Coming Home

When I went to my Great Uncles funeral they taught about the Prodigal Son and I have been thinking about it ever since. If you don’t know who that is you can read about him in your bible (Luke 15:11-32). The gist of the story is I young man asks his father for his inheritance and then goes and blows it all… only to realize that once he had wasted everything his father had given to him he had nothing… and ended up eating with the swine (pigs) which to the Jewish people was a dirty animal… so its safe to say that he was in the lowest place he could be in…. but one day he realized that his fathers servants lived a better life than he was living so he decided to go back home… and ask his father to let him be as a servant… he came back to his father who ran to him… and accepted him back not as a servant but as a son… and his father says something later on when the young man’s brother is upset that his dad is throwing this big celebration for the son that wasted his inheritance. He says “It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.
Sometimes I am so full of appreciation for God accepting me back into his arms that I feel like I need to share it… so bear with me… you see I left God thinking I had made mistakes that God would never see past, that I was so soiled that I deserved nothing better than to eat with the swine… and truth be told that was true.. But that isn’t how God saw it, just like that Prodigal son when I hit the point where I knew that the only way for me to have any peace within myself was to come back, to accept whatever my father would give me. And to know that what he had to offer was better than what I could do for myself, for me to desire the life he had for me… that’s when I came back… I always liked that story, because it gave me hope that “when I was ready” he would be there… now I love that story because it tells me something else… you see that son left the ways of his father… He went out into the world and without having a direct link to his father ended up with nothing… when he came to his senses he came back to his father… he came back to his fathers house… he came back to the life that his father had for him… he didn’t stay out there… just like me when I came back… I had to pick up the life my father had for me… I had to leave all those other things behind, all those things I had picked up when I was living a life in the world…. I had to see for myself that what God could give me was more important than what I could ever do for myself…. There is a scripture (James 4:8) that says “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.” If we want to get closer to God we have to draw closer to him. Think about it… he hasn’t changed… the only way to get closer to something that doesn’t move is for you to start moving closer.
If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.