When I participated in a spiritual parenting class at my church, we were challenged to come up with a mission statement for our family. It took years for it to be revealed, but I finally settled on Be All God Created You To Be! When I drop my girls off at school each morning, I encourage them to be all God created them to be, not who their peers pressure them to be or become. My prayer is that they discover their true identity in God and live up to who He created for them to be.
God uses our natural parental relationships to demonstrate the relationship He has with us. For some of us, that picture is not a good indication of how Our Heavenly Father would indeed love us, and in that case we must solely rely on His perfect love to embrace us and show us how He intended for that love to be.
Luke 15:11-32 gives us a clear picture of the Fathers perfect love for His children. This is the story of a wasteful or reckless son who abuses the love of his father by taking his portion of the inheritance and journeying into a distant country. By his lifestyle choices, he abandons all that he knows and makes an unwise choice to live recklessly.
It wasn’t until he becomes empty and without that he started to hurt. A bad famine arose and the prodigal son begins slopping pigs and would have eaten the pigs food, but wasn’t even afforded that luxury. Ever since he had become a citizen of that country, he was lost and in need of a Shepherd, someone to guide him.
This emptiness was necessary to bring him to his senses. He started to recall his father’s workers and how they were taken care of and he compared that to the poverty stricken state in the pig slop. The Bible states that when he had come to himself, his response was “I’m going home!” He left that alienated country and went home where he could become a servant to his father. And while he was still a way off, his father saw him, ran to meet him, embraced him with loving arms of mercy and kissed him with a kiss of love!
With a heart of repentance and sorrow, and declaring his unworthiness, the son confessed his sin against God and his father. While the son is in mid sentence, the father is busy telling the servants to prepare the feast in the sons honor! It was good enough to be welcomed home, but to be celebrated is the best–And the best is yet to come! What had been lost is now found! What had been considered dead is now alive! Everything that the father has now belongs to the son because he finally realized who he is!
Embrace the fact that you have royal DNA in your gene pool. You are a child of the King of Kings! As citizens of the kingdom, when we realize who we belong to, we receive all that belongs to the Father! Every promise and every blessing is now ours! He loves me and He loves you with an everlasting love!
Prayer Focus:
Father,
I repent for ever taking advantage of your grace and trying to do things my way. Thank you for keeping me even when I was in my mess. I was lost, empty, and without–and you found me from a distance. You embraced me with your loving arms of compassion and mercy and put a robe of righteousness on me! Help me to know that everything that belongs to you now belongs to me. I have found my place in you and I pray that you will always abide in me.
In Jesus name.
Amen.