The Long Road Home // The Long Road Home, Part 4

Sometimes, we come to the conclusion that decisions and choices we've made – just aren't working. But turning them around, well, it can be a long road. For years, and years, and years, I wandered around in a spiritual desert. Now the crazy thing was that I'd been a Christian in my teenage years. But when I grew up, I rebelled and I came to the point where I kind of knew that there was a God but after all the things I'd done, after the years of wandering out there, I just didn't know whether He'd really want me back, and at what cost? What would I have to give up of the lifestyle that I was accustomed to, in order to have a relationship with him again? For me, as it is for so many people, the road home seemed like such a long one. And what would His reaction be when I turned up on His doorstep again anyway? I remember as a child, I did something wrong after school, I can't remember what it was, but my Mother said to me, "You wait until your father comes home." And I can still remember, I must have only been about six or seven, or eight years old. I can still remember vividly the sense of dread, of waiting at home for the consequences when my Dad came home again. Do you remember that? I'm sure we've all had that experience. This week on A Different Perspective we're doing a small group of messages that I've called The Long Road Home because so many people are wandering in a spiritual desert and the thing that often keeps us from turning around, and going to God in the middle of that. The one person that we're looking for, you know the one thing that can satisfy that longing that we have, the thing that so often stops us, is that sense of dread. That sense of wondering well how is He going to react? Is it going to be like Dad punishing me when I was a kid? Jesus knew that, Jesus knows that. That's why he told a story, it's the story of the prodigal son, the lost son. We've been looking at it over this week on A Different Perspective. It began with a son's rebellion. Let's have a read of it again. A man had a two sons, the younger of them said to his father, "Dad give me the share of the estate that I have coming to me." so the father distributed the assets to them. Not many days later the younger son gathered together all he had and traveled to a distant country where he squandered his estate on foolish living. After he had spent everything a severe famine struck the country and he had nothing. And then he went to work for one of the citizens of that land who sent him out into the field to feed the pigs. This son longed to eat his fill from the carob pods that the pigs were eating but no one gave him anything. When he finally came to his senses he said, 'How many of my father's servants have more than enough food and here I am dying of hunger. I'll get up and I'll go to my father and say to him, 'father I've sinned against Heaven and against you, I'm not worthy to be called you son anymore, just make me one of your servants'." And so he got up and he went to his father. It's a cycle that began with a desire to do it my way, with a desire to rebel, with a desire for partying and excitement, and all the stuff I guess that we look for as young people, and probably as we get older as well. But I wonder how much of this cycle parallels our lives. Whether you've never met Jesus before, you just have a sense of spiritual longing, or maybe, maybe once you walked with him, somewhere along the road either you wandered off, or he somehow seemed to disappear, or maybe you're trying to walk with him but in a certain area of your life, well there's something you're holding back. Wherever we're coming from, the same symptoms of spiritual hunger, of emptiness, of something missing, of something not working is what so often people feel. And what happened here for this young man, is when he finally came to his senses, what he did was this. He linked his pain with the initial cause, which was his rebellion. So often we don't do that, so often we're suffering and yet we go on deluding ourselves that our choices are fine and everything's fine. Of course I can have an affair, of course I can live like this, of course I can reject God's view on A, B, C and D. And yet, if we're really honest with ourselves, if we really look at our predicament in our situation in this spiritual wilderness that so many people are walking through. If we're really honest, we can see that the pain and the symptoms come back to a rebellion. I don't know what that rebellion looks like in your life, we all rebel in different ways but it's not rocket science to figure it out. And then this young man-made a pragmatic decision, a selfish decision, not some altruistic decision to say I'm going to go back to my father because my father is a wonderful man. It was a decision that was driven by the hunger in his stomach looking at these pigs day and night. And he made a decision in his best interests to start on that long road home. We're not told in this ...