What If He’d Never Come Home?

“So he returned home to his father. And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.” (Luke 15:20 NLT)

A lot of division arises between the proverbial “camps” over this parable. Today, by God’s grace I will share what the Lord has shared with me, you do with it as you will.

Parables have one main point. They are not allegories that reveal many lessons through many aspects or avenues of teaching within one story. The main point of this parable, as was the main point of the other two parables in this series (lost sheep and lost coin) was the lost boy was found.

The argument has been made that the lost son would have been saved because he didn’t lose his sonship, but the reality is, every living human being is born of God. No human being has life except it’s given by God. Life begins at conception because that’s what God has ordained, but because God is the Author of our biological life doesn’t in and of itself guarantee we will go to heaven. The son was lost before he left home.

Heaven demands we be born again of the Spirit through an act of faith evidenced through our willingness to repent and turn from our sin through confessing our need of God, submitting our will to His authority and obeying His directives. That’s the decision the prodigal ultimately made. Notice what the Bible says in Luke 15:17-19: “When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, ‘At home even the hired servants have food enough to spare, and here I am dying of hunger! I will go home to my faither and say, “Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Please take me on as a hired servant.”’”

Salvation isn’t based on sonship, every person is a “son” or “daughter” of God by virtue of our physical birth, it’s based on relationship. It wasn’t that the prodigal didn’t have a father, it was that he had no relationship with His father. Had he died in the foreign land without a renewed relationship with his father, continuing to live in his “lostness,” he would never have had a relationship with his father; thus, as we think of it in “spiritual” terms, he would have remained lost and not gone to heaven.

So, the logical question becomes, have YOU come home to the Father? It’s not simply about what we say, a “profession of faith,” if you will, it’s about repentance and confession, coming home to the Father, confessing our sin and yielding our life and allegiance to His Lordship – becoming His servant, His slave. It’s ironic on some levels that we can only become our Savior’s slave as we become submitted to our Father’s authority.

Sonship opens the door to the privilege of divine Ownership. We recognize that on many levels our lives were never our own, they were bought with a price (1 Corinthians 7:23) through the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus on the Cross. We can quibble about how much a professed believer sins and still gets to go to heaven, but here’s the deal – every one of us, without exception is a sinner saved by grace and will be haunted by Satan’s lies and temptations as long as we have air in our lungs.

Can we just please leave it to the Lord to make the final call as to who belongs to Him and who doesn’t. Ultimately, we have only ONE person to be concerned about – the beautiful or ugly mug that stares back at us from the mirror. Focus on that ONE person and make sure they’re ready for heaven, then the Lord will lead us to others we can help get ready.

Food for thought.

Blessings, Ed 😊