Guest Post – Jordan: “The Prodigal God”

Hi, my name is Jordan and I’m a guest blogger while James is gone.  I’m on facebook and am always up for having more friends, so if you want to have private conversations with me then facebook would be the best medium for me.

I’m going to try and post more and to write a better, but to start I thought I’d just share a book that a group of friends and I read through and discussed.

The book is The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller.  It’s a good read and great for conversations in a small group.  I’ll just give the basic jist to see if anyone can relate. 

Jesus tells a parable to a mixed group of people of ‘sinners’, tax collectors, Pharisees, and Scribes.  We find this parable recorded in the book of Luke, chapter 15, verses 11-32.  Keller renames this parable as “The Parable of the Two Lost Sons” because that’s how Jesus starts the story out, “there was a man who had two sons”.  So here we are looking at this story with the well known sinner brother who basically robs his father and could have been put to death for what he did, he goes off and spends it all on parties and prostitutes.  But the elder brother stays to work hard like he always has.  Little bro comes back and big bro is angry that his father is throwing him a party… So we’ve got two basic kinds of people listening: Those who are Licentious and those who are Moralists.  We’ve got two brothers: the licentious  one and the moralist.  Both brother need the Savior and one is repenting.  The book serves a few different purposes, one to teach what Jesus was saying, one to figure out which brother you are more like, and one to challenge you to be like Jesus.   Are you an elder brother or a younger brother?

Jordan