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THE KING’S BUSINESS
ent o f God He lets us be, and thus learn the bitterness and folly o f it by experience. The boy did not go away from home at once, though his heart was already in “the far country.”/ So the man who has begun to wander in heart still keeps up some out ward semblance o f communion with God. “ Not many days after” he is gone. When the heart is already away, man will not long keep up his outward contact with God. “ The far country” is the land away from God, the world o f sin and' unbelief. It is a bad country to visit (Jer. 2:5, 13, 17-19; Ps. 72:27), Monday, January 27 . Luke 13 : 13 - 16 . The first thing the boy found in the far country was fun. Fun is the first fruit of sin. Some say there is no pleasure in sin, but the Bible says that there is pleasure in sin (Heb. 11:25). As some one has put it, “ The devil is not such a fool as to go fish ing without bait.” The pleasure o f sin is the devil’s bait by which he gets us to bite his hook. But there is always a hook in the devil’s bait, and if we bite the devil’s bait we will soon have the devil’s hook in our gills. The consequence o f the boy’s riotous pleas ure was poverty, “ he spent all” (Prov. 21:17; 23:19-21). “Want” followed close on the heels o f wrong pleasure. It always does. Not always temporal want, but there is deeper want than temporal want and intenser hunger than physical hunger—soul want and soul hunger. These always come to the soul away from God, for God alone can satisfy the soul o f man. In his “ want” he should have returned to his father at once, but man will not return to God until he has tried everything else (Jer. 5 :3 ; Isa. 1:5). So “he joined himself to a citizen o f that country.” He was only a sojourner in the far country, he did not belong there, the citizen did. W e next see him feeding hogs, the most degrading work a Jew could undertake. This part o f our Lord’s parable suggests both the debase ment and slavery that are the inevitable result o f sin. Here is a young man who might have been a son in his father’s house, in an ennobling, joyous, well-requited serv
ice, hog tender for a stranger, in degrading, ill-paid toil. That is the choice that every one who wanders from God makes. He becomes hog tender for the devil (cf. Deut. 28:47, 48). He would liked to have eaten the hogs’ husks but could not get even them. “And no man gave unto him.” Tuesday, January 18 . Luke 15 : 17 - 24 . The first step back was that he began to think. That is where salvation always begins, in thinking (cf. Ps. 119:59, 60). If we could only get people to thinking we would soon get them saved, but the average worldling is bound not to think. It is to be noted carefully what he thought about—his .own lot as compared with that o f his father’s hirelings. That is a good thing for any wanderer from God to think about. As a result o f that thinking “he came to him self”—an impenitent sinner is beside him self, a moral lunatic. From thinking he passed to resolving. That is the second step in sdlvation, “ I will.” The resolve was the correct one, “ I will arise and go to my father.” That'is the resolution for every sinner to make. He resolved to go with a confession o f sin, “I will say unto him, -father, I have sinned.” That is the only way for a sinner to come to God, with a confession on his, lips (Ps. 32:3-5; Prov. 28:13; 1 John 1:9; Luke 18:11-14). He came back with the hope o f being made a hired servant, but God is better than our highest hopes, he was made a “son.” He did not stop with resolving, “he arose and came.” Resolution that does not lead to action does not lead to salvation. The father was watching for the boy, “When he was yet a great way off his father saw him.” God is watching for the sinner’s return to, Himself. The boy had forgotten the father in the days o f profligacy, but the father had never forgotten him. W e forget God in the days o f our immersion in the world, but God never forgets us. The father “had compassion”.—that is God’s feeling toward the sinner in rags and hunger and with the ravages o f dissipation still upon him, re turning to Him. Furthermore, the father “ ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.”
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