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In Christ, Mark
In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy
word.
“After he had spent
everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be
in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who
sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the
pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.”
Luke 15:14-16
This ends
today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
There are consequences
to living a life separate from the Lord’s will. Millions upon millions of
people can testify to this truth and I am counted in this number.
Here’s my story.
I was married young in
life, perhaps too young, but I fell in love with a hometown sweetheart and we
had two beautiful daughters together. I started out working wherever I could to
support my family but none of the jobs were steady enough to where we had
security and so I decided to join the Navy. It was a move that I thought was
right and it was difficult as we uprooted and moved to northern Illinois in the
dead of winter, then Georgia in the dead of summer, before heading far west to
California and my first duty station. We settled in there but then ended up
moving across country again to southeastern Virginia where I would report to my
first ship. I had found a lot of success professionally and we seemed to be
doing pretty well as a family, at least that’s what I thought. Hindsight being
20-20, I was missing the overall big picture while absorbed in my career. I was
living outside of the Lord and had not been the Christian spiritual leader for
my family.
Such was the consequence
of doing my own thing and trying to lead my life on my own. In yesterday’s
devotion, we saw where this left the prodigal son broke, having squandered all
the wealth he had been given by his father. In my life, I squandered the thing
I should have valued the most: my family.
You see, my wife wearied
of me not treating her as I should have and so she looked for someone who would
and that person lived next door to us. I remember how devastated I was when I
learned this was happening just before I was to go to sea for six weeks. It
would be the last time I would be together as that family again. When I
returned from sea, she was living next door with my daughters. I can’t tell you
how much that hurt and it led me into the darkest time of my entire life, a
darkness I would walk through for three years.
That’s a long time to be
at rock bottom but the good news is that I didn’t stay there forever. More on
that tomorrow as I will continue this testimony but for now I want to turn
attention back to Jesus’ parable and how circumstances led the prodigal son to
hit rock bottom himself. Look again at these words here:
“After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole
country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a
citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to
fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him
anything.” Luke 15:14-16
You’ll recall from
yesterday that this younger son had gained quick wealth after asking his father
for an inheritance before the father had even died. The father honored the
request and the son took off with his share of the money to a foreign land and
blew it all on what the scriptures called “wild living”. We can only guess what
that must have looked like in New Testament times because there are no details
given but the point was that the son quickly squandered his entire entitlement.
And as we see in today’s
passage, that wasn’t such a good idea.
We know this because the
younger son had no more squandered all his money that a “severe famine” hit the
entire country he had gone to. Without money to support himself, the now-impoverished
son began to be in need. And so he decided to go to work.
Scripture tells us
through the parable that the son went out to a “citizen of that country” and “hired
himself out.” His job was to go out into the fields and feed the employer’s
pigs, pigs that were eating better than he was. For without income, the son
found himself incredibly hungry, so much so that he would have been willing to
eat the pods the pigs were being fed. He would have even welcomed a simple
handout from someone, anything to put into his empty stomach but “no one gave
him anything.”
The son had wanted to
dictate the terms of his life. He asked for his share of the inheritance. He
left his father and older brother to go elsewhere and flaunt his riches,
emptying his money coffers in short order. And now he found himself unable to
dictate much of anything. At rock bottom, now he was desperate for anyone to
take pity on him and help.
So what would he do? How
would he resolve to get out of his rock bottomness?
Maybe you’re reading
this and are on rock bottom right now in your life. If not, maybe you know
someone else who is.
Stay tuned because we’ll
see in tomorrow’s devotion how it often takes someone to bottom out in life
before they turn to the only One who can lift them out of their circumstances.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.
Send any prayer requests to OurChristianWalk@aol.com
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