The Prodigal Sonsنموونە

Day 3 Devotional:

Our Saviour

In that culture at that time, a good, kind, patient, benevolent, and loving parent like the wealthy father in this story would have rightly responded angrily with verbal and physical blows to the attitudes and behaviour of both sons.

Both sons had rejected their father’s love. They showed that they were more interested in what they could get from him, rather than in himself, as their loving father.

This was the same with our first parents in the Garden. They missed the love of God that was everywhere on display around them.

Luke 15:20 tells us that, when the younger son decided to return home, while this younger son was still a long way off, his father saw him, and he ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. Obviously, the father had looked out yearningly every day, day and evening, to see if the son would ever return home.

This is a picture of God’s yearning love for us displayed in the incarnation of Christ, and His humiliating and painful death on the cross for us.

The father in this story does not respond like a father to these two lost sons. He responds like a mother. The New Testament consistently explains that the defining motivation in God’s efforts to save us from our sin is His motherly, unconditional love for us.

Christ confirmed this in those well-known words that define the gospel so well in John 3:16.

Rom. 5:7-8 echoes this same gospel truth by declaring that very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die, but God demonstrates His own love for us by the fact that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

So, we can summarise our second S by saying that, like the father in this story, the defining motivation of God that makes Him our Saviour who saves us from our sin through the gospel, is His amazing, and even scandalous love, for us.