Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-41% $9.99$9.99
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$7.17$7.17
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Jenson Books Inc
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith Paperback – March 1, 2011
Purchase options and add-ons
Newsweek called renowned minister Timothy Keller "a C.S. Lewis for the twenty-first century" in a feature on his first book, The Reason for God. In that book, he offered a rational explanation of why we should believe in God. Now, in The Prodigal God, Keller takes his trademark intellectual approach to understanding Christianity and uses the parable of the prodigal son to reveal an unexpected message of hope and salvation.
Within that parable Jesus reveals God's prodigal grace toward both the irreligious and the moralistic. This book will challenge both the devout and skeptics to see Christianity in a whole new way.
- Print length192 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateMarch 1, 2011
- Dimensions4.97 x 0.56 x 7.1 inches
- ISBN-101594484023
- ISBN-13978-1594484025
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Thrilling . . . Brilliant. Keller elegantly explains the goodness of God, redefining sin, lostness, grace, and salvation." —HeartsandMinds.com
"An amazing, thought-provoking, illuminating work." —Examiner.com
"The insights Tim Keller has about the two individuals in the story, and about the heart of God who loves them both, wrecked me afresh. Tim's thoughts deserve a hearing worldwide." —Bill Hybels, founding and senior pastor, Willow Creek Community Church
"Explain, explode, expose, explore—all of these Jesus did by telling the parable of the prodigal son. In this book, Timothy Keller shows us something of how this story actually reveals the heart of God, and, if we read it carefully, our own hearts. This brief exposition is unsettling and surprisingly satisfying. Like seeing something as your own home, or your own self, with new eyes. Enjoy and profit." —Mark Dever, senior pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, D.C.
"When it comes to the gospel of Jesus Christ, Timothy Keller is simply brilliant." —Mark Driscoll, pastor, Mars Hill Church and president, Acts 29 Church Planting Network
"Keller will be remembered as a pioneer of the new urban Christians." —Christianity Today magazine
"I thank God for him." —Billy Graham
About the Author
Timothy Keller was born and raised in Pennsylvania and educated at Bucknell University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary. His first pastorate was in Hopewell, Virginia. In 1989 he started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City with his wife, Kathy, and their three sons. Today, Redeemer has nearly six thousand regular Sunday attendees and has helped to start more than three hundred new churches around the world. He is the author of The Songs of Jesus, Prayer, Encounters with Jesus, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, Every Good Endeavor, and The Meaning of Marriage, among others, including the perennial bestsellers The Reason for God and The Prodigal God.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This short book is meant to lay out the essentials of the Christian message, the gospel. It can, therefore, serve as an introduction to the Christian faith for those who are unfamiliar with its teachings or who may have been away from them for some time.
This volume is not just for seekers, however. Many lifelong Christian believers feel they understand the basics of the Christian faith quite well and don't think they need a primer. Nevertheless, one of the signs that you may not grasp the unique, radical nature of the gospel is that you are certain that you do. Sometimes longtime church members find themselves so struck and turned around by a fresh apprehension of the Christian message that they feel themselves to have been essentially "re-converted." This book, then, is written to both curious outsiders and established insiders of the faith, both to those Jesus calls "younger brothers" and those he calls "elder brothers" in the famous Parable of the Prodigal Son.
I am turning to this familiar story, found in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of St. Luke, in order to get to the heart of the Christian faith. The parable's plot and dramatis personae are very simple. There was a father who had two sons. The younger asked for his share of the inheritance, received it, and promptly left for a far country, where he squandered it all on sensual and frivolous pleasure. He returned home penitently and, to his surprise, was received with open arms by his father. This reception alienated and angered the elder brother greatly. The story closes with the father appealing to his firstborn son to join in the welcome and forgiveness of his younger brother.
On the surface of it, the narrative is not all that gripping. I believe, however, that if the teaching of Jesus is likened to a lake, this famous Parable of the Prodigal Son would be one of the clearest spots where we can see all the way to the bottom. Many excellent studies have been written on this Biblical text over the last several years, but the foundation for my understanding of it was a sermon I first heard preached over thirty years ago by Dr. Edmund P. Clowney. Listening to that sermon changed the way I understood Christianity. I almost felt I had discovered the secret heart of Christianity. Over the years I have often returned to teach and counsel from the parable. I have seen more people encouraged, enlightened, and helped by this passage, when I explained the true meaning of it, than by any other text.
I once traveled overseas and delivered this sermon to an audience through an interpreter. Some time later the translator wrote to tell me that, as he was preaching the sermon, he had realized that the parable was like an arrow aimed at his heart. After a period of wrestling and reflection, it brought him to faith in Christ. Many others have told me that this story of Jesus, once they came to understand it, saved their faith, their marriages, and, sometimes literally, their lives.
In the first five chapters I will unlock the parable's basic meaning. In Chapter 6 I will demonstrate how the story helps us understand the Bible as a whole, and in Chapter 7 how its teaching works itself out in the way we live in the world.
I will not use the parable's most common name: the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It is not right to single out only one of the sons as the sole focus of the story. Even Jesus doesn't call it the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but begins the story saying, "a man had two sons." The narrative is as much about the elder brother as the younger, and as much about the father as the sons. And what Jesus says about the older brother is one of the most important messages given to us in the Bible. The parable might be better called the Two Lost Sons.
The word "prodigal" does not mean "wayward" but, according to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, "recklessly spendthrift." It means to spend until you have nothing left. This term is therefore as appropriate for describing the father in the story as his younger son. The father's welcome to the repentant son was literally reckless, because he refused to "reckon" or count his sin against him or demand repayment. This response offended the elder son and most likely the local community.
In this story the father represents the Heavenly Father Jesus knew so well. St. Paul writes: "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not reckoning to them their trespasses" (2 Corinthians 5:19 – American Standard Version). Jesus is showing us the God of Great Expenditure, who is nothing if not prodigal toward us, his children. God's reckless grace is our greatest hope, a life-changing experience, and the subject of this book.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (March 1, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 192 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1594484023
- ISBN-13 : 978-1594484025
- Item Weight : 5.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.97 x 0.56 x 7.1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Timothy Keller is senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Manhattan. He is renowned for his clear, reasoned approach to Christian apologetics and his book THE REASON FOR GOD: BELIEF IN AN AGE OF SKEPTICISM was named Book of the Year for 2008 by World Magazine.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The answer is in that key word in the subtitle, recovering. Yes, the "heart of the Christian faith" has been lost like a prodigal son over the centuries. Not that Keller is the only one to attempt to recover it in recent days. But he works within the realm of an orthodox, conservative reading of the Bible and shows how many--both inside and outside the church--have failed to grasp the essence of Jesus's message.
The first thing one will want to know about this book is why it is entitled The Prodigal God when it is based on Jesus's parable traditionally known as "The Prodigal Son." The answer is twofold. First, the traditional name of the parable does not do justice to the focus of the story. It is not a story about one son, a so-called prodigal, but rather a story about two sons (Luke 15:11). Second, the word prodigal does not simply mean "wayward" but rather "recklessly spendthrift." And so, Keller argues, it is just as appropriate to use it to describe the father in the story (who obviously represents God) as the younger son (p. xv).
In the first chapter the author discusses the setting for Jesus's parable. There were two kinds of people who gathered around to listen to Jesus on this occasion, and the two are represented by the two brothers in the story. The "tax collectors and sinners" were despised by the "Pharisees and the teachers of the law" who were the morally upright people in society. But it is to this second group of people that Jesus's teaching in the parable is directed. Their attitude toward the "wayward sinners" is what Jesus is attacking. This is not because Jesus approves of the behavior of sinners but because Jesus disapproves of the moralism of religious people. This parable will not allow either side to claim God's approval!
Everyone seems to understand in general that God does not approve of immoral behavior. But when the younger son returns home, the fact that the father does not allow the son to earn his way back into the family demonstrates that "nothing, not even abject contrition, merits the favor of God" (p. 24). God does not demand that sinners become morally acceptable before he will accept them. Instead, we find Jesus here "redefining everything we thought we knew about connecting to God. He is redefining sin, what it means to be lost, and what it means to be saved" (p. 28).
Keller argues that sin is not only rebellion against God's moral commands; it is also pride in one's moral record. At the end of the story, the elder brother loses the father's love not in spite of his goodness, but because of it (p. 35). In other words, all people are in rebellion against God, either through self-discovery or through moral conformity. Both sons in the story wanted the same thing--the father's possessions. They just took different paths to get there. In other words the elder son, who represents the religious elite, was just as "lost" as his younger brother. Keller contends, "Careful obedience to God's law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God" (p. 37) because "sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life" (p. 43).
Thus we can see that the path of moral conformity may be even more dangerous than the path of self-discovery because the former is more blind to his soul's condition than the latter. And we can see why many people who have turned their backs on religion generally have no interest in Christianity: the Christian message has been confused with religion. Keller explains, "Everybody knows that the Christian gospel calls us away from the licentiousness of younger brotherness, but few realize that it also condemns moralistic elder brotherness" (p. 67).
In Chapter Five, Keller makes what I found to be the most interesting observation in the story. By comparing and contrasting the parable of the lost son with the other two parables in Luke 15, we find amid the obvious similarities one striking difference. In this final parable, no one goes to seek out that which is lost. But someone should have and the answer is quite obvious. The younger son needed an elder brother who understood his responsibility to keep the family intact and so would have, at his own expense, done whatever was necessary to bring his wayward brother home. Instead, the younger son got a Pharisee for a brother who grumbled at the idea that God would receive such sinners. But in the Christian gospel we find that all humanity has a "True Elder Brother."
Keller again:
"Think of the kind of brother we need. We need one who does not just go to the next country to find us but who will come all the way from heaven to earth. We need one who is willing to pay not just a finite amount of money, but, at the infinite cost of his own life to bring us into God's family, for our debt is so much greater. Either as elder brothers or younger brothers we have rebelled against the father. We deserve alienation, isolation, and rejection. The point of the parable is that forgiveness always involves a price--someone has to pay. There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself. Our true elder brother paid our debt, on the cross, in our place." (pp. 84-85)
Keller concludes the book by showing how the parable of the lost son fits the larger context of the entire Bible. This is why it is his contention that in this one parable we have the rare opportunity of seeing clearly, all the way to the bottom, of what the Christian gospel is. All of us find ourselves longing for home--we instinctively know that the way the world is now is not the way it ought to be. Indeed the Bible teaches that we feel this way precisely because we have left "home." We were meant for life in the Garden of God but because of our rebellion against the father we find ourselves in a distant land far from home. But we have a "True Elder Brother" who has come to bring us home, to a real, material world absent of evil and disease and suffering where we can enjoy the feast the Father has prepared in celebration of his children who were lost but have been found.
The Prodigal God will most assuredly challenge your fundamental beliefs about the Christian gospel, yet it would be hard to be anything but satisfied by what you begin to see more clearly.
Keller's book, as the provocative title suggests, is built on one of Jesus' most famous stories: the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15). Keller consents that "on the surface of it, the narrative is not all that gripping." But, he contends that "if the teaching of Jesus is likened to a lake, this famous Parable of the Prodigal Son would be one of the clearest spots where we can see all the way to the bottom." Keller has taught from this passage many times over the years, and says, "I have seen more people encouraged, enlightened, and helped by this passage, when I explained the true meaning of it, than by any other text."
The book is laid out in seven brief chapters which aim to uncover the extravagant (prodigal) grace of God, as revealed in this parable. Keller shows how the parable describes two kinds of "lost" people, not just one. Most people can identify the lostness of the "prodigal son," the younger brother in Jesus' story, who takes his inheritance early and squanders it on riotous living. But Keller shows that the "elder brother" in the parable is no less lost. Together, the two brothers are illustrations of two kinds of people in the world. "Jesus uses the younger and elder brothers to portray the two basic ways people try to find happiness and fulfillment: the way of moral conformity and the way of self-discovery." Both brothers are in the wrong, and when we see this, we discover a radical redefinition of what is wrong with us. "Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors may be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life." As these quotes hint, Keller's exposition of the two sons lays the groundwork for a penetrating analysis and critique of both moral relativists on the liberal left and religious moralists on the conservative right, showing that the latter are just as lost as the former. What both need is Jesus, whom Keller presents as "the true elder brother," the one who comes to our rescue at his own expense. Through his grace, we are given hope and invited to the great feast of the Father.
As with Keller's preaching, this book is intelligent and winsome, combining thoughtful reflection on both text and culture with searching heart application. Keller's book is effectively illustrated with a liberal use of stories and quotations from literature, movies, and the arts. Most imporantly, the book orients the reader's heart to the hope of the gospel of God's grace revealed in Christ.
One more note: for readers who may have felt intimidated by Keller's recent book The Reason for God, don't shrink away from The Prodigal God. It is probably only 1/3 of the length and much easier to read. I highly recommend it to unbelievers, seekers and established Christians.
Top reviews from other countries
As Keller outlines the story of the prodigal son, he highlights that there were two sons in the story - both equally estranged from the father. Keller helpfully states that the story that Jesus told should really be called The Prodigal Sons, not The Prodigal Son. This difference, though subtle, leads to something quite profound: there are two ways that a human can be estranged from God. The first, is the way of the younger brother who became estranged through his rebellion and hedonism. But there is a second way, the way of the older brother, who became estranged through his idolatrous striving.
Keller demonstrates that both sons cared more for the money than they did for their father, yet the older brother carried out his covetousness in a more socially accepted way - but just as toxic. The parallels for us today are deeply convicting. Do we act like an older brother towards God?
But Keller doesn't leave the reader without a solution. He shows that the gospel message of Jesus gives us a third way to live and this is based on the prodigious actions of not one of the sons but on the father. God himself was the true prodigious character in the story. And that's a story that is truly empowering and uplifting. That's a story that needs telling!
Buy it. Read it. Absorb this truth. It will change your life! It's changed mine.
Baseado na Biblia que retrata o interior do ser humano.
A leitura desde livro ajuda na caminhada de fé em Deus, no Deus da Biblia Cristã.