Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: I want to talk about that huge human longing for belonging, human heart longing for home, that the whole world has, though it doesn't always know it until something happens to panic them, to frighten them. As I was thinking of the parable I was going to share with you, it was a perfect one because I want to share the prodigal son with you and his longing for home that he didn't know he had until he ended up in the pigsty. So if you'd turn with me to Luke chapter 15, I want to read this story. It is a very familiar story, but it's like a good solo. It's like a good song. It needs repeating. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat a favorite song or hear a favorite song, so it is with some of the parables. And this, of course, is one of the best-known parables that Jesus ever spoke about.

There was a man, verse 11, who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, "Father, give me my share of the estate." So he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, he set off for a distant country, and there he squandered his wealth in wild living. After he'd spent everything, there was a severe famine in the whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and he hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

When he came to his senses, he said, "How many of my father's hired men have food to spare? Here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired men.'" So he got up and he went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, was filled with compassion for him, and he ran to his son and threw his arms around him and kissed him.

The son said to him, "Father, I've sinned against heaven and against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son." But the father said to his servants, "Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found." So they began to celebrate.

Meanwhile, the older son was in the field, and he came near the house and heard the music and dancing. He called one of the servants and he asked him what was going on. "Your brother's come," he said. "Your father's killed the fattened calf because he's got him back safe and sound." The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, "Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never even gave me a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!"

"My son," the father said, "you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found." Jesus wants a lost world to come home, to become citizens of the kingdom, and that has to happen here and now while there's time, while there's opportunity. "Quick," says the father. Let's take this opportunity. He's repenting, he's coming home. Quick! Don't let's get him changing his mind.

There's an urgency about the fact that we live among a human race that has only a window of opportunity called life, and we have no idea when that window will be shut. Absolutely no idea. It could be tonight. It could be tomorrow. Nobody knows. Only God. He alone, the Bible says, knows the day and the hour when it will be too late to come home. Too late to come home. Now let me take this parable in two pieces. It's a wonderful picture that Jesus was trying to get across to the Pharisees who didn't think they had to come home to God and repent. They were rather like the older brother, proud.

Jesus, trying to make a point with them, starts and tells this story because God is into lostness. He's into seeking and saving that which is lost. He's into being the good shepherd. He's into being the woman sweeping the house for the coin until she finds it. God loves lost things like us. And so it's a wonderful picture of God. If you just take the very simple picture, let me remind you what it teaches of the Bible's doctrine on sin, redemption, and glory.

The father is a picture of God himself. No question about that. The loving father who lives in this incredible kingdom in his beautiful mansion. And the Bible teaches that in, as Jesus said, "My father's house are many mansions." I don't know if you've ever noticed that in John 14. In my father's house there are many mansions. Now what that means I'm not sure, but there's certainly a kingdom. And within that kingdom, dwellings, the word is. And there is a loving father, God, creator, ruler of all things. The father in this story is undoubtedly a picture of God.

The son, the prodigal son, is a picture of the human race born to privilege in Eden. And of course, what happened is a picture of the fall of man. Paradise simply wasn't enough. Paradise wasn't enough. We know the story. And Adam and Eve said, "Give me, give me, give me, give me, give me." And everything given by grace was taken by right, as it were. It's my right to have all these things that actually were given by grace. So they took their rights, as it were, and turned them into wrongs.

Adam and Eve said, "Give me what is mine. Give me the inheritance that you have put around me." And like the loving father in the story, God said, "Take it." He didn't run after the prodigal. Not long after that, it says here in the parable, not long after he had started to take what God had lent him as a steward to look after and make it his own by right, not long after that he took off out of the father's presence. If you read the book of Genesis, then you will see this is exactly what happened in Eden, in Paradise. Adam and Eve said, "Give me, give me, give me." Took what they shouldn't have taken. And not long after that, they set out for a distant country. Actually, it says in Genesis that God drove them out of paradise, out of his kingdom, out of his presence.

They set off for a distant country, a far country. And there the human race has squandered their wealth in wild living. There's another word in some of your translations: rebellious living. Squandered, wasted their lives in disobedience, disobedient living. And so the far country is a picture of where the majority of mankind live today. It's a picture of a place lived where they can live out their rebellion. They're not perhaps aware of this, but that's what the Bible says is happening. It's a state of mind in people that is characterized by distance.

If you ask people, "What do you feel about God?" "Well, I don't feel he's very near. I feel he's far away. I mean, there's been one time in my life I might have felt him near, but if you ask me if I feel he's near now, no, I don't know where he is. He's sort of out there. He's distant." And of course, that's because they're not where they should be. They're not at home. They're in the far country. So it's a state of mind characterized by distance.

The wasted life is the one that is lived in the far country. The wasted life is the one that's lived in the far country. So if we live in this state of mind, we waste or squander our lives. Now what happened to this prodigal was that he ended up homeless. Now he had a lot of money. Must have been able to rent a place out, which he probably did. But living in the far country is expensive. And he became homeless. He spent everything he had. It says there arose a famine. After he'd spent everything, there was a severe famine in the whole country, and he began to be in want. He began to be in want.

I don't know if you know people. I certainly know people who have spent an incredible amount of energy, time, and money, resources in the far country. And yet they begin to be in want. The more they spend, the more they want to spend. To see it is to want it. To want it is to have to have it. It's the greed need. But when they get it, it's never enough. It's never enough. And there's this sense of homelessness.

I was talking to a very, very wealthy person last year. And as I was talking to him, I thought, "This man's homeless," which was a funny sort of thought because we happened to be standing in this incredible mansion, one of the mansions that he owned. And yet he was homeless. He was as homeless as the man in the gutter in New York who's homeless. He was spiritually homeless. And it showed. It showed in his talk. It showed in the distance that he was verbalizing that he felt himself in his heart.

And I was able to tell him that everybody's born hungry. And when you begin to be hungry, when you begin to be in want, that's the beginning of a whole new universe, whole new experience in your life. The famine, you come to the end of yourself. You can't meet your own needs anymore. Now something usually happens to make you aware of that need. It doesn't need to be the pigsty. There's all sorts of pigsties. There's pretty pigsties, posh pigsties, intellectual pigsties, and all sorts of pigsties. It doesn't need to be rock bottom to bring you home like the prodigal. But something needs to happen to alert you to this distance, to this sense of homelessness, this sense of, "I want to go home."

In the case of this young man, it was a famine in the land. Actually, what happened to him was he came to his senses and said, "Well, life in the far country is not what it's cracked up to be. It's not doing it for me." I think I've quoted this how many times because I think it sums it up. There's a quite a famous starlet that got into drugs and everything that a lot of people get into. And she said, "I was looking for mind expansion and pain reduction. However, I found mind reduction and pain expansion. I was looking for mind expansion and pain reduction, ended up with mind reduction and pain expansion." However, she did come home. And it was that particular experience in that quite well-known starlet's life that alerted her to the fact she was homeless. She was homeless.

The devil tells all sorts of lies. He did to Adam and Eve. He tells the human race, "You'll find friends in the far country. Yes, you will." True. But he doesn't tell you what sort of friends. He doesn't tell you they'll probably be—not always, but probably and mostly—fair-weather friends. There was a famine of real friendship out there. He was homeless. He was friendless. No one gave him anything. No one gave him anything. It's a loveless sort of place where people that you trust let you down, and everyone's out for themselves.

Now he was foodless, of course. Remember the devil told Eve there's food in the far country. You must taste it. It'll bring you satisfaction no other apple on any other tree can bring. And yet when you get there, there's this incredible sense of eating, taking your fill of whatever it is, and yet getting hungrier and hungrier and emptier and emptier inside. He longed to fill his stomach with the husks that the swine did eat. No man gave unto him. And he said, "Here I am starving to death."

It makes sense when you think of humanity made for God, by God, to live in touch with God. If he's out of touch with God, he's going to be hungry. And you can eat as many forbidden apples as you like, you'll still be hungry. I can't remember which African country it was that I was visiting when a young research scientist, who had been trying to find out how to grow food with vitamins in, started to sow a crop called Caro. It was made out of some plants that they could gather around and it was developed and everybody thought, "Great, we can feed the people that are starving in this area."

And so they put them onto it and then moved on to do relief work in another area. However, when they came back to see how they were doing after about six months, they were dying like flies. They were dying worse than the people that didn't even have any food. And yet they had all this Caro. So they put it under tests and found it had not one vitamin. It had not one good whatever you need, amino acid, all those things you see on the little box of vitamins, in it. And so they were literally starving to death with their stomachs full. They didn't feel hungry, but they were starving to death.

That's sort of a picture of people today as well. They're just eating the husks, they're filling up their stomach with Caro. And actually, there's no real life-giving vitamins in it, and so they're starving to death. So he felt homeless, he was friendless, he was useless. He hired himself out. And the word is "pinned himself to" a citizen of the far country who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. Now I'm quite sure as he began to come to his senses, he said to himself, "I was born for better things than this."

And you have to understand Jesus' figure of speech here. He was talking to Pharisees and Jews, big crowd around him. And Jews and pigs don't get on very well together. And so what Jesus was doing with this little piece of the story was saying this young man got about as far away from his roots as he could get. As far away from his upbringing, as far away from everything his father had put into him as far away as it was possible to get. He was feeding the pigs and he was sharing their food, pig food.

And I imagine he felt very useless with all his education, with everything that he'd done. This is not what life ought to be. You can just start and see the wheels turning. Work gave him no sense of value or purpose, and I'm sure he didn't wake up every morning and say, "Yay! This is what I was created to be. Come on, pigs, let's get to it." I see people pin themselves to citizens of the far country. I see them pin their hopes in a person or marriage or friendship or a mass. And yet that's not going to do it because there's still a heart in man that says, "I want to go home."

Now there's a wonderful turn in the story, isn't there? And the heart begins to whisper, "There's no place like home. Let me take you there." And the soul begins to shout, "I'm starving!" and he comes to his senses. Now what happened? Well, he got honest. He said, "What a fool I've been to live at such a distance from my father and believe the lies." What lies? The lies the devil through his friends had been telling him. What had they been saying? Freedom! Promised them freedom, said, "Come with us, live as we do. Freedom without restraints." We don't live without the father until we suddenly discover the devil's lie, that liberty without law is a lie. You cannot have liberty, human, personal freedom, and liberty without law. It just doesn't work.

God has put boundaries for good reasons. God has given us rules. I was talking about the house on the rock, how everybody's life needs a foundation, and then everybody's life needs to have a frame. And you have to build the frame. That's what you do in your life. And you have to build it according to code. That's an amazing thing. I was sharing that we had renovated our little schoolhouse when we moved in. My husband says we bashed it down and put it up again, but I say renovated. However, he is right in the sense that we did demolish it down to the schoolroom floor. And there it sat out in a Wisconsin winter for a little while.

Then because the man who was building the house, wonderful builder here, had a job in Chicago while he was building it and couldn't do it unless it was in his spare time, I became the general contractor, really. And so I learned how to build a house. And it was fascinating. I loved every minute of it. And I learned all about building things to code. Everything has to be to code. And if you don't build it to code, it doesn't get passed by the inspector. And it's all very, very important because when the storm comes, this Wisconsin winter sets in, I tell you, and that wind comes off that lake and if it's not built to code and it's not on the rock, you can forget it.

"Great will be the ruin of it," said Jesus. And liberty without law is deciding to build a house on the sand, not according to code. So in a sense, that's another picture. But you know people that say, "Well, you'll never be happy until you're free from those old-fashioned values. Why obey stale conventions when there's red blood dancing in your veins?" etc., etc. I can imagine that the young man's friends said, "Do you want to end up like your self-righteous, rule-keeping older brother?"

Now this must have given the prodigal pause. Maybe it was the thought of his elder brother that had driven him from home in the first first place or kept him in the far country for so long. This thankless young man with a sour face, this joyless young man with a sour heart, this loveless young man with a sour spirit, and above all, this heartless young man who was unforgiving. No charity there. So little love. But the younger son was so hungry for home he decided to go anyway. Prigs were not quite as bad as pigs, he reckoned. And so he started the journey.

And you know when any prodigal is lost in the human race and they come to themselves and they decide to come home, you can be sure of one thing: the father is standing on the rooftop of heaven and he's watching. Now what's he watching for? He's watching for the first step. He's watching for the first step. And he waits. The young man says, "I'm going to set out and go back to my father and say to him, 'I've sinned against heaven and against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired men.'" And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. And he said to his servants, "Look! He's coming home. He's coming home."

And that always touches me very much when I think of God waiting and watching. And it touches me because he ran down the stairway of that house and he ran down the road and he cradled his son. And he didn't make him crawl. He didn't make him crawl. Older brother would have made him crawl, but the father didn't make him crawl. He hurried to forgive, to cleanse and heal, to restore and remake. And he put a robe to cover his sin. Gave him back his rights by giving him shoes. Only sons wore shoes, servants went barefoot. And a ring on his finger, gave him authority to do his work. The stamp of his image on the ring. And he forgave him. He forgave him.

Now of course, it cost him to do all that. It cost God to come down the stairway of heaven with a baby in his arms and put him in a bale of hay. It cost God to come in Christ. And it cost Christ to go to the cross. But that's where I believe the father met the son at the crossroads, wherever they were. And he covered him with the robe of redemption and said, "Welcome home. Let's celebrate."

Now let me illustrate this with my own story. I was born into the world, my father's world on June the 29th, 1935. And I was born with a prodigal heart into a sinful race. I wasn't aware of this, wasn't aware of anything when I was born. I didn't know I was living in a far country. I thought I was living in England. But as I grew up, my state of mind definitely could have been characterized by distance. God, though I was aware he was there, seemed to be very far away.

So I began to do the only thing I knew how to do, waste my life with rebellious living. Now I didn't know I was doing that. But every now and then I got hungry and I felt homeless. Every now and then. And the time I felt most homeless was when I was in my beautiful home. Not when I was at college, when I was actually in this beautiful, beautiful, gorgeous home that I was privileged to be brought up in. That's when these feelings would come, this homelessness.

And I felt very guilty about this. Wasn't it all enough? Well, apparently it wasn't. Now of course, I felt homeless because that's what I was, but nobody had told me that. But I do distinctly remember this little voice that kept whispering now and then, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home." And I knew there was somewhere I ought to be. There was someone I ought to know and there was something I needed to do. But the answers eluded me. I became aware of all of that, that there was someone I needed to know. Yes, there was. Who, how, what?

So I spent all. I had a high old time with my friends who also lived in the far country. We had a ball. We had a party just like the prodigal. But then came the famine and I began to be in want. And the first famine that I experienced was a famine of friends. I ran out of my ability to buy lasting friendship. To buy it by inviting a friend to come to the south of France with us for a holiday. To buy it by lavishing the good things that I was privileged to have on less fortunate friends of mine. I couldn't buy it. It didn't work.

And I became friendless. And I found that everyone was out for themselves. Dog eat dog or cat eat cat. But the problem was we were all out for ourselves. I was no better than they, in fact, I was rather worse. I remember stealing my best friend's boyfriend. And when another friend cheated on an exam, I ratted on her. No wonder I found myself out of friends.

So I was homeless, I was friendless, I was certainly foodless. Nothing I ate filled me up. Legitimate food failed to satisfy. Illegitimate food failed to satisfy. Forbidden fruit left a bitter taste. Nobody told me that. Devil certainly didn't. I ate a lot of Caro. And I began starving to death with my stomach full of husks. And I felt useless. No purpose. That was the thing that really got me awake. My work seemed meaningless. There's no reason for what I was doing, for this cycle of endlessness. This is not what life ought to be, said something inside of me. And in the end, I came to my senses and I realized my problem was a spiritual poverty. And I got honest for the first first time in my life.

Seeing I was a born liar, we all are, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, but I think mine was a little bit more deceitful than yours. I was a born liar and very good at it. It took me a long time to get honest with myself, to come to my senses. Another translation says, "Come to yourself." He came to himself. He got honest. And until you get honest, you never get home.

But I got honest and I said to myself, "I've been listening to a lot of lies, citizens of the far country that say liberty without law is freedom." It's a lie. And I'd rationalized my sin and called it growing up. That was the problem. So what I did was like the prodigal. I started calling things like sin by their real names. You've got to start and call sin by its real names.

My husband has a wonderful little thing he does on the four words used in the scriptures on sin. Four: sin, iniquity, trespass, and guile. Sin is coming short of the target. It's a picture of an arrow from a bow shooting at a target and the arrow's constantly falling short. He says it's like God wakes you up in the morning and gives you a quiver full of arrows of opportunities. And he says, "Now hit the mark." And then in the evening, he says, "Now let's go and see how you did." And you walk with him and find that the arrows have all come short of what you should have hit, what you should have said, how you should have behaved, how you should have thought, how you should have reacted and responded.

So sin is coming short of the standard that God has set. Iniquity is polluting that which is perfect. Well, it was pretty clear that I'd been doing that, all sorts of ways. Trespass is stepping over the boundary that you're told not to step over. And I think we all know when we do that. I certainly, when I started to get honest, knew that it wasn't my parents' rules that I was trespassing in somebody else's property. It was God's rules. It was God's rules.

And guile is projecting that which is false, projecting that which is false. coming into church on Sunday, "How are you?" "Fine." And you're not. You're dying inside. But we learn to project, we learn to use guile to project that which is false. And so the honesty of calling sin sin instead of calling it growing up, being mature, coming of age, was very hard for me, but I got there because I realized that sin had led me indeed to a pigsty. I was about as far away from my roots as I could have been, from how my parents raised me. They would have been and never did know what a pigsty I ended up in after one short semester at college. Didn't take me long.

One of the things that stopped me coming home, however, was the older brother. I had met a few older brothers, and maybe some of you have met some of them in church. I was not in church, but the older brother was at college with me, or the older sister because it was a girl's college. But if you'd asked me, "Why don't you go home?" I'd say, "Well, I don't know if I want to live with the older brother." Met a marvelous—well, many marvelous people in this convention, but I met a girl from Portugal. Beautiful Portuguese girl. She went to Bible school and met somebody there and married. And three months after the wedding, he left her. She was expelled from Bible school. Wasn't her fault, she didn't want him to leave her, but she was asked to leave. Her father was a pastor. She went back there to church and the older brothers in church said, "Well, we really don't want you to come here. Really now, you're divorced. Maybe you could go and find another church that doesn't mind people going that are divorced."

So she tried a couple of other churches, but she kept bumping into older brothers all over the place. However, she did get into a church and began to evangelize and all these people began to come to Christ. She's an extraordinary woman. She started her own business and now she's won the prize for the country and she's like a Mary Kay, you know, she's going to be that well-known. And she's very talented and gifted. And she has begun to lead all these people that she's training in her business to Christ. But she said, "I've stopped doing it." And we said, "Why?" And she said, "Because I don't know where to take them once they've come to the Lord." And she said, "I don't want them to meet the older brother. So what's the point of me bringing them to Christ because there's nowhere to go and there's nothing I can do for them," etc. Isn't that sad?

So sad. And yet the reason that I paused on coming home was just a few people that I had met, just a few older brothers. And what I had to do is be honest enough to say, "But they're just a handful. And I don't stop going to the doctor if I find one quack." And so I had to be honest and say, "You know, this is just a big excuse, this hypocrite thing. I'm not going to church because it's full of hypocrites." And had to realize that the church is full of sinners and if I went to church I'd add one more hypocrite to the bunch. But they weren't as bad hypocrites as the one that were outside the church. When I thought about it, I was one of the worst hypocrites there was and I never went to church, and so were my friends. Play actors, the word means.

And so I got over that in a hurry. And God gave me some neat real servants of God, like they were in the father's house, around me to show me that there were other people in the father's house and that even the older brother, even the older brother had his good points. And so I decided to come home. And at that moment, the father said to the angels in heaven, "Look! She's coming home."

I've realized in retrospection that the father didn't say that when I was 18. He said that when I was five, the first time. And I was a little girl frightened of the bombs falling on me. And I looked up to heaven and said, "God, stop it. Please. Stop them doing it." Now God didn't, but the father watching me said, "She's coming home." That was the first step. There was a God in heaven. And even though he didn't answer my prayer, he was there. I knew it.

And then the next time he said to the angels, "She's coming home," was when I was 14, I think. It's a good exercise for you to do this. What's the next step? Sitting on a incredibly beautiful mountain in Switzerland four months after the war finished with my dad and mom and sister asleep in the car and watching the sunrise in the Swiss Alps. Absolutely devastating. I understand what Romans means, that the things of God are clearly seen in the things that he's created so that we are without excuse. The character of God is clearly seen. And as I watched the sunrise, I ran back to the car and scribbled on a bit of paper, "The dawn breaks softly, filling me with awe. It seems the other side of heaven's door. That God forgives my sin to me is plain. Today, in spite of my sin, the sun did rise again."

And the father said, "She's coming home." It was when I was 16, lying in my little pink bedroom, pink and white painted bedroom. And there was a bookshelf into the wall, built into the wall. And with all the books on it was a Bible. I have no idea whose it was, where it came from. And one night after winning a quite a prestigious tennis tournament, a senior tournament as a junior and all that went with that, I put my cup, my tennis cup, up in that recess next to the Bible. And I lay there looking at the cup, but my eyes kept going to the Bible. And a little voice kept saying, "Open it. Open it. Read it. Open it." And I began—I lay there and I tell you, a battle began. No, yes, no, no, yes, no. And in the end I turned on my side and shut my eyes and went to sleep. And I've always wondered what I would have read. I'd never, ever had a Bible open before or read anything in it. Would it have been Luke 15? I don't know, but I didn't do it.

However, I know the father said, "She's coming home." And then back to college and being sent with a note up to the senior girl in our college, the president of our college, who I knew was different, but I didn't know why. Didn't like her very much. And rudely barging into her room, I discovered her at prayer. Down on her knees with her face to the rising sun. She didn't move. She didn't hurriedly get up and smooth her dress and say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I was praying." She just said, "Yes, Jill. What do you want?" And I threw the note at her and barged out of the room and slammed the door and leaned against the wall, furious. How dare she make me feel like this? What was happening? I was coming home. I was seeing in that beautiful girl whose body language said, "Jill Briscoe, here I kneel. I can do no other and I don't care what you think or anybody else in the world. I love Jesus." And I couldn't take it because I was coming home.

And it was very shortly after that I was taken into hospital. And there, in that hospital bed, God sent me a servant into my far country to say, "You know, father's been waiting a long time. Time you came home." And I came home. And he put a robe over those dirty rags, robe of righteousness. And he put shoes on my feet. And he gave me the rights of a son. And he put a ring on my finger. And he said, "Jill, go do my business. You've got my authority. You go out into this world and look for prodigals. You stand with me and we'll watch them come home. You can help me find them." And that's my story.

Now I wonder if that's your story too. Oh, the details will be different. But I want to ask you two questions. Have you been forgiven? Have you experienced the forgiveness of God? Have you come home? Now there might be many steps like I've described. But the important thing to know is has God covered your sin with his righteousness? You know the Bible says that he won't remember your sins anymore, and people have got mixed up with this. What does it mean that God forgets your sins? I read something wonderful the other day on this. God doesn't have amnesia. He looks at me as if he's forgotten. To say that God forgets is to say he feels about me the way he would feel if he had forgotten.

Let me say that again because it's very profound and very wonderful. To say that God forgets is to say he feels about us the way he would feel if he had forgotten. In other words, he puts the robe over us, but he sees the rags. His eyes go right through the robe, he sees the rags. But he feels about you now you've come home as if he had forgotten. You see, God can do that. And that's what's so wonderful about coming home.

Do you know that when the time comes and you want to go home, you'll be able to get there? No place like home, let us take you there. Have you let God take you there through Christ? Well, make sure. Don't put it off. Don't wonder. Don't say, "Well, I don't want to ask anyone. I'd feel silly. I mean, I've been in church all my life." Or what are people going to think? Far, far more important than what people think, far, far more important what God thinks. And what he wants is for you to come home. He's waiting. Pray with me if you will.

Heavenly Father, thank you for this very, very simple story and yet such a profound picture of the father and of us sitting in a pigsty. Anywhere that isn't home is a pigsty in comparison. And Lord, there is so much wealth waiting for us and celebration waiting for us and joy and feasting in a spiritual sense and yet we just eat husks. That's so silly. And I pray if there's anyone who isn't sure whether they've ever come home, whether they've ever really been forgiven, whether God looks at them through the robe of Jesus, the life of Jesus, even though he sees the rags, he forgives them. Lord, if there's anyone here that isn't sure, may they in this quiet moment say, "Lord Jesus, forgive me. I'm confused. I've still got questions, but I want to come home." And Lord, may they be conscious of your heart of compassion as you meet them halfway and you welcome them back to life, Lord.

And I pray there may be great assurance of salvation. I pray that all of us may be just as assured as the young prodigal in his new robe with his new shoes and his new ring, that life is going to be different. Life is going to be different. And teach us how to walk like your son in our new shoes, how to use the rights you've given us as your children. And also, Lord, how to do your work. How to put your stamp, your image, on our world need as we do your work to the glory of God. We ask it for Christ's sake, Amen.