Pastor David Jang draws out the heart of the gospel through the “Parable of the Prodigal Son” in Luke 15 — offering deep theological insight into the Father’s love that runs first, repentance and forgiveness, and the grace of becoming one by laying down possession.
A Question That Begins with the Confession of a Wandering Philosopher
“Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
This one sentence, inscribed in the opening of Confessions by Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in fourth-century North Africa, still pierces the heart sixteen hundred years later. Once, he drifted between pleasure, ambition, and philosophical wandering. He was absorbed in Manichaeism, pursued success in Rome and Milan, and tried to find freedom in indulgence. Yet only after squandering it all did he finally realize this: freedom is not found in leaving, but in returning. His mother Monica prayed on her knees for decades for her son’s return, and Augustine finally fell before God. Then he understood—long before he turned back, God had already been running toward him.
The sermon of Pastor David Jang, founder of Olivet University, meets this ancient confession with striking precision. The
“Parable of the Prodigal Son” in Luke
15 is the very essence of the gospel, touching the deepest instinct of human existence: the longing to return home. When the Pharisees grumbled against Jesus for eating with sinners, He responded not with argument, but with a story. A shepherd who goes after one lost sheep, a woman who sweeps the whole house to find a single coin, and finally—the story of a son who left home and returned. These three parables all run toward one truth: God seeks even one who is lost, and all heaven rejoices over even one who returns. This is the gospel. A love that is unconditional, that comes first, that runs toward us.
Eyes Opened at Last Before the Carob Pods
The younger son’s demand was almost a declaration:
“Give me the share of the estate that falls to me.” In Jewish culture, these words were little different from wishing his father dead. He severed his relationship with his father and leapt into the world of indulgence he mistook for freedom. But the key point Pastor David Jang sharply draws out through biblical meditation is that the prodigal son’s true bankruptcy was not that he lost his wealth. It was an ontological bankruptcy—the bankruptcy of a being who left the father and tried to become his own god.
In the misery of not even being able to eat the pods fed to pigs, he thought for the first time of
“my father’s house.” His confession,
“I have sinned against heaven and before you,” was not mere regret. It was a declaration of return toward the source of his being. And the father—while he was still a long way off—ran to him first.
Pastor David Jang calls this scene the climax of gospel preaching. The father does not first verify the son’s sins. He does not interrogate the past. He runs, throws his arms around him, and kisses him. Then he immediately gives orders: the best robe, a ring, sandals, the fattened calf. This is more than forgiveness; it is the proclamation of complete restoration. His status, rights, and place in the family are all returned at once. Grace is not given after one has become worthy of it. It is poured out already, simply because the son has come home.
Another Kind of Wandering Inside the House
But the parable does not end there. Pastor David Jang’s theological insight cuts even more sharply into a second figure: the older brother. He never left the house. He did not break any command. Yet when he heard the sound of celebration, he would not go in, and he protested to his father:
“For all these years I have served you, and you never gave me even a young goat.” In those words, we see the naked face of the religious person who has reduced God to a transaction partner. A heart that accumulates merit and demands compensation—that too was another form of wandering, a way of leaving the father while still remaining in the house.
The father says to him,
“My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” The older brother had been enjoying everything with his father all along. But trapped in the calculations of
“my merit, my portion, my devotion,” he had never once fully enjoyed the abundance of grace. To know that all things belong to the father, and to respond not with possession but with sharing, not with envy but with joy—that, Pastor David Jang emphasizes, is the life of a true steward.
The Father Still Watching the Far Road
As Augustine confessed, the human heart can never truly rest until it rests in God. The parable of the prodigal son is the story of returning to that rest, and at the same time, the story of the God who always runs first to welcome that return. Pastor David Jang applies this parable honestly to today’s church. Is the church ready to run toward prodigals returning from their wanderings in the world? And at the same time, are long-time believers perhaps living like the older brother—calculating
“my church, my share, my labor,” while having lost the father’s heart?
The gospel always returns to this question. And before that question, even today, the Father is still looking down the far road—ready to run the moment we come into view.
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