If you have a son or daughter running from the Lord I can’t begin to imagine the heart pain you must regularly feel. But I have some good news, God does.
God totally understands because He too has prodigal children. He has sons and daughters He has poured His life into, who He has sacrificed for, who He has shown nothing but love toward and yet they turned on Him, rejected Him and ran.
Here are some other things you need to know about God and that prodigal child of yours.
He loves your child many times more than you ever could.
He formed them. He has known them longer and more intimately than you.
He knows them better than they know themselves – every secret hurt, every question, every tear and pain.
He has not abandoned them.
He is right there with them, so conscious and so aware of them at this very moment.
Wherever they might run they cannot escape His presence, His care, His love, His compassion.
He bled and died for them. He sacrificed His own Son to purchase them as His own child.
After such a great price, do you think He is going to give up easily on reaching them?
Certainly not!
Do you think they can escape His persistent love?
Certainly not!
Do you think he cannot soften their heart as surely as He hardened Pharaoh’s?
Certainly He can!
“But”, you say, “I should have been a better parent.”
You’re right. We all should have been better.
But we were what we were.
The past is the past. Let it go.
We cannot alter the past but we can altar it – put it on the altar.
Give it to God – all our mistakes, all our regrets, all our heartbreak over what we should have done, would have done, could have done if we had only known.
Cast it on God’s altar and let the fire of His love and forgiveness burn it to ash.
Next, take the stance toward your prodigal that God demonstrated for us in Jesus’ story.
Don’t rush to rescue them from the pig pen.
Often pig pens are the only place a prodigal will hear God’s voice.
Let God do His inner work without help from you.
Meantime, you look to God – through daily crying out to Him for your child.
And keep looking toward the horizon every day with expectation.
Expectation that this could be the day you see your child returning home to His Creator.
God has not given up on your child. So you dare not give up either.
Put your hope in God.
“Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh; is anything too difficult for Me?”
– Jeremiah 32:27
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