Thursday, February 8, 2007

scandal of grace 2

Remember with me now the story of a young man, old enough to leave home, becoming disillusioned with life at home, working for dad on the farm. He demands his inheritance and leaves to find himself. But all he finds is himself homeless and broke.

Coming to his senses, sitting in a pig’s pen (which was the lowest place a Jewish man could ever be, because they considered swine one of the most unclean animals), he realizes that in dad’s house the servant get better treatment than this. Surely even servanthood is better than eating pig slop. So he humbly starts the long road home.

How many of us have found ourselves in the pig’s pen before we came to Christ? We know what the slop tastes like and what it smells like. So we turned to God…and what did we find?

Here is the beginning of the scandal. If we were reading a tabloid or a gossip column from that period, there would be pictures of this influential man’s son in with the pigs and a whole article about who he’d been partying, sleeping with, and so on. What would happen when he returned home?

No comments: