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EVA WOLEVER
Witness Correspondent
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LAKELAND (FBW)—If church isn’t about seeing lives changed with God’s grace, then it’s about nothing at all, Jack Graham said in his sermon at the annual Florida Baptist State Convention in Lakeland Nov. 10.
Graham, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, focused on the “essential” Gospel of God’s grace looking through the lens of Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.
“[Grace] becomes a miracle when it happens to you. You know grace is a five-letter word. It’s spelled J-E-S-U-S,” said the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. “Of course, you know that it is the unmerited, unlimited favor of God towards the undeserving. … It is a free gift.”
Teaching from Luke 15, Graham examined three parables Jesus told to a group of Pharisees grumbling about His ministry to sinners. The stories show three ways people can be lost and found, Graham said.
In the narrative of the shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to search for one lost lamb, the lamb is lost through aimless wandering, Graham said.
People who are lost aimlessly drift away from God, “putting themselves in desperate conditions to predators and all the rest that can devour and destroy them,” Graham said.
People also can be lost through carelessness, such as in the parable of the lost coin, when a steward of the coins carelessly dropped one.
“Many [lost through carelessness] are victims of others’ sins and failures,” Graham said. “I know we don’t want to accept any kind of victim mentality in our society. We’ve got way too much of that. But, the fact is that many people are lost because of the abuse of others, the carelessness of others, the lovelessness of others.”
Graham said he feared a careless church may have “dropped the ball” in reaching some of these people.
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“They slip through our fingers,” Graham said. “The question always remains: ‘Do we really care?’”
The tales of the lost sheep and lost coin are just “hors d’oeuvres” for the parable of the prodigal son, the “main course on this platter of parables that Jesus gives us,” Graham said.
The prodigal son is lost defiantly, through his decision to walk away from his father, Graham said. After blowing his inheritance on riotous living, the prodigal ended up in a pigpen, planning to return to his father to beg him to accept him back as a servant.
The son’s decision to return was not a conversion, nor a conviction—and at the point of his return he still did not understand the depth of the love and grace of his father.
“He’s like so many people today who think that somehow they must prove themselves or talk themselves into a relationship with God,” said Graham.
The father, meanwhile, had been waiting and praying for his son’s return, and ran to meet the prodigal. The father puts the best robe in the house, his own robe, on his filthy son’s shoulders, gives him the ring that signifies their relationship, and throws a party to celebrate his lost son’s return.
But, rather than rejoicing with his father, the older son succumbed to his selfishness and arrogance and disrespectfully argues with his father because of the celebration and finery lavished on the prodigal, Graham said.
“The problem of the elder brother is the problem of many people today,” Graham said. “He didn’t have the heart of his father.”
Graham said there are two kinds of sins. The prodigal committed sins of dissipation, while the elder brother committed sins of disposition.
While some are lost aimlessly, many lost carelessly, others lost defiantly, people can also be lost arrogantly, like the older brother, Graham said.
“[The older brother] represents the self righteous,” Graham said. He represents people who stay at home, but their heart is far from God.”
Graham said the hardest person to reach is the church member who is religious, but lost.
“They’re people that get all bent out of shape when people start getting saved, especially when people start getting saved that don’t look or act like us,” Graham said. “And the church has become so often a society for snubbing sinners rather than being a lighthouse for the lost and a greenhouse for the saved.”
Graham admitted that he often must ask himself if there is some of the hypocritical, arrogant Pharisee in him. Everyone can be “pridefully arrogant” in choosing who to love, Graham continued.
“I know some Christians who get more excited about elections than they do about Easter,” Graham said. “Let me tell you what excites Heaven. Jesus told us it’s when one man, one woman, one little boy or girl comes home. All of heaven explodes with excitement.”