Partying Ain't All It's Cracked Up to Be // The Long Road Home, Part 2

We all love to kick our heals up every now and then. Problem is that the more you watch TV, the more they seem to tell us that life is just one long party.

We all like a good party from time to time, the chance to kick up our heels, let our hair down, relax and enjoy, it’s a part of life. In fact, it’s a very necessary part of a balanced life. Now the advertising industries figured that out, that’s why they use images and stories that tap into our desire to kick up our heels, in order to sell whatever it happens to be they’re selling on any given day. And so we get bombarded with these images of freedom and rebellion and success and leisure and partying, not just in the advertisements, but the TV shows themselves, basically tell us anything goes.

So before you know it, you turn around and we’ve shifted from a post-war puritanical extreme of the 1950’s, to an anything goes "if it feels good do it" society just half a century later. But more than ever people are finding themselves in their own private spiritual wilderness. Doesn’t matter what they tell us on TV, why is that?

There are so many people wandering around in a spiritual wilderness, the TV’s and the advertisers, they’re all saying, "It looks like an oasis, it is an oasis". But when we’re in the spiritual wilderness, you know something? It feels like a desert. Jesus knew that, Jesus told a wonderful story, it was a parable it’s not a real story, it was intended to illustrate His point. And it’s the parable, the story, of the prodigal son, began with a rebellion. Let’s have a look.

A man had two sons, the younger of them says to Dad, "Dad give me my share of the estate that I have coming to me." So, the father distributes the assets to them. Not many days later the younger son gathered together all he had and traveled to a distant country where he squandered the estate on foolish living. After he’d spent everything, a severe famine struck that country and he had nothing. Then he went to work for one of the citizens of that country who sent him to feed the pigs. He longed to eat his fill from the carob pods the pigs were eating but no one would give him anything.

Here’s this young man, you know, he’s living on this farm with Dad, he’s bored, he wants to see the big smoke and do the things and have the parties. Maybe he’s been watching too much television, I don’t know. So he decides to go somewhere exotic, he decides to say, "Dad give me all my inheritance, I’m taking it with me." And he goes to some far distant land where he parties, where he does the whole "if it feels good, do it thing". Does it sound familiar to you?

It’s exactly what Jesus was talking about. But not long into that rebellion reality sinks in. You know, this guy’s spending money as though there’s no tomorrow, on anything he can think of he’s spending money, and all of a sudden a famine hits the land. Now, it’s not like a famine in a rich developed country. This is like a famine in a subsistence farming country, and when his money runs out, the things that (I don’t know) this exciting living promised, the things that all these glossy ads on television promised him turned out to be hollow and empty, and he was hungry. That was a reality. Here’s the paradox, the more you pour in to fill up, the emptier and the shallower life becomes.

I wonder as each one of us looks at our lives, how much they mirror this story of the prodigal son. The parable is this: A home, Dad, the farm, that’s God. Now to this young man they looked boring they were constrained, there’s something in him that wanted to kick up his heels and rebel against all of that and so he left home. The place of privilege, the place of plenty of food, the place of wealth, it was boring. He wanted to go and do it his own way. He did that. He went and partied.

You know something, any life that’s out of balance will come crashing down around our ears. That’s the problem with constructing our reality from all these flashing images on the television of success, success, success; party, party, party; freedom, freedom, freedom; life’s not like that. Don’t know about you but I have responsibilities, I have a family, a mortgage to pay and food to put on the table and ministry things to do, we all have those responsibilities. Life is not about partying even though relaxing and enjoying life is a normal part of a balanced life. But when we have an unbalanced life, when it’s out of kilter, out of whack, things come crashing down round our ears, reality sets in.

We all do our rebelling in a different way. But after a while, we discover that partying 24 by 7 ain’t all it’s cracked up to be right? So let’s look at our own lives just for a minute. It’s possible, you know, even for someone who says, ‘Well, I’m a Christian’ to have some form of rebellion going on in their lives.

I was at a Christian Bible study some years ago and we were talking about things, there was a young woman there who was working in the church and she was doing all sorts of things and she expressed a very strong opinion. She said, "Look, I agree with just about everything that God says, but I don’t agree with this abortion thing. Like it’s a woman’s choice, you know. If a woman wants to have an abortion she should be able too." Great, that’s an opinion, that’s a view. But if we really listen to what God is saying, really go and read about what’s going on in the mother’s womb. It tells us God is putting that person together. We can’t take a part of what He says and reject the rest, that’s rebellion.

People want to accept God on their own terms. I don’t agree with that bit about God. No, God can, I’ll have all of this bit of God but I won’t have that bit of God. People go to church and put on the façade and yet there’s a cold war there’s a détente going on between husband and wife. I wonder if we can just take a few minutes, each one of us, to think about what rebellion is going on in my life really?

What are the areas, what’s the one thing, what are the multiple things, how am I rebelling against God? Because as sure as God made little green apples, if there is rebellion there will also be symptoms that are causing us pain. What’s hurting? What’s empty? They’re a cause and effect relationship, the prodigal rejected his Dad, he squandered the money and now he’s starving. You and I reject Dad, and that’s what Jesus calls Him, through our attitudes or through the things we do or whatever it is, and there are impacts. They’re there, they always are, they hurt, they rob us, they steal life away from us.

It’s just one of those natural laws of life. God is God. God made the world, God made us to love Him and to enjoy Him and to be blessed by Him. And when we reject Dad and the family farm, when we reject our birthright and try and take a grab on our inheritance and run off in the other direction, let’s not be surprised, when there are consequences. When partying 24/7 falls down around our ears and all of a sudden, we’re in the trough with the pigs, yet we hold on to those bags of rubbish for dear life, while they eat away at us like a cancer. Come on, what are they in your life?

They’re inside, is it time to name them? Is it time to shame them? Is it time for you to look at what you’re missing out on, for me to look at what I’m missing out on in this rebellion? Instead of slopping it with the pigs, tomorrow, tomorrow we’re going to look at the turning point of the story, but it all began with a son’s rebellion against his Dad.