Prodigal

Jack Frost

Posted on by Kath Walden

When most people read the parable Jesus told in Luke 15, they refer to it as the story of the “Prodigal Son.” Religion traditionally has made this story about the failure and sins of the son, just as religion often focuses more on the deeds of the sinner rather than on what God has done to restore the relationship between Himself and His children. But this parable is more about a father’s love and cry for intimacy than it is a son’s rebellion. Although the son did spend his inheritance extravagantly, how much more recklessly did his father give honor, compassion, forgiveness, and grace to his son when he least deserved it?

Jack Frost
Daily Christian Quote Website
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Basil

Posted on by Kath Walden

April 19, 2020

For the Lord does not want the sinner to die, but to return and live. There is still time for endurance, time for patience, time for healing, time for change. Have you slipped? Rise up, Have you sinned? Cease. Do not stand among sinners, but leap aside. For when you turn back and weep, then you will be saved.

Dwight L Moody

Posted on by Kath Walden

I believe that if an angel were to wing his way from earth up to Heaven, and were to say that there was one poor, ragged boy, without father or mother, with no one to care for him and teach him the way of life; and if God were to ask who among them were willing to come down to this earth and live here for fifty years and lead that one to Jesus Christ, every angel in Heaven would volunteer to go. Even Gabriel, who stands in the presence of the Almighty, would say, “Let me leave my high and lofty position, and let me have the luxury of leading one soul to Jesus Christ.” There is no greater honour than to be the instrument in God’s hands of leading one person out of the kingdom of Satan into the glorious light of Heaven.

James Castleton

Posted on by Kath Walden

Our God is so gracious. None other gratefully and joyfully welcomes home the wayward soul who would, only after having exhausted all possible alternatives, seek Him as the refuge of last resort. The natural father, under such circumstances, would seethe with the resentment born of pride. God, however, evinces a love so compassionate and encompassing that He would humble Himself to accept those who would be inclined, if left to their own devices, to choose anything and anyone but Him.

John of Kronstadt

Posted on by Kath Walden

How many have suffered and still suffer because their hearts were not firm in their good inclinations, because they imprudently looked with impure eyes, because they heard with ears unaccustomed to discern between good and evil, because they tasted greedily! The senses of the sin-loving, greedy flesh, unrestrained by reason and by God’s commandments, have drawn them into various worldly passions, have darkened their minds and hearts, deprived them of peace of heart, and taken away their free-will, making them the slaves of these senses. Thus you see how necessary it is to look, listen, taste, smell, and feel prudently; or, rather, how necessary it is to guard your heart so that through your outward senses, as through a window, no sin may steal in, and that the author himself of sin – the Devil – may not darken and wound that heavenly fledgling, our soul, with his poisonous and deathly arrows.

Robert Farrar Capon

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You’re worried about permissiveness – about the way he preaching of grace seems to say it’s okay to do all kinds of terrible things as long as you just walk in afterward and take the free gift of God’s forgiveness… While you and I may be worried about seeming to give permission, Jesus apparently wasn’t. He wasn’t afraid of giving the prodigal son a kiss instead of a lecture, a party instead of probation; and he proved that by bringing in the elder brother at the end of the story and having him raise pretty much the same objections you do. He’s angry about the party. He complains that his father is lowering standards and ignoring virtue – that music, dancing, and a fatted calf are, in effect, just so many permissions to break the law. And to that, Jesus has the father say only one thing: “Cut that out! We’re not playing good boys and bad boys any more. Your brother was dead and he’s alive again. The name of the game from now on is resurrection, not bookkeeping.”

George Macdonald

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Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at home; but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer…So begins a communion, a talking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may receive; but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower needs, is not God’s end in making us pray, for He could give us everything without that: to bring His child to His knee, God withholds that man may ask.

Theodore O. Wedel

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Prodigal sons, forgiven and reconciled with their heavenly Father, could they do other than forgive one another? A fellowship of prodigal sons came into being — the church of Christ. Love begets love. A new power…was let loose upon our suffering world, the power to love those who have not deserved love, the unworthy, the unlovely and unlovable, a man’s enemies, and even his torturers. Christians, in imitation of the Saviour, became, as it were, Christs to one another and to the world.