Luke 15:29 “But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.’”
One of the greatest struggles of being a parent is having children with attitude. You know what I am talking about, if you have had children. They reach a certain age (for some it was age three) and everything you ask of them is met with attitude. They roll their eyes. They put their hands on their hips. They huff and puff. And sometimes their make the mistake of opening their mouths and speaking!
Sometimes you just want to slap the attitude right off their face and out of their hearts. I hope you have resisted! But attitude rarely gets removed through discipline. Attitude gets removed when the child humbles themselves before the LORD and before you. And this is true for all of us.
You see, attitude makes a difference. There is an old story of the boy who was told to sit down by his parents. He replied and said, “I may be sitting down on the outside, but inside I’m still standing up!” The parent knew progress was being made. Or was it?
We read in our text about the older son in the two son pair. The younger son has demanded his inheritance and has blown it all living the high life in a foreign land. He was the jet-setter of his day. Party, party, party. He always had a woman at his side. Until the money ran out!
Then, he hit bottom, came to his senses and returned to his father, broken and humble. And this is where the story picks up in today’s text.
The older brother betrays his own bad attitude in this moment. The younger one may have run away in protest, but the older brother wasn’t much better. He may have stayed, but his attitude stunk.
We see this attitude in his words. He has been slaving all these years. No joyful obedience, no fulfillment in his work, no sense of purpose. No! He has been slaving for his slave master, his father. Not the kind of son you want. We want obedience with a good heart, not with a heart that resents our presence in their life.
This son was obedient. We like obedient children; it makes our job easier. But I think we want children with obedient hearts, not just obedient actions. This older son was outwardly obedient, but his heart was on another planet. He probably envied his younger brother’s freedom, but couldn’t express it. He probably wished he had taken his inheritance and left as well.
We also see that he had no sense of generosity. He was not even generous toward himself. He wasn’t willing to share his good fortune with his friends. He held onto his wealth with a tight fist. No wonder the father seemed more disappointed in him than in his younger brother at this moment. The younger brother at least expressed humility and gratefulness.
We all have people in our lives who lack gratitude. Their attitude is anything but humble. They haven’t learned the joy of hard work. These people are hard to be around longterm. We can take them in small doses, but not much more.
Perhaps we are one such individual. Maybe we haven’t learned to be grateful for what we have and express it openly. Maybe we are too full of ourselves and need to let the air out of our big head. Maybe we have let laziness creep into our attitude toward our daily tasks.
Today is the day to get an attitude change. We make the determination that we will be grateful. We start to keep track of all the blessings, and then express thanks to the LORD and to those who helped us along the way. We begin to think of others more than we think of our wants and needs. Our focus shifts. And we see the joy that can be had in our daily labor. Every task has its joys.
The Arnold Journey 