Sunday Reading: Luke 15:17-24
Key Verse: Luke 15:20
20 And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.
Devotion:
Having been through the parable of the lost son recently in bible study, I thought it about time that I mentioned here in our devotions again. When we read parables like this we can relate to them because of their human content and human level, but looking beyond the obvious is what Jesus wants us to do. Yes we see the need for righteous thinking from the son’s side, the need for forward planning too, and we also see the love that the father has for his sons and the sons repentance after he realises what he has done wrong. But Christ’s true teaching comes when we start to compare this with how God looks at us.
God is our heavenly Father who is constantly looking out for us and loves us. He is the one that has given us the opportunities and He is the one that has given us the inheritance too. We are akin to the sons and we are the ones that have the choice as to how we deal with our inheritance. We have been given the gift already because Jesus has already paid for our sin debt on the cross. We now have the choice as to whether we want to accept that gift and its true wealth or squander that gift through wrong living. The son in the parable certainly cause a riot when he went off and wasted that gift on just about everything that he could – something we tend to do when we do not know the true wealth of Christ’s gift to us.
When we begin to understand just how much of a wonderful gift Christ has given to us through paying for our sin debt, we then begin to see just how much we have done wrong in our lives and why He had to go and do that in the first place. Imagine knowing that you have to live your whole life just so that you can pay for someone else’s life... That is exactly what Christ did for us. Jesus is waiting patiently for us to repent of our sins. When we do, He will be faithful and loving like the father in the parable and come to us wherever we are because then He will know we are sincere about our lives with Him.
Points to Ponder:
Are you surprised by how much people do forgive when you apologise?
Are you confessing your sins?
