A Come-to-Jesus Moment

There’s a phrase in our language that started out in the church and then went to work out in the world. A come-to-Jesus moment. It means the talk you can’t put off any longer. The meeting where the truth finally gets said.

It started here, in the church, and then it got out, because the world figured out something we’ve always known. Sometimes a person, or a nation, or a whole movement of believers has wandered so far from the truth that nothing short of a confrontation with Jesus will do.

I want to borrow the phrase back this morning. And I want to be careful where I point it, because a sermon aimed at everybody hits nobody. I’m not talking about your neighbor who votes the other way. I’m not talking about the folks down the road at the conservative church who love their kids and coach the little league. I’m talking about the machinery. The television preachers selling miracles by the minute. The organizations that have spent nearly half a century welding the name of Jesus to a political platform and calling the welding holiness. Somewhere in all that, the Jesus being advertised stopped looking like the one in the book. They say his name more than anybody. They put him on banners and ballot measures and courthouse lawns. And the hard, grieving truth of this sermon is that the movement needs to find him. It lost him.

Not abandoned him. They’d never say that. Lost him, the way Israel lost him in the wilderness. And that’s where we need to start.

The Golden Calf with Better Marketing

Exodus 32. Moses is up on the mountain, gone longer than anybody expected, and the people get nervous. Here’s what we usually miss about the golden calf. They didn’t say, “Forget God. We’re on our own.” Listen to what Aaron says when he builds the thing:

“These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 32:4)

Do you see it? They used the salvation story. They told the testimony. They kept all the vocabulary of the Exodus, delivered, redeemed, brought up out of bondage, and they attached it to a bull of gold they had made themselves. They didn’t trade the truth for some foreign god. They traded it for a homegrown one. A god they could see, manage, carry, and park wherever they pleased. A god who wouldn’t go up a mountain and go quiet on them. A god that fit their schedule.

That’s the oldest sin of religious people, and it didn’t stay in the wilderness. When a movement takes the name of Jesus and welds it to a political platform, when the Jesus being preached blesses grievance, sanctifies suspicion of the stranger, and has nothing to say to the widow or the sojourner or the poor, that is not the Jesus of the Gospels wearing new clothes. That’s a golden calf with better marketing. The marketing is the problem. It’s got his name on it.

And the people who made it were sincere, as far as we can tell. The text doesn’t hand us Aaron’s heart, but nothing in the scene reads like a con. Israel sang and danced and called it a festival to the LORD. But sincerity has never been the test of whether a god is real. The test is whether the god looks like Jesus.

Lord, Lord

Nobody said it more plainly than Jesus himself. He said it at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, and notice who he’s talking to. Not the outsiders. His own disciples, the ones who had already left their boats to follow him. And he says something that belongs among the most sobering sentences he ever spoke:

“Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven… On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you.’” (Matthew 7:21-23)

Read that slowly. These aren’t atheists. These aren’t the indifferent. These are people with a flawless Jesus vocabulary. Preachers, exorcists, miracle workers, people who said his name in public until the whole town knew whose side they were on. And he says, I never knew you.

He doesn’t say, “You knew too little about me.” He doesn’t say, “Your doctrine had errors in it.” He says the relationship was never there. The name was on their lips. The man was never in their hearts. They built a ministry and called it a friendship.

If you’ve spent your life saying “Lord, Lord,” if his name is on your church sign and your yard sign and your social media, this verse was written for you to read on your knees. And the question of this sermon is not whether you talk about Jesus. It’s whether the Jesus you talk about is the one who actually exists. The one who ate with the people your politics despise. The one who touched the people your tradition avoids. The one who told the religious insiders that the tax collectors and the prostitutes were entering the kingdom ahead of them.

But Here the Sermon Has to Turn

Now, I know how a sermon like this usually goes. It names the idols, quotes the woes, and lets the congregation go home feeling like the prophet. It ends in contempt. And contempt is just one more golden calf. It’s the idol that looks like righteousness and asks nothing of the person bowing down to it.

So we’re not going to end there. Because Jesus didn’t.

The sharpest story he ever told about people who had the father’s house but not the father’s heart is one we almost always read backwards. The prodigal son. We make it the story of the runaway. It isn’t. It ends with the elder brother. And when it ends, he’s standing in the yard, and Jesus lets the curtain fall with him still there.

The Elder Brother in the Yard

Remember him. He never left home. He kept the fields plowed and the commandments kept. He said all the right words at all the right meals. By every measure his community used, he was the faithful one.

Then his lost brother comes home, the one who had squandered everything, and the father throws a party. And the elder brother will not come in. He stands outside in the dark and says the very thing white evangelicalism, at its most lost, has been saying for years:

“Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. But when this son of yours comes, who has devoured your living with harlots, you kill for him the fatted calf.” (Luke 15:29-30)

This son of yours. Look at what he does with one phrase. He disowns his own brother and hands him back to the father, as if grace were the father’s problem and not the family’s joy. That’s the sound of a believer who kept every rule and missed the whole point. He lived in his father’s house and never knew his father’s heart. He wasn’t lost the way the younger brother was lost, with the geography and the money and the far country. He was lost the way you get lost standing still. So certain of his position that he couldn’t even hear the music.

If the church has lost its way, this is the map of how. Not by running off. By staying home, keeping the rules, saying “Lord, Lord,” and refusing, year after year, to come in to the feast while grace flows toward the wrong people.

And here’s what the father does. He doesn’t stay at the party. He doesn’t send a servant. Luke says he came out and was pleading with him. The man with all the power in the story walks out into the yard and pleads with his resentful son to come inside.

Then the parable just stops. No answer recorded. No ending tied off. Because Jesus isn’t telling a story about somebody in the past. He’s leaving the yard door open and looking straight at us.

The Turn: Out of the Yard

I said at the start that this was their come-to-Jesus moment. Theirs, the machinery, the ones with the banners. But a preacher who ends a sermon pointing across the sanctuary hasn’t preached. He’s just picked a fight. So hear the turn. There’s an elder brother inside every one of us.

Every time we keep the rules and resent the mercy, there he is. Every time we’re relieved that a grace we depend on is being denied to somebody we’ve already judged, there he is. Every time our faithfulness sours into a sense of deserving, “these many years I have served you,” there he is, standing in the yard with his arms folded, outside a party he’s technically entitled to attend. This sermon was never only about them. The elder brother is in this room. Some mornings he’s in this pulpit.

And here’s what I want you to carry out of here. The father doesn’t lecture him. He doesn’t itemize the elder brother’s failures. He comes out, he pleads, and he says, “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours.” The invitation isn’t to try harder. It’s to come in. To know the father’s heart, not just the father’s house.

That’s the come-to-Jesus moment. Not a political realignment. Not a new platform or a better argument. A fresh encounter with the actual Jesus, who stands decisively with the poor, the stranger, and the sinner coming home, and who waits in the doorway of the party we’ve refused to enter, pleading with us to come in.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem because she didn’t know the things that made for peace (Luke 19:41). I believe he looks at a large part of his American church that same way. And I believe he looks at each of us that way on the mornings we mistake correctness for communion. Grief, not contempt. He weeps over the lost the way the father went out into the yard. That’s the heart we’re being invited into.

So What Do We Do?

If we’re the elder brother, and we are, then the way home isn’t a feeling. It’s a practice, and Jesus made it painfully concrete.

Come in to the feast by going to the table. Find the person your politics has turned into “this son of yours.” The neighbor across the fence with the other sign. The stranger at the border. The family that makes your congregation uneasy. And serve them this month in a way that costs you something. Not to convert them. Not to win an argument. To learn the father’s heart, which has never once in history been learned while standing in the yard with folded arms.

Tell the truth about the calf. If you’ve been worshiping a Jesus who looks a lot like your own preferences, and you have, we all have, say so. Say it to God, and say it to somebody who can hold you to it. Repentance is just the elder brother unclenching his arms.

And some of this repentance is bigger than one person, because the calf was built by more than one person. Churches can repent too. A congregation can look at its budget, its platform, its politics, and ask whether the name on the sign still belongs to the man in the book. If we built a calf, however small, it can come down the same way it went up. In the open, where everybody can watch it go.

Then come in. The music is already playing. The fatted calf is already on the fire. The father has already spent more grace on your brother than you thought he should, and that’s exactly what grace is.

The party’s been going the whole time we stood in the yard. The only question the parable leaves open is the one Jesus is asking each of us this morning. Will you come in?

Amen.