The Prodigal God

We’ve had a surprise house inspection come upon us for 8:30 in the morning, which has thrown my evening out a little. (The real estate agent rang late this afternoon to confirm, which was the first either of us had heard of it, so I think they neglected to pass on that important point – and we’re just going to let them come in with the key because otherwise finding a suitable time goes on and on.) Thankfully things aren’t in too much disarray here, and it’s a good motivation for cleaning up my room.

But, another book I am reading at present is Prodigal God by Tim Keller. I really liked (and, more importantly, was challenged by) Counterfeit Gods, so I thought I'd read this one. The earlier chapters are very much like a sermon I heard years ago by Rico Tice on the Parable of the Lost Son, about the lostness of the elder brother and the way in which both brothers are a picture of wanting God not for who he is but for what he gives. I thought that sermon was great and bought copies to give to people (it was preached at St Thomas’s North Sydney, and I stumbled upon it when I went to a music concert there and was ratting through the church book stall up the back, as is my want). But it looks like Keller is going to move beyond what was in that sermon (at least I think so, because I haven’t finished yet).

It's a good book (and was a good sermon) for me, and perhaps others like me, because I certainly think that I am more likely to err on the side of the older brother rather than the younger. If it is generally true that kids go for either good attention or bad attention (I'm not so sure it's that simple, but anyway) I was definitely the good attention kid, who took the path of the conscientious, over-achieving, duty-filling, do-gooder. But one needs to take a look at what’s happening underneath that. And of course life gets complicated by other factors, and people’s innate temperaments are prone to one thing or another. I saw a psychologist briefly once, who concluded that because I was somewhat terrorised by the grief and fragility of my mother as a child (after my father died my older sister would go off to school and I'd be at home with a mother who was in the throes of grief) I developed a kind of "don't upset your mother" habit, and then projected that onto the world and spent my life avoiding upsetting people or getting into trouble (silly given I was not the source of the "upset" in the first place) - and there is some truth in that which I've been mindful of since. That possibly inclined me in the direction of the older brother, and I do feel like I'm constitutionally incapable of outward rebellion.

But that is a rambling tangent, because the issue with whether you’re a younger or older brother is whether or not, according to Keller, you are “putting yourself in the place of God as Saviour, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life”. So he writes chapters on "Redefining Sin" and "Redefining Lostness". Am I relying on being “good” to earn me points or bargaining power with God (or even just to keep me out of "trouble")? Hopefully the rest of the book is going to help me dig into that.

This is probably enough for a rambling post smattered with childhood psychology, and I shall hopefully come back when I have cleaned up the rest of the house and read more of the book.