Friday, May 17, 2013

It's a Lonely Road


My first draft sound recording of my new song, "Lonely Road"

Musing on the Prodigal Son

It is amazing to me that God gives us characters in His Word that are so real, so ordinary, so human, so flawed. Perhaps the greatest source of my hope in Christ is that God has always been able to use even the weakest of human beings to accomplish His purposes. As I was thinking about the prodigal son this week, I was stunned to see "the road home" as a picture of Christ's work.

It is the Holy Spirit who causes us to repent, to turn around on the sinful road we came down. It is our Father God who waits at the door of heaven to receive us with open arms. But, it is the Lord Jesus who guides us into the Father's arms..it is He who assures us that His sacrifice is enough as we fumble through excuses to offer God at the pearly gates, and it is Christ who walks beside us with wisdom, forgiveness, and love on our way home.

My thoughts on the prodigal son are certainly not from the point of view of the father or the elder and obedient son. I am the prodigal, I am the runaway, the renegade, the son who "wasted his inheritance on riotous living", the young man filling the pig trough and groaning with hunger. But praise God, I am also the prodigal who was awakened and turned around by the Spirit, led home by the Savior, and accepted by the Father through no righteousness or words of my own, but by His love.

Suffice it to say that I am not proud to have been a prodigal. Neither could I be proud that I so often still am one..foolishly making decisions that turn my heart from the Cross and onto the world, selfishly placing my desires above pleasing or obeying my Father. I sing "O to grace, how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be" and I mean it with everything in me. My soul, my heart, and my mind are not at all what they should be. But I pray that God will always give me the strength to turn around and walk the road home--knowing He's there with an embrace when I try to offer an excuse, knowing that He has given me Heaven when all I deserve is Hell..

"It was a lonely road finally coming home again, it was a lonely road without a soul to call my friend..but He was with me the whole way, He led me in the right way to a life in Him that will never end...When I was walking down that old dusty road that night, there was a Father who'd been waiting every single night for me to just turn round on that LONELY ROAD I traveled down." ~Lonely Road