to sermons for someone to become and remain a disciple of Jesus. He organized the early Methodists into classes (small groups) and bands (networks of small groups). While small groups called “societies” were not unknown in Wesley’s time, they were not as systematically organized as Wesley’s classes and bands. As well as nurturing its members in the Christian faith and life and giving spiritual care to them, a class offered a degree of accountability not seen in a typical twenty-first century Sunday School class.
Whenever a class reached a certain size, a maximum of 20 people, it was required to divide into two new classes. In this way a class did not become too large and therefore unable to effectively carry out its functions.
Wesley’s general rules, sometimes referred to as “simple rules,” were intended to guide the early Methodists in their classes. They are to do no harm, and avoid all kinds of evil; to do good; and to attend the ordinances, the ordinances being the various means of grace such as services of public work, the Lord’s Supper, searching the Scriptures, family and private prayer, and other similar things through which God influences us and transforms us.
As we can see, a number of things keep us from showing the kind of love to others, which God shows to us.
In the final analysis, it must be acknowledged that the responsibility for our spiritual growth is in large measure ours. We can put little time and effort into growing spiritually, hoping that we can get by this way. However, as Jesus points to our attention, a tree is known by its fruit. When we give little attention to our spiritual growth, our fruit will be wizened and shriveled. We will not be producing the kind of fruit that we ought to be as a disciple of Jesus. We will struggle to love others as God loves us.
It is tempting to neglect our spiritual growth. We may see no benefit to ourselves in embodying the generous love that God shows us. What do we get out of loving those difficult people in our lives and in our church? Our life is much easier when we do not speak to that older church member around whom we feel bad about ourselves, guilty and ashamed about the bad or unkind things that we have said and done and avoid and ignore them. The truth, however, is that the older church member is not the one who is making us feel bad about ourselves. It is us. We are not living our lives in harmony with God according to the teachings and example of Jesus and deep down inside us we know it.
The benefit of loving others with the same generous love as God loves us is that we are doing what is God’s will for us. We are doing what is good, pleasing, and perfect, as Paul puts it. Our will and God’s will are aligned with each other. We have peace of mind.
When we hear the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we tend to focus upon the father’s love for the wayward son. We may overlook one important thing. When the son came to his senses, he concluded that he would be better off working as a hired servant in his father’s house than he would for as underpaid, starving pigherd for a pig farmer in a foreign land.
For the Jews pigs were unclean animals. Pigherds were unclean people. A farmer who raised pigs was unclean too. Someone could not get much lower than working as a pigherd. The pods which were fed to the pigs were most likely fava bean pods. The pods are tough and hairy and not fit for human consumption. From the perspective of Jesus’ original audience, the wayward son had fallen on really hard times.
What the son decided was that he would be better off obeying the will of his father than he would be doing whatever he felt like doing. Doing the latter got him into the predicament in which he finds himself. In deciding to return to his father’s house and seek employment as a servant in that house, he decided to submit to the will of his father.
Nowhere in the parable does Jesus suggest that the father’s generous forgiveness of the son means that the son, in returning home, is free to continue to act in a willful manner. While the father takes him back as a son, not a servant, the son is expected to obey the father and to do his will.
God’s generous love and forgiveness does not free us from obedience to God. Some of us may have acquired the mistaken belief that it does. This belief may account for why we do not give a whole lot of attention to loving others, forgiving them, and treating them with grace and kindness. We believe that God will forgive or pretend not to notice what we are doing.
In adopting this attitude, we are using to the wrong end God’s goodwill toward us. We are presuming upon God’s generosity. We are not showing God the respect that God deserves. God does not forgive us so we can go on doing bad things and harming ourselves or others. God forgives us with the expectation that we stop what we are doing. When we persist in doing it, we grieve God.
When Jesus saved the woman caught in adultery from a cruel death and forgave her, he told her to go and sin no more. He did not tell that she could keep on doing what she had been doing—having sex with someone other than her husband. He did not indulge her proclivity to do what is wrong.
One step that we can take to become better at loving others is to identify what feelings and opinions and beliefs we are allowing to block us from being more loving. What feelings are we allowing to control us? What thoughts and ideas are we allowing to dominate our thinking? We ask the Holy Spirit to show us where we are going wrong, where we are allowing our feelings to get the better of us, where we are drawing the wrong conclusions. We then weigh these feelings, opinions, and beliefs against Jesus’ teachings and example, asking the Holy Spirit’s help in carefully considering whether we are doing the right thing—what God would want us to do.
