Is Your Life a Channel of Blessing?

I like the first two lines of the hymn Make Me a Channel of Blessing: “Is your life a channel of blessing? Is the love of God flowing through you?” I am convinced that this is the best way to see the way the Christian life works. You don’t’ work really hard to earn God’s love for you. You accept God’s love, it fills you, and then the love of God flows through you to other people. This image of love accepted and love flowing helps me to understand the story we call “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.”

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is also the Parable of the Unloving Older Brother. Jesus told this story mainly to help unloving people to see themselves in the older brother. Luke tells us that Jesus responded to Pharisees and scribes with this story when they saw that tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. Seeing the people they despised gathering around Jesus evoked a response from them that went like this: “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” If we sang the hymn’s question to them – “Is the love of God flowing through you?” – the obvious answer would be, “No.”

So Jesus told them what Luke calls “a story.” Actually, it is three stories that function as one. A lost sheep is found and there’s a celebration. A lost coin is found and there’s a celebration. A lost son that is found and there’s a celebration. The older son will not enter into the celebration for his brother who was lost and is found. Why? We limit our understanding of what is happening inside the older brother if we side with him when, acting like a victim, he tells his father, “You never gave me a party – after all I have done for you.” We also fail to understand what is happening if we make him the bad guy and just label him the mean and nasty older brother.

The reason the older brother cannot celebrate his brother’s return home is because he does not have love in him. He thinks he has earned his father’s love by working hard. Love that is earned is not real love. He can’t get love from his father that way. He has to accept his father’s love for no other reason than the father gives it, and he needs it. If he had love in him, it would be flowing through him, but he had never learned that the love of God is freely given and freely received. Then it flows out to others.

If you try to earn love you can’t have it, and it won’t flow. But if you will receive it, God the Father’s love will fill you and flow through you to other people. It won’t matter to you who they are. Your life will be “a channel of blessing.”