The Prodigal Sonsنموونە

Day 4 Devotional:

Our Salvation

Luke 15:14-20 tells us that, far away from home, having squandered his wealth, becoming poverty-stricken and increasingly desperate, the younger son came to his senses, and he set out to return to his father.

The New Testament refers to this action on the part of the younger son as repentance. If, in his remorse and desperation, he had stayed where he was after coming to his senses, the lost younger son would not have received the father’s forgiveness and reconciliation. That would not have been repentance.

In the NT, the Greek word that is translated into English as repentance refers to not just a response of remorse over sin, but to a turning of our hearts, our minds and our wills, to God in a way that results in a permanent change in our behaviour, as this younger son did in this story.

What Christ is teaching us here is that the first step we need to take to receive God’s salvation is repentance. Christ is teaching us here that our first indispensable response in our return to God has to be repentance.

In this story, the older son was angry with the father for accepting the younger son back home because it threatened his ownership of what was left of the estate.

Heb. 2:11 tells us that Christ is our older brother who is not ashamed to call us his brothers. In this story of the two prodigal sons, Christ is telling us that He was not just an elder brother who needed to go out into the next town to find us and bring us home, like the older brother in this story should have done.

Christ is telling us in this story that, instead, He is the true older brother who came all the way from heaven to earth to seek and to save us, at the cost of his life. On the cross, Christ, our true elder brother, was forsaken by the Father so that we could be received, forgiven, and completely accepted home by the Father.

In this story, Christ is saying, I am the true elder brother who lost everything so that both the lost younger brothers of this world in their rebellion, and the older brothers of this world, in their empty and arrogant religiosity, could be saved.

So, we can summarise our third S by saying that, the only way we can receive the salvation from sin that God offers to us through the gospel, is when we respond to the gospel with repentance and faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross for us.