Word of Salvation – Vol. 30 No. 21 – Jun 1985
I Will Arise And Go To My Father
Sermon by Rev. A. I. De Graaf on Lord’s Day 44
Scripture Readings: Ps. 119:1-8, 169-176; Luke 15:11-32.
Suggested Hymns: 52:1,2; 449:1,2; 164:1,2,4,5; 440:1,2; 428:2,4; 251; 449:3.
FREE! FREE! Everybody dreams of freedom, especially these days. Liberty for women, ah but they still are in chains. Liberty for blacks – oh but still they sigh in bondage! Liberty – well, but when the police still roam the streets and prisons are filled with frustrated freedom fighters, we can sing as we sang just after World War II that German song:
DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI !!
(At least) OUR THOUGHTS… are free!
But now in this commandment, in this Word of God, your Maker and Redeemer comes to you and asks: how free, really ARE those thoughts? Oh I agree – says God – FREE they should be.
But could it be that they are still prisoners in the land of slavery? Even when you have started to live the new life of freedom-in-God, it could be that the most important part of you, your thoughts, your desires, your HEART…. is still in bondage!
What is it, to be free?
The Lost Son from Jesus’ well-known parable thought he was free at last when roaming away from father’s farm… but then he found out, in the end, how cold, cruel and bitter the slavery of sin is. How un-free he was. Always having to prove himself.
Really, the psychologists and psychiatrists of today are beginning to discover a bit what slavery can be suffered exactly in those so-called free thoughts, in the so-called emancipated heart. How deadly the slavery there.
And so the Lord is radical. He asks you and me: Are you doing – whatever you are doing of my law – you know: stick to your wife, come to church on Sunday, pay your tax, do what dad & mum say.
Are you doing all that because you have to – asks God – or because you really want to?
And then He gives an invitation.
He says: Come, don’t let even your thoughts stay out in the cold!
Come home where I live, the whole person of you, all of the life of you.
For doing the will of God is your true homeland;
it is what makes heaven to be heaven.
Not the marble chairs or the angel’s songs
or even absence of war,
but the will of God… GOD… is the most heavenly thing that heaven knows.
Come home, says God, and then He gives the Law.
Oh sure, I grant you, you can’t always see THIS beauty in what we make of this law, our little explanations, our added rules and regulations. Our little tyrannical by-laws, our Pharisee-additions, which we come along with to “round off” matters nicely.
Hah! As if we can ever make matters as round as He who created the circle of the wide heavens.
And HE created them laughingly, as a song. Not at all with a steep calvinistic frown in the front of His forehead. God did not make His law as if He meant to say:
“I’LL TEACH-EM!”
God says: “Come to me, small one, and I will get you to walk, step by step. Until you have stepped all the way home. And then He says: When you LOVE Me, THEN keep My commandments.
AND NEVER FORGET HE SAID THIS JUST AFTER HAVING WASHED THE FEET OF THE LIKES OF YOU AND ME.
Look, He says, when you really love Me, what would you rather do than what I tell you I like?
You love Me? Then I will tell you the desire that is in MY heart, says God.
And when you love Me, nothing will be too much for you, will it? Then love not only makes the commandments light to bear, it also shows me how good, how bright, how light these commandments are.
So I cry out: Lord how beautifully and carefully you have arranged everything: you really didn’t overlook or forget anything at all! Please forgive me for being so stupid to think that I knew better than You!”
Then the lost son, disappointed, stuck, sorry and sick of where his stubbornness landed him, says:
“Shall I be so crazy to stay a bit longer in this dirty pig-business?”
No sir, I (and here begins his road while he still sits down)…
“I will arise and go to my father….!”
Then he isn’t walking yet; that comes later.
Do you see that the TENTH commandment in a way is the FIRST?
Commandment obedience begins in the heart,
before it can ever properly begin in my ACTIONS.
You could say, in a way,
that the Lord put that tenth commandment at the end
just to make sure we would not misunderstand.
That’s why the fathers who wrote this Catechism saw rightly:
It’s more than just desiring a woman (7th)
or desiring houses, oxen and donkeys (8th commandment)
that is here at stake:
The very first commandment has already fallen flat
if I serve no other gods publicly…
but do so like mad in my thoughts and in my heart.
Then it’s only a matter of time before my heart –
from where are the very issues of all my life –
and my thoughts – which guide my deeds,
` will have made my whole life serve those gods.
You CANNOT serve two masters, says Jesus, even if you would want to.
It just CANNOT be done.
And so Father asks you: What REALLY do you want?
Then God’s child says: Yes Father, I come.
In that heart he first begins what will become the deeds…
he long, long road back home.
How tiring it was, how utterly exhausting,
to try and serve God and… the other gods.
To halt on two thoughts, instead of walking on with joy..!
But the joy of coming home:
the joy I have seen on the face,
the tear-stained face of a man at his first Lord’s Supper
after long, long idolatry….!
There is no peace, says God, outside of Me.
My child, what else do you desire, what else could you want?
C. S. Lewis was brought up in a Christian family.
But he thought he could substitute other names for the Name of the only God.
He thought his sharp brain could find food
in other words, than the only Word of God.
But when he at last goes down on his knees,
when his one thought after the other has been dismantled
by the patient logic of the Creator of all the human mind,
he calls the book that tells about it: SURPRISED BY JOY.
There is no peace, says God outside knowing My Name.
My child, what else do you desire, what else, then, could you want?
A sinner-at-heart can drag his feet to church on Sunday
but when his heart is not free,
how can he know the joy of the Sunday as sign
that all my time is now free,
risen with Jesus from the grave of deadly boredom?
How free are you when you DO come to church
but then sneak off to the flea-market?
Or, yes of course you DO go to church but then,
“Yesterday I had to make money, so no Saturday for the family.
So on that SUNDAY in November
we must load the family in the car
and instead of the rest of God…
have that rush all the way to the Prom
to see the block of land where my tent shall stand.”
Oh sure, you can argue, and protest….
but must anyone argue with you about the token of your freedom,
the Day of rest and gladness, that shows that all your time is free?
There is no peace says God, except my Sabbath peace,
and so, my child, what else do you desire,
what else now, do you want?
And so you may have tried the road of revolution.
Do Your Own Thing!
Let those parents talk!
Let those elders try and persuade others till they see blue in the face,
I Do My Own Thing…!
But there is peace in the rediscovery of the leadership God gives sinful people over my life. I am no rock, and surely no island! I belong somewhere and in the world someone cares…! Yes, says God, there is no peace in revolution. But my child, what do YOU desire, what do you want?
It can be long you tried to live with hatred in your heart…! Oh sure, you came to church, even tried the Lord’s Supper at times…! But the hatred was there, the root of bitterness, which the catechism calls the root of murder… but now I see it: God wants the thing tackled not just in civil words and a formal handshake.
He wants the reluctant heart go all the way.
No mere tolerance but love, where I see that fellow, that nasty woman, that cruel creature as one who may live by grace just like I myself…! Oh the peace when hatred can die and be buried forever. When my shouting ego forever can shut up and I no longer need to be bothered by feelings of superiority or inferiority.
Oh the peace of resting in God’s love, and it is this God who gave His Son, who asks you now: What else then did you desire, what else is there you want?
For so long – oh sure everyone THOUGHT you lived decently, you were lured by the lust for that other one: that man, that woman, who was not yours. But your God does not merely want you decent on the outside: he wants that wrongful fire put out, so that all the coals can burn only for the ONE He gave you. Where you can THANK GOD for the gift of the ONE He gave you! Oh the peace of love re-found. Of love pure and holy. And He says never mind the crazy books and movies: what else but My design could you desire, what else but My Way… could you want?
For so long you may have hungered and shivered in the cold world of deceit of robbery, of lie and pretence, but you want more, don’t you, than just to have “done the right thing by everybody”…!
You want more.
Oh, says your Father, don’t you want the full joy the re-found joy of childlike trust, where you can be content, and where the truth is like the crisp daylight in which you walk?
Who would even want to keep one foot in the foggy land of lie?
You see, in all these things your Lord asks you:
Now what really do you want, my child?
He does this in every preaching of the law.
Such preaching of the law is also a preaching of the Gospel.
For the Gospel is not only
that I shall be forgiven the GUILT of my sin
(Alleluia for the Lamb)
but also that I am set free – inside first of all – from the POWER of that sin:
Hurray for the Holy Spirit!
It all comes down to the Covenant of grace He makes with us and our children:
I call you to a life of togetherness with Me, says God:
I – and I only, your God! – and you, you FULLY… MY people!
No-one else’s people but MINE!
In a way you can say the tenth commandment is the most impossible one of the lot.
Or you can say: Unless a miracle happens,
it shows how impossible they ALL are.
Yes, says God: and you don’t think I should trim these requirements, these specifications-for-peace, just down a bit to suit YOUR WEAKNESS, should I?
Tell me yourself now, small one,
How can I – or could you ever – be content with less,
if LOVE is what we really want?
And so there I sit with that trembling, broken and divided heart,
and your Father says:
Isn’t it time you give it to Me to mend,
to Me to heal, and then to Me to rule?
(As Calvin said: Here it is Lord, my heart… to you, promptly and sincerely).
When you hear that you will say: I shall arise and go to my father.
O Father I long for home.
How homesick I really am,
for that home, that fullness, that peace, that life!
That’s the start of a long road.
But it’s a road along which the birds are singing.
And you chime in with the birds, those FREE birds.
And your song also, becomes a song of true FREEDOM.
The amazing song of Psalm 119:
Lord, that LAW of Yours, that DEMANDING Law of yours,
what a message, what a future, what a beauty!
When at last even our thoughts will be truly free!
Amen.