He Came to His Senses

There is a moment in Jesus' most famous story when a starving young man, sitting among the pigs he was hired to feed, suddenly wakes up. Luke tells it in four quiet words: "he came to his senses." He remembers his father. He remembers home. And he gets up and starts walking back. That single turn of the heart is what stands between a life spent outside the love of God and a life spent inside the feast. It is worth asking what exactly happened in him — because the same thing can happen in you.

A love that never let him go

Read the parable carefully and one thing is beyond doubt: the father loved both of his sons the whole time. Not once, through all the days the younger son was away, did the father stop loving him. That is the great mystery about God we so easily miss — no matter what we do or fail to do, his love does not switch off. "I have loved you with an everlasting love," the Lord says through the prophet; "I have drawn you with unfailing kindness." Paul says it with a kind of holy defiance:

If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Neither death nor life, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:31-39

But here is the tension. It is one thing for God to love you with a love you can never lose. It is another thing to live inside that love day after day. The younger son was never outside his father's heart — yet for a long season he lived outside the experience of it, and it cost him nearly everything. And the elder brother, who never left home and kept every rule, also missed the full warmth of that same love. Both sons were loved. Only one of them, by the end of the story, was enjoying it.

The key that opens the feast

So what did the younger son actually do that pulled him back into his father's embrace — into the robe, the ring, and the fattened calf? The answer is the one word that runs like a thread through the whole New Testament: repentance. "He came to his senses." When Jesus began to preach, his first word was "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." It is the whole point of Luke 15.

I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

Luke 15:7

As Tim Keller observes in his reading of this parable, which he calls the story of the two lost sons, the elder brother is every bit as lost as the younger — he has simply lost his way inside the house rather than outside it. He kept the rules but refused to repent. In fact, he felt he had nothing to repent of; he stood outside the party, arguing with his father. Every time we refuse to repent, we quietly lock ourselves out of the feast — and Jesus says there is sadness in heaven over it.

This is why Martin Luther, when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, made this the very first one:

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said "Repent," he called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Martin Luther, Ninety-Five Theses (1517)

The entire life — not only the day you first came to Christ, and not only the moments you fall. This is not a call to grovel or to earn God's mercy by punishing ourselves. It is an invitation to keep the heart tender and turned toward home. But to live that way, we first have to understand what we are turning from.

What sin actually is

The clearest explanation I know comes from a church father who wrote it down more than 1,500 years ago. In his Confessions, Augustine described the root of sin as disordered love — what an older translation of Scripture calls "inordinate affections." God has put an order into the universe. Possessions matter less than people; and people, however precious, matter less than God himself.

Whenever we love something less important more than something more important, we have disordered love — and any action flowing out of it is sin.

after Augustine, The Confessions

Seen this way, sin is not first a broken rule; it is a misdirected heart. The moment I begin to treasure a colleague or an image on a screen more than my own spouse, something has already gone wrong inside me. And whenever we fall into disordered love, the One we are ultimately turning from is God — because we have decided to be our own saviors and find our own way to be happy. That is why James can write, "Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it." It is God we have turned from, not merely a commandment.

Sin is senseless

The first thing to notice about true repentance is that it is deeply clear-eyed. "He came to his senses" means that until that moment, he had lost them. Sin is the most senseless thing we can do. Why would the younger son ever imagine his father's things were better than his father? Which would you rather have — the gift, or the Giver? Scripture is full of people who briefly lost their senses this way:

• Cain, so angry at his brother that God preached him the first sermon on sin ever preached: "Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it" (Genesis 4:6-7). What had Abel done to him? Nothing. It was senseless — and it cost Cain everything.
• Esau, who traded his birthright for a bowl of red stew — treasuring what he could grab in the moment more than the blessing given him by grace.
• The elder brother, who did everything in his father's house, but whose real aim was the fattened calf and not the father himself. Many of us are like him: we keep the rules, but our heart's real passion is our career, our money, or the approval of others.
• David, whom God had lifted from obscurity, anointed king, and rescued from every enemy — yet who looked at Bathsheba, told himself his life would be incomplete without her, and brought a sword into his own household.

If anything matters more to our happiness than God, then it has quietly become a "god" to us. Even good things can do this. You can make getting into heaven so central that heaven itself becomes an idol, and God the King of heaven becomes secondary. But Jesus said this is eternal life: to know him. The Lord does not mainly want to hand you things; he wants to give you himself.

Two mountains: Sinai and Calvary

Here is where so much of our repentance falls short. Often it does not go deep enough to release real change, because it can be done out of a purely self-interested motive. Paul calls it "worldly sorrow," and he warns that it leads nowhere good.

Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.

2 Corinthians 7:10

Picture two mountains you might run to when your sin is exposed. Go to Mount Sinai — to the law and its verdict — and you see the judgment you deserve. You fall on your knees and cry, "Lord, I deserve to be punished; have mercy on me." There is nothing false about that prayer, and God may well receive it. But look at what is driving it: you are repenting mainly to escape the punishment coming to you. It never reaches the root of why you sinned, which was that you were selfish — the same engine, still running. That is exactly where the younger son was headed with his speech, "Make me one of your hired servants." But his father would not let him finish it. Instead, he carried him past Sinai to Calvary.

What happens when you come to the cross? God is still there, just as holy as he was at Sinai. You have still broken the law; your sin has still exposed who you really are, and you still see that you deserve judgment. But now you see something else. You see the judgment your sin deserved being poured out in full — and landing not on you, but on Someone who did not deserve a drop of it. He took it because of his covenant love, the everlasting loving-kindness by which he had bound himself to you. Your sin forced him to the cross, to pay a debt he never owed.

And when you truly see that, your repentance changes completely. Now you cry something new: "Lord, I am so sorry that I hurt you — you who have loved me like this. What kind of person am I, that my sin should fall on Someone who did not deserve it?" You are no longer weeping because you were caught, or because you fear the consequences. You are weeping because you have grieved the One who gave everything for you. At Sinai, your repentance is driven by your selfishness. At Calvary, it drives the selfishness out.

The repentance that sets you free

That is the repentance that releases the power of God's love in your life. The grip of disordered love finally breaks — not because you gritted your teeth, but because your eyes have beheld something more beautiful than anything sin was ever offering. There is nothing lovelier in all of reality than a perfectly happy God leaving the bliss of heaven and giving himself up for rebellious, undeserving people. The more you look at Jesus doing that, the more he wins your heart — until even the best things become things you could let go of, because he has become the treasure. This kind of repentance does not crush you; it liberates you, drawing you deeper into the presence and power of God's love.

Maybe you are reading this and something in you is waking up. You do not have to wait until you have hit the bottom or been found out. You can turn to God today and simply say, "Father, I have been senseless. I have loved lesser things more than I have loved you. I am sorry — not just for what it might cost me, but for the way it has grieved your heart." Respond like the younger son, who said, "I will arise and go to my father." Jesus said, "If I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself" — younger brothers and elder brothers alike — home to his beauty, and to the feast that has been waiting the whole time. Are you ready to come to your senses today?