Most of us know the story of the Prodigal Son, for those of you who don’t, you can find it in Luke 15:11-32. A quick summary of the story: a father has two sons and the younger son asks his father for his inheritance. The father gives the sons their shares of the inheritance and the younger one goes off parties, lives it up, and squanders everything he has been given by his father. Suddenly things take a turn for the worse for the son as famine strikes and without his inheritance he suffers greatly, hungers, thirsts, is cold, and likely homeless. His suffering causes him to regain his senses and he knows that the servants of his father are treated better than this and he returns to his father, confesses his sins, repents and resolves never again to abandon his family. Out of joy his father gives him more than he had before, throws a grand feast and welcomes his son back with ever greater joy, love, and mercy.
I quite like to think that this illustrates quite nicely the story of our own salvation. While many of us think that the grace or inheritance we received from God is something we can never lose, this parable tells us otherwise. The son probably never dreamed that he would receive the riches of his father, but end up destitute on the streets, but he did. The same can happen for us. We receive the rich grace and mercy from the Father, through Christ, and we think we will never be without it, but we often find ourselves destitute of the grace of God when we find ourselves in mortal sin. But it’s not God who takes away the grace he gives us, but it is we who make choices and lose that grace on our own. God has given us the freedom to make choices, the freedom to do what we will with his grace. He has taken a big risk by giving us every blessing because we can squander and abuse what he holds dearly, the gifts he lavishes upon us. I try to make it clear that it is not God who takes away our grace and salvation, it is we who lose it when we make poor choices like the Prodigal Son.
But the best part of the story is that the Prodigal Son returns to his father to repent of and confess of his sins. The father rightly could have given his son a lowly position as a mere servant. In fact the father rightly could have turned his Son away and sent him back to the streets. But he didn’t, he embraced him, welcomed him home and restored his son’s inheritance. In the same way we crawl back to God, we confess, we repent. God has every right to send us away empty handed, but he doesn’t. His rich love and mercy restores our grace and salvation to us. God is infinite in mercy and grace and so no matter how many times we fail, how many times we screw up, God is waiting for our return so that he can restore our grace, give us more mercy, give us Christ. But we have to return. We have to repent, or else we have lost our salvation, not because God has taken anything away, but because somewhere along the way, we set the grace down so that we could pick something else up and grace is a delicate thing and it was lost, by our own fault.
Our Father,
You are rich in grace and mercy. Show your mercy to those of us who have lost the grace we were given freely. Restore us to eternal love and help us to make better decisions in the future, to embrace the grace you have given to us. In Christ we pray, Amen.
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