Connect

Story Time - Week Three

October 19, 2025 0 0

 Checking for any available downloads...

Download this video to your computer: Download
(right-click and choose "Save/Download Linked File As...." or similar)

 

Sensational headlines from a family saga

 

This week we pull some sensational headlines from the ongoing family saga of the two sons…

 

SEEDS TO SOW: Jesus didn’t sit and wait for people to come to him to listen to his stories — he went out and about sharing them. How can we carry our stories with us, ready to share?

 

Read Luke 15: 11-16

Wild Son Absconds With Family Fortune

Q: Imagine a 24 hour news cycle was reporting this tale of this wild son’s wild antics… how would they cover it? What are the details they’d focus on? Who would they interview?

Q: As we travel through this parable let’s reflect on these questions: How does this story help us to: see ourselves, see each other, and above all, see God?

 

Read Luke 15: 17-24

Wild Son Wildly Welcomed

The younger brother has hit rock bottom. It’s a wake-up moment. Now, having rejected his father and decided to go his own way what’s striking here is that while he is full of remorse he still wants to go his own way. He wants to come back — just as he left — on his own terms. He hatches a plan to go back and do penance, to do enough to get the minimum he needs from his father to survive.

Q: Do you think the younger brother reckons he has a lifetime of being a hired hand ahead of him, or do you think he is planning to gradually work back into his father’s graces?

Q: Verse 20 says that the father glimpsed the son while he was still far off. What do you think this means? Is it a poetic coincidence that the father should be outside facing the road? Is it because since the son has left the father has been sitting waiting for him to return? Or do you think the father himself is only just returned having been out on the road looking for his son?  Or perhaps he had recently heard a rumour somewhere of someone matching his son’s description being spotted and he was out strolling aimlessly on the off-chance?

 

Read Luke 15: 25-32

Wild Family Feud in Reunion Bust-up

This story is often referred to as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. But Jesus himself begins this tale by saying “There was a man who had two sons…” and this story is as much about the older brother as the younger brother.

The younger brother recklessly rejects his father, determined to go his own way. But the older brother, while more methodical, also rejects his father, wanting to go his own way. He thinks he’s earned his place in the family and his father owes him as a result. When the father welcomes back the younger brother with open arms it enrages him. He’s left thinking: What’s the point of having been good all this time? It was pointless and it got him nothing. The story ends with him on the doorstep, still refusing to go in.

Q: The story is intentionally left on a cliffhanger — will the older brother eventually go in or not? What do you think would happen next? If you were writing Two Sons: The Sequel, where  would you take the story next?