Christian Living

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On the second Saturday of each month, The Church of Life goes to do homeless ministry, helping to serve meals at a church in downtown Orlando. Today was the first time I went, and it was a powerful experience. One of the men from the church, Roger, taught a message about the story of the prodigal son. Yet I think the message of the parable of the prodigal son is vastly different than the way we've always taught it. I also think that we can all identify with the feeling of being homeless, because in a way we all have been.

The message of the story is beautiful. A man has two sons, one of whom decides to abandon his father and live however he wants to live. He takes his share of the inheritance, squanders it all on foolish living and then, completely ruined and at the end of his rope, finally returns to his father, who takes him in. The story is usually explained as being about a person who strays from the faith, and the moral is that God will take anybody back no matter how far they've strayed. Yet I think the story is more about salvation, the way we approach God for the very first time, than about coming back to God.

The son's arc in this story closely parallels our own journey into life, and then into sin. We are all, even before salvation, "children" of God in some sense, because we all come from him and we would not exist if he didn't make us. Yet we choose not to live like it. We take our "inheritance" from God - the life that he's given us, the five senses with which we experience pleasurable things, the ability to make choices and have friends and experience love. We take this inheritance, and we squander it on things that God never meant for us to do. We choose to live our own life, to ruin the beautiful things that God gifted us, to spend our inheritance, our lives, foolishly.

The word "prodigal" does not at all mean what we usually mean when we say it. It doesn't mean someone who returns after going away. It means someone who is completely spent, completely ruined, with nothing left to give. That's the condition we're in when we realize our need for God. We come to that understanding after squandering all the things God gave us, when we realize that we took this precious gift of life, the short time we've been given on earth, and made a miserable mess out of it. That's when we're prodigal.

You could say, at this point, that we're spiritually homeless. We always had a home, in our father's house. Yet we turned our backs on him and chose to go live on the streets, in the rough and tumble world where people used us to get ahead, took advantage of us, and treated us however they wanted to. We got used to living on those angry streets, wishing there was a better place we could go. Finally we discovered that there was, and we moved in out of the cold, into the house that could have been ours all along.

See, the prodigal son never stopped being his father's son. Even when he wasn't living like it, he was still loved by his father, he still bore the family name. The same is true of us as well. Even when we're buried underneath the weight of our sins, even when we're fleeing from God as fast as we can, we're still not capable of outrunning his love for us. We're still our Father's children, because he made us, and nothing can ever make him stop loving us. When we finally realize that we're prodigal, when we reach that point of being completely spent, we can always come back to our Father - the place we came from to begin with, the place where we always belonged.

The worship song "Marvelous Light" begins, "I once was fatherless." All respect to Charlie Hall, but he's wrong. We were never fatherless. We've always had God as a father, because he created us. We disowned him; he never disowned us. Exactly the opposite, even when we were still sinners, he kept pursuing us with his love, sending Christ to die for us so that he could reconcile us to him (Romans 5). He never disowns us, unless we reach the very end of our lives without acknowledging that he's our father. If that happens, he says, "Okay. Have it your way - I'm not your father. You can't have my forgiveness, and you can't have my eternal life either. You could have had these things, but you told me you didn't want them, because you never came home to ask for them."

That's the story of our salvation: going from death to life, from homeless to living with our father the way he always wanted us to. I believe that's the point of the story of the prodigal son: us taking our inheritance from God, squandering it, and then, when we're fully spent, coming back to the father who has loved us all along. Salvation is not really a new life at all, but the life we should have had from the very beginning, the life we were made for.

Whether this is the most correct understanding of the story of the prodigal son, I can't say for sure, but I think it has merit. It explains very vividly how we used to be homeless, living in ignorance or denial of our father who loved us, and who at any moment would have welcomed us back and celebrated our return. Yet just the same as many homeless people refuse help because they're proud, we refused God's help, trying to insist that we could do life ourselves and achieve happiness. Only when we were prodigal did we find out how right he was. Only then did we come home, into the arms that had always been open to us.

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