The Gospel of Compelling Grace (5)

“So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” (Luke 15:20)

When you try to start a new life, you feel that you have come too far. Falling into sin is a moment, and once you fall for it, you immerse yourself deeply in the world while compromising without realizing it. When you look back, you feel that you have come too far to go back.

‘Still a long way to go…’

The distance of the heart is farther than the distance on the earth. The moment you turn around and decide,

‘I have to live by the word of the Lord and by the law!’

but you realize that your existence is too far from God.

“Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” (Rome7:20-24)

This is the trouble in heart experienced by those who receive grace in the gospel and try to turn to leave the world behind and make a decision to live before the Lord.

Those people experience a situation where it seems like they went one step forward but then pushed back more steps, feeling like walking in the same place. After experiencing spiritual difficulties and shocks, it is difficult for them to recover and they feel very far from the gospel. They feel like truth and emotions of the wonderful gospel are not revived.

“I will return to my father!”

The son gets up from his seat and is on his way home, and surprisingly his father is looking at him at that moment, even though the son is still far away. To the prodigal son, it seemed like a long way to go alone, and he wondered how long it would take for him to get home. However, at the moment the prodigal son turns and takes direction, he encounters an unexpected and surprising situation.

No matter how far and how impossible it may seem, if you turn around, you will find yourself in an unexpected situation. When you are discouraged, and yet you have the only hope, the Lord, you are greeted with a one-sided gift from God that can only be explained as grace. Hallelujah!

After the curse of Adam, in the bitterness of history without hope, what we have always found is that man does not seek God, but that God seeks man. The fact that the father saw the son first indicates that the father was keep waiting and always looking for the son.

While we were going astray and turned to our own way forgetting the Father, the Lord laid on Jesus the iniquity of us all. (Please refer to Isaiah 53:6)

The Lord, who saw us and ran to us first, had compassion on us.

I was worried that he would run to kill me, but his eyes were different. Perhaps there were tears in his eyes. I felt pity for my father as he ran to me, not knowing what to do.

‘What would I do if father suddenly appeared with a cane? Should I ask him to listen to me for a moment even if I get beaten? Or, should I lie face down?’

The prodigal son would have thought and devised all kinds of things. However, the father runs and suddenly embraces the prodigal son. His father’s hot tears, dripping down, must have fallen on the shoulders of his son, who couldn’t lift his head. When he kissed his son with the unchanging love of the father, the heart of the father who loved his son with his heart would have been revealed.

Missionary Young-Ui KIM

(Itinerant Missionary Representative of LOG Mission)

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