“Our Prodigal God”
- Losing Things
- I lose things all the time
- One of the worst things ever, is to lose your keys
- Always happens when you’re running late
- Natalie put in a key holder near the entrance to the door, saves my bacon more days than I’d care to admit.
- Feeling when lost things are found?
- Fantastic, isn’t it?
- Lostness
- Today we’re going to talk a lot about being lost.
- Sometimes we think that the lost people are the skid row bums and the prostitutes and the ilk
- And they’re lost
- But sometimes, so are we
- Today, we get the story of not One but TWO lost brothers
- Only one of them gets found though.
- Read the Passage
- Story – The Far Country
- Randy didn’t want to find himself lost
- He started life like any kid but, according to him, he got full of himself
- Then he got into drugs
- Next thing you know, Randy robbed three convenience stores with a gun and is sentenced to 12 years in the penitentiary.
- I met him doing Kairos
- He talks so powerfully about being lost but what’s interesting is if you take the details out of it, the emotions he describes, well, we all understand
- You may never have been strung out on drugs or robbing stores, but if you’ve lived a few years on this side of eternity, you know exactly what it’s like to feel lost
- IT’s a feeling that nobody is watching and that worse, nobody cares
- It’s feeling that because nobody is watching and that nobody cares, you can do whatever you want
- Seems like it’ll be freeing
- No morality
- No ethics
- No rules
- But living that way? It only amplifies your loneliness as life becomes a collection of hangers on and half-hearted friends who can’t be counted on.
- In that self-manufactured isolation from others as well as God, we become inclined to selfishness
- The selfishness is what dooms us.
- Every one of us travels to the far country on occasion
- Where is the Far country?
- I always think of it as being Vegas
- After all, there’s sin aplenty to be found there!
- Everything the younger brother was after
- Sex, gambling, the bright lights of the big city.
- But it doesn’t have to be Vegas
- It Could be North Carolina, it could be Charlotte, heck, the far country can and is on occasion no further away from us than Coulwood.
- The fact of the matter is the far country is wherever we are when we’re travelling without God.
- That’s what the Younger Brother wanted to do. He KNEW IT AND EVEN TOLD HIS DAD.
- Everything the younger brother was after
- After all, there’s sin aplenty to be found there!
- I always think of it as being Vegas
- Seems like it’ll be freeing
- You may never have been strung out on drugs or robbing stores, but if you’ve lived a few years on this side of eternity, you know exactly what it’s like to feel lost
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