Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This spring, we’re looking at the parables of Jesus from the New Testament book of Luke.
In this parable, Jesus exposes our deep need to be “the right kind of person.” But he shows us that there is something even better than being the right kind of person. It’s knowing that we’re the wrong kind of person, and we are loved and welcomed based on the rightness of another.

(*thanks to Matt Howell, Skylar Adams and Ben Robertson for their insightful observations and illustrations, which influenced much of the material in this sermon! )

Quotes:

“How do you get someone to love and accept you? You make yourself more attractive, right? You make yourself more lovable and appealing. That's what all the adverts tell us; it's the relentless drone of social media. Yet with God, it is the other way round. With God, failing, broken people “are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive”… In other words, God does not love people because they have sorted themselves out: he loves failures, and that love makes them flourish.” - Michael Reeves 

“My repentance needs to be repented of, and my very tears to be washed in the precious blood of my dear Redeemer. Our best duties are as so many splendid sins. Before you can know you are at peace with God, you must not only be made sick of your original and actual sin, but you must be sick of your righteousness, of all your duties and performances.”-George Whitfield

“Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good—above all, that we are better than somebody else— I think that we may be sure we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.”- C.S. Lewis