[09]

V Indicates Scripture or other reference inserted at the end of this chapter.

 

Chapter 9       A special message for everyone
who ever turned away from God.

Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.
                           Malachi 3:7

No matter what you may have done, said, or thought about God, God has never turned away from you. How could He! God can never stop loving you, because God is love. Even if you said in your heart, “I hate God!”, this ever-loving God still desires you to repent, return to Him, and love Him as He loves you.

God has kept you in His sight, and held you in His heart, since the day you were born. Even before He formed you in the womb, God knew you and loved you.V1 God knew all the possibilities that would open up to you during your life; and He equipped you – body and soul – to make the most of those possibilities. And God has never stopped reaching out – by His Holy Spirit – to encourage you to enter in to the life that He prepared for you and prepared you for.

Sometimes God reached out to you through the gentle words of family members, friends, and other people who knew Him and wanted you to know His love. Sometimes He overwhelmed you with the beauty, harmony, and majesty of His creation. God can speak in an infinite number of ways. And no matter where we may be at any moment – physically, emotionally or spiritually – God will always speak to us in a way that touches us “right where we’re at.” God does not want anyone to miss out on His best for them. And that’s why, all your life, God has been calling you to rise up and enter in to the glorious life that He created you to walk in.

Then one day – a day you’ll never forget as long as you live – you heard His special call to you. There was that moment when you suddenly knew in your heart that God is real, and that you and He can touch each other. You knew beyond all doubt that God loves you, and that He really wants to be your Father. In that moment, you were so close to God that the whole world looked different than it ever had before. You had a love and a hope in you that you could not explain –  you just knew it was greater and stronger and more substantial than anything you could describe or explain in the world’s terms.

Maybe you were a born-again Christian at that moment. Maybe you weren’t.

Maybe it was the moment you were born again. Maybe it was the moment Jesus baptized you in His Holy Spirit.

Maybe it was a moment of personal desperation, when you had no one to turn to, and you cried out to a God you had only heard other people speak about ... and He answered you!

Maybe it was during a time you were deep in prayer to a God you had never met on the personal level ... and He gave you a sudden and breathtaking understanding of who He is and how much He loves you.

But then....

But then ... you may have suffered a personal tragedy or disappointment that caused you to doubt the Truth of God. Or ... you may have seen a family member die – painfully, senselessly, and much too young – and the pain and senselessness of that death it made you say to yourself (or scream out loud), “How could a loving God ever let this happen!”

Or ... you may have fallen in with the wrong crowd of people and gotten trapped in drugs, alcohol, homosexuality, the occult ... or the love of money.

Or ... you may have been led away from the simple Gospel of Christ by some know-it-all college professor. Or ... you may have been hurt or exploited by some church leader, who thought he or she was in the ministry to use people instead of serving them. Or ... you may have been in a church that was stuck in its own religious traditions and did not encourage its members to build personal relationships with God – and when the day came when you needed God, their traditions couldn’t do anything for you.

Or ... maybe you didn’t “do” anything at all, and nobody “did” anything to you. Maybe you just got tired of waiting for God to “do something” and dropped away from Him by degrees.

Or maybe there was a day when you told God something along the lines of, “I’m young, I’m smart, I’m good-looking, and I’m not going to waste my whole life just doing what someone else tells me ... not even God!” And then you went out to conquer the world. And then, after the world conquered you, maybe you told yourself something along the lines of, “Well, looks like I’ve had it as far as God is concerned. I spit in His eye, and all I can expect from Him now is a good swift kick.”

But God isn’t like that! Yes, God is holy and all-powerful. Yes, God can reject – or even destroy – anyone who says a word against Him. But God’s great heart won’t let Him do that to anyone who repents. Jesus makes this clear beyond question in this picture of the Father’s heart that He gave us in the parable of the prodigal son:

 

Luke 15:11-24

11 And He (Jesus) said, A certain man had two sons:

12  And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me. And he divided unto them his living.

13  And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

14  And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

15  And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

16  And he willingly would have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

17  And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

18  I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

19  And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

20  And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

21  And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

22  But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

23  And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

24  For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

We’ve all known ungrateful children like the younger son in this parable; they’re called “brats.” This brat offered his father the ultimate insult: “I want everything you can give me, but I don’t want you.” He turned his back on his family, his heritage and his homeland. He lived like a fool until the last cent of his inheritance was gone. And then, as the parable tells us in verses 16 and 17, he “got just what he deserved” – life in the hog-pen, with no way out in sight. 

At that point, the brat could have stayed a brat. He could have told himself, “I’m tough enough to handle this!” He could have said, “This is all my father’s fault!” But why would Jesus put a stubborn brat in His parable? He saw no need to teach about boys who get too big for their britches – everyone knows what happens to them. Jesus wanted to teach us about the love, the grace, the mercy, and the compassion of His own Father, God!

That’s why Jesus says that the boy in this parable “came to himself.” He saw that he was a sinner, and he repented. Instead of “hanging tough” or blaming someone else for his troubles, he confessed, “I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee.” And when the boy put his words of repentance into action, “His father saw him [coming home], and had compassion on him.” The repentant son’s father told him (if we may paraphrase the last few verses of the parable):

“Welcome home!

“No need to explain. I feel everything you feel; and I feel it as deeply as you do, because I went through it when I was young.

“I feel the teenage frustration that made you want to leave home. You didn’t have to run away – but you were young and foolish. Now that you see your mistake, I forgive you for it.

“I feel the suffering you went through out in that hog-pen. It must have been a lot harder on you than it would have been for that farmer’s son, because you knew all along you weren’t born to  feed hogs. I can’t take that suffering away from you; but I will promise you won’t have to suffer like that under my roof.

“I feel the desperation that led you to repent, and I admire your courage for doing what was right as soon as you realized you were in the wrong.

“Welcome home ... son!”

If you ever turned away from God – for any reason – you can be sure that if you repent and return to Him, then you will receive the same understanding and compassion from Him that the “brat” in the parable received from his father. That’s the whole point of the parable – God does understand our weaknesses, and He is always willing to forgive us and welcome us back into His presence the moment we repent.

Does it sound incredible that God understands our human weaknesses? After all, God the Father never lived among sinful men and women – He stayed in Heaven, where there’s “no sin allowed.” The Father does have an intellectual understanding of sin ... but how can He possibly understand the feelings of people down here on earth who fall prey to sin?

He can – because His Son Jesus came to this earth so He could go through everything we go through. For years, Jesus was tempted and taunted and tortured – by lust-filled women, by religious hypocrites, by devious lawyers and teachers and tax-collectors, and finally by an unholy conspiracy of Jewish priests and Roman rulers who were perfectly happy to sacrifice His life so they could get on with their lives of sin. Walking in the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus survived them all. And because He willingly went through it all, the Word of God assures us:

We have not a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.
                               Hebrews 4:15,16