The Father's Example (Prodigal Son)

One of the very well known parables of the Bible is the story of the Prodigal Son. This story can be found in Luke 15: 11-32. There are so many examples in this story that point to our Heavenly Fathers’ example of love for us. There are three main points that jump out at me in this that I would like to share with you.

1) God is willing to let you make your own decisions: it had to be hard for this father to watch his son ask for and leave with his share of the wealth early in his life. Knowing that it more than likely would not work out like he had hoped for. Parents have a great sense of these things in their kids lives. In this case the story is letting us know that despite our free will and not always making the best decisions, God is going to let us do that. He is not going to force things on us.

2) The world does not offer you the happiness that it portrays to have. The world offers up so many things to us if we will live by its standards. Most of them are material value or fake in their earthly happiness. There is not sustenance in any of it and it will quickly leave you scraping at the bottom just as it did to the son in this story. Unfortunately, it takes us a lot of times getting to that point before we open our eyes and see what it is we have with our heavenly Father’s love.

3) His love is not conditional. Despite going out and wasting it all, despite turning his back on his father and walking away, we see in the story in Luke15:20 that the father was standing and waiting for his return. It didn’t matter how far away he got, the father was going to be standing and waiting to show his love and forgiveness.

These three are so true with our Heavenly Father as well. We can put ourselves into this story in some regard. From the worst sinner to the most righteous of us, we all at times need our Heavenly Father to be standing there and waiting on us to embrace us and bring us in.

Let’s finish this up by taking it one step further. What if we showed this type of love to others in our lives? What type of impact could that bring to this world and our lives? This example of love I feel was not just to teach us and show us how much the Heavenly Father loves us and will forgive us, but also to encourage us to exemplify this type of love to people in our lives. How often do we write people off or turn them away because they did something we didn’t like or hurt us just a little? Can we not be an example of Christ and forgive and show them the love he would? I know that is hard and can take time but let’s make that effort together to show this love around in our lives.

Your Heavenly Father loves you unconditionally and without end!

Be Blessed,

Pastor Brandon