Well, some Christians are dramatically saved out of a life of scandalous sin and have an amazing testimony of deliverance to share. Many other Christians, particularly those saved at a young age, don't really have a dramatic conversion story to tell. And that leads to a challenge for at least one young Christian, a young woman, named Rachel.

She writes in this, "Hello, Pastor John. Thank you for taking my question. I've been a Christian all my life, as long as I can recall. I'm not perfect. And I have a ton of issues that God is still working on in me. But I've never indulged in alcohol, never done any drugs, never engaged in premarital sex.

I guard my heart to the best of my ability and pray often when I'm struggling with temptations. I'll be the first to tell you that I need God's grace as much as anyone, if not more than anyone else. But sometimes I get a case of FOMO, the fear of missing out.

Sometimes I feel like the older brother in the prodigal son parable. Like when I see people at church who turned away from sinful hedonism and became Christians. I'm happy for them and rejoice with them, but at the same time I feel like, 'Wow, no one cares that I've always said no to drugs and sex and wickedness my whole life.' But boy, they all care when all the people doing that stuff turn away from it.

And I know that's not what I should be thinking. I shouldn't be bitter or resentful, but sometimes those feelings manifest. I'm not proud of these thoughts and I often pray to God that these feelings would flee so that I can just bask in his presence, but it's hard. Any advice you have would help.

Thank you. I appreciate Rachel's honesty and I appreciate her self-recrimination at the temptation to feel resentment that her lifelong faithfulness to Christ feels unacknowledged and less valued than recent converts from lives of flagrant sin. And one of the reasons that I appreciate this is that it shows me that Rachel is not in the category of the Pharisee in Luke 18.

Two men went up into the temple to pray. One a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee standing by himself prayed thus, 'God, I thank you that I'm not like other men, extortioners, unjust adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector standing afar off would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner.' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.'" Now, Rachel is aware of that danger and she's not proud when that temptation rises.

That's a good sign. She mentions the elder brother, the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. Now that is a dangerous comparison because she doesn't want to be in the category of the older brother. The older brother was very angry that the father was so lavish in his celebration of the return of the younger son who had wasted the father's inheritance.

But the problem with the older brother more deeply was that he related to his father like a slave instead of a son. He reminded his father, "How hard I've served you all these years," you could just hear, "like a slave." But the father shook his head as if in bafflement and said, "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours." In other words, the problem with the older brother is not merely that he doesn't love his younger brother the way he should, but that he doesn't see or feel the glory of what he has in his relationship to his father and the inheritance from the father.

So Rachel does not want to be like this older brother. Now let's go one step further with this parable because it gets insightful for her situation. The parable of the prodigal son is the third of three parables that illustrate joy when a lost sinner is rescued by Jesus for the kingdom of heaven.

In the first parable, there's the man who leaves 99 sheep behind, and he goes out and he finds one lost sheep, and it says, "There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance." And then there's the woman in the next parable who has 10 coins.

She loses one, and she desperately sweeps all of her house, finds the coin, gathers her friends, and rejoices. And Jesus says, "Just so I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents." Now, that might sound like the situation Rachel is frustrated about.

The church throws a party for one amazing convert out of a life of flagrant sinning. Why? Well, doesn't Jesus say in Luke 15 that one sinner who repents is more to be celebrated than 99 faithful Rachels? No, that is not what it says. These three parables are not about a church with 99 godly, faithful, lifelong Christians who know they need grace and who live by the mercy of God.

That's not what these parables are about. These parables are about a dinner party where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners surrounded by Pharisees who are ticked off that Jesus is offering his forgiving fellowship to sinners. The elder brother represents the Pharisees, not the faithful, humble, believing church member.

And when Jesus refers to 99 persons who need no repentance, he's speaking ironically because there is no such thing as a person who needs no repentance, especially the Pharisees. But here's what I would say both to Rachel and to Rachel's church leaders. It is a serious mistake to give the impression that Christians come to understand the depth of depravity from which we've been saved and the glories of grace by which we've been saved, that we come to understand that by focusing on the remembered experience of conversion and the sins that went before.

That's a profound mistake to think that we can know the depth of our depravity by recalling our pre-conversion sins or that we can know the glories of grace by recalling that night when we were set free from drug addiction and sexual bondage. That is utterly naive for pastors to think that way or people to think that way.

Nobody, nobody can know the depths of their depravity and the glories of God's grace by focusing on remembered experience. I don't care how horrible the lifestyle was or how dramatic the conversion was. All such estimations of depravity and grace will be superficial without the biblical revelation of what depravity really is in relation to God.

And what grace really is in the heart of God. That reality can only be learned from what God has said in His Word, not from any analysis of our sinful lives or our conversions. Listen to Paul. "You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you once walked, following the age of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work, and the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of their heart. But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you have been saved." So that's a combination of Ephesians 2, 1 to 5 and Ephesians 4, 18. If we don't penetrate into this kind of God-given description of our condition before and after grace, we will never know the depth of our depravity or the glory of God's grace.

Which means, for Rachel and her church, "By all means, let there be celebrations of every conversion of every hardened sinner." Amen. "And let there be celebrations of every eight-year-old child who genuinely repents and embraces Jesus as Savior and Lord and Treasure. And let every Christian marvel every day that he or she has peace with God and that we swim in an ocean of grace and that we owe nothing to ourselves and everything to God.

And let the elders teach the people so that year by year they tremble, the people tremble more and more at the horrors of what they were saved from at eight or 18 or 58. And so year by year they leap with greater joy at the increasingly amazing grasp of grace by which they live." This episode reminds me of one of your co-pastors, Pastor John at Bethlehem Baptist Church years ago, who gave his testimony and said that, "God saved me out of a life of drugs and crime and sex when I was six years old." That's such a great line that stands out.

I'll never forget that. And it's a line we featured back in APJ 158. We talked about that on the podcast if you want to find that. Thank you for joining us today. You can ask a question of your own, search our growing archive, or subscribe to the podcast all at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

I am your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Wednesday. Thanks for listening. (end) (music) (end)