I have been asked... REPEATEDLY! By my life-long buddy, Jake Potter, to record "on paper" (I guess "this" is paper in 2011) my life story... My testimony, if you will. It's a sermon I preach. It's a story that I tell... More than all that, It's a nightmare that God has turned into a dream that became reality that I've lived. To you... It's words. For my family and I it's: hopes, heartbreaks, disappointments, and Divine providence. It's my life.
My story runs eerily parallel with another story. One the Master Storyteller, Jesus, communicated probably on a hillside somewhere near Jerusalem to a gangload of people. He started like this, "A certain man had two sons..." Most people dive right over this verse into the meat of the text. Not me! The story, of course, begins and ends with the father. The entire point of Jesus' story that day was to display the love of the father. We can't properly understand the love of the father until we see the son(s)! Unless you are a parent there is no way to fully grasp the hopes, dreams, goals, aspirations, love, and desires that a parent has for their child. The boys would carry the "family name", they are the embodiment of everything this father ever hoped and prayed for.
In a series of seven steps we will see how a father's love is crushed, hope is restored, and family is reconciled.
I. Son Full of Self:
To assume or say that the Father of Luke 15 was to blame for the prodigals' rebellion would be a massive dismantling of the text. The father in this parable is perfect! He is representative of our perfect Father God. To say that the son's rebellion is acceptable is also wrong... However, we live in a world whose shalom was fractured and broken in Genesis 3 with the fall of man, and Romans 8 tells us that the whole world groans because of sin. So this is where I separate from the text some to say, "Let's step away into '2011' and at least glance at what may be leading kids to rebellion..."
For me, life as a "PK" was GREAT! I loved ministry! I loved chillin' at the church as a kid! I loved Christian education! I was a happy-go-lucky kid! I remember like it happened last night. I must have been 11, or 12 at the oldest. It was a Friday night of our annual TCA basketball tournament. My body was changing, and no adult leadership was talkin' to me about it... I mean, we're to be "simple concerning evil", right?! A boy, over 3 years older than me began to talk to me about girls, body parts, and sex... The pleasure centers of my body, and brain were exploding. My imagination running wild! He was a family friend we had known all of our lives, he invited me to spend the night. My shalom was shattered in a night! Raped, abused, molested, sodomized all night long... And, this continued for a year or more. The light switch was thrown! My soul became a black hole of anger, bitterness, disappointment, SHAME! I wouldn't whisper what happened for over 16 years.
We know the prodigal son was rebellious! We know that in essence he was saying that he wished this perfectly loving father would, "drop dead". When we see people in rebellion do we ever stop to consider what led them to that place? With abuse on the rise, divorce at astronomical levels, and increased pressure on kids, especially Christian kids, to be adult-like in their living and decision making I'm never surprised anymore to see kids becoming more and more... Full of self!
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