A LOVING GOD WELCOMES HIS PRODIGAL CHILDREN HOME

The father of the prodigal son had no idea why his son was returning home; but he dropped everything he was doing and came running out to meet him, embrace him, and welcome him.  It wasn’t because the boy had repented, came to his senses, or returned home to where he belonged.  It had nothing to do with anything the boy did.  The father’s heart was filled with love for his son and he simply overflowed with joy to see him walking towards him.  I wonder if more people really knew that would be God’s response if they would turn around, come to their senses, and return to Him where they belonged.

Eventually the emptiness of the pleasures of this world becomes evident.  Eventually people will come to themselves and find their souls depleted.  They need to know that a loving God is watching and waiting for them to come home where they belong.  Eventually they will desire to repent and be filled with the life that God blew into their nostrils that gave them life.

The futility of sin, abandoning God, becomes obvious to the soul at some point.  All the other things we try to fill that space with fail; when that happens people will come to their senses.  It is not helpful to have people encourage the sin in another’s life just to make them feel better.  What helps is to have people point the way to the road back to where one can take his spent soul back to a loving God that will fill it once again; with his welcome, with His love, with Himself.

Jesus did not condemn the woman caught in adultery; he actually protected her from those who would have been right to punish her.  But, neither did he commend her lifestyle and tell her to continue in it.  He told her to go and sin no more.  I believe that is what she needed to hear and therefore she regained the self she had lost and found the self that God created her to be.  I believe that’s the way God works; the way Jesus works; the way God’s representatives one earth should work.  Helping one find true freedom in the ways of God is the most loving thing one can do for another.