That sigh was a good sigh. Just so you know, so good to be with you this morning. It’s been such an honor to be a part of your community for the last few years, and to occasionally get a chance to bring the scripture to you and, alex and Aaron invited me to be a part of this brief series and special privilege because this particular passage in Luke 15 has become so radically important to me and to so many others.

If you could see. where my Bible, it’s just falling apart in this passage because I have been in this text and preached this text in several different contexts, literally around the world, so many times. And also this little book that we’ve been referring to occasionally, The pictures that you’ve been seeing have come from this book by Henry now on a Catholic priest who wrote a book called the return of the prodigal son.

I’ve read this book seven times. So you can tell it’s an important story in my journey. The question would be why? Why is this story so radically important to so many people, including myself? And it’s basically this, that Luke 15 Of all the stories that Jesus tells, and of course, he was a parable teller, so he told many.

Of all the stories that Jesus tells, this is where Jesus most profoundly tells us in living color. It’s just rich and layered with meaning and emotion what our God is like. It’s been affectionately called, as Alex, I think, said a few weeks ago the parable of the prodigal son. But as we’ll see in just a moment, it’s not primarily about sons and daughters.

It’s not primarily about us and how we are to him. It’s primarily about how he is with us. So there’s a reason why that matters so much. And it’s simply this because what most impacts our lives is not our circumstances, but the love of the one or the ones that we are attached to. If you ever have been to a therapist or if you listen to some good therapists on a podcast, or if you read therapists, you’ll know that there’s five or six things that we know that children need from their parents in order to thrive.

And the first one on everyone’s list is a child needs to be able to attach to a parent that is attuned to them. Hopefully both a mom and a dad. And if there’s not a mom or dad, it might be a grandparent or another caregiver. That’s the most important thing in terms of determining how their lives are going to go.

And so with kids, we intuitively look for a dad or a mom to attune to. That’s what our brains are looking for when we literally come out of the womb. The same is true in our spiritual life. This is one of the reasons why Jesus tells stories like this. It’s one of the reasons why he’s constantly telling us in the gospels that he loves us, showing us images of how he loves us by the way he loves folk in the first century.

It’s why he’s always telling us he’s with us. He’s going to be with us always, even to the end of the age. It’s why he shares in some of his most important last words. Before he went to glory, he shares, Make your home in my love. I want you to be with me. I want you to attune to me. I want you to attach to me.

This is so important that I’ve come to believe that all the enemy needs to do is distort God’s image in our journey, and he’s got us. In fact, that’s exactly what happened in Genesis three. You remember what the serpent said? Did God really say that? In other words, he doesn’t come out the front door with some huge temptation.

He simply invites Adam and Eve to question God’s character, what they knew about him. In Genesis 2 25 when they were surrounded by his love, and it says the text says they were naked and not ashamed. They were absolutely flourishing and safe in the love of God, and all the enemy had to do was to get them to question God’s identity, and he had them.

It’s interesting that over the years, as I have read commentaries and taught and then talk to folk about and listen to their comments about Luke 15, how most of the time, it seems like we tend to go toward agonizing about which of the sons that we are, if you’re a daughter, you extrapolate that this could have been a daughter, which of the kids we are and how we cannot be like them.

And if we can, how we can do better than they did, how we can basically be a better son or a better daughter for the father. I think that’s because again, our image of the father has become so subtly distorted that we tend to not even see him in, in, in his bigness. In this parable, we tend to see us and our faults and our wounds and our behavior patterns that might be uncomfortable for him or displeasing to him when really all that Jesus is trying to say in this story.

It’s not about how we are to him. He wants to just tell us how even in our darkest hour, this is how your God is to you and to us. As we take a look at the father in this story, because we’ve already taken a look at the older brother and the younger brother in the last two weeks. As we take a look at the father in this story, and can I just invite you into these three invitations, even when you go home.

Forward in your study, the prodigal son, three invitations. As we, we studied a little bit this morning. The first one is I want you to pay attention to how counterintuitive the father’s actions are toward his wayward kids. There’s going to be some things we’re going to say, and you’re just going to go, that can’t be true.

That’s absolute nonsense. That’s not how a father, any kind of a father, good or not so good would act toward his sons or his daughters. But I want you to pay attention to the fact that no one less than the second person of the Trinity, Jesus, the eternal son says, in spite of our misgivings, in spite of the counterintuitive ways, this story is going to come to us, he says, this is who our God is like.

I want you to also notice how our own past experiences impact how we tend to see the Father in our present. There’s an invitation, I think there’s an invitation in the whole book, quite frankly, but especially maybe in this story, there’s an invitation to pay attention to how some woundedness from our own past with caregivers that We were trying to attach to in some way, and they were maybe in their own brokenness trying to attach to us, but it just didn’t work out.

In fact, we were deeply wounded. There’s an invitation here to do some healing work and to maybe learn that the father in this story is not like our caregivers in our past, especially those who wounded us most deeply. The other day when I was just laboring over this text one more time, and honestly, I was thinking about you.

You’re not an audience to me. You are my brothers and sisters. You are God’s sons and daughters. And so I was thinking about my brothers and sisters, and this is what I I just wrote it in a stream of consciousness. If I was talking to you, I might say along alongside this invitation, I don’t know why your earthly father or your earthly mother or some other caregiver or some other coach or some other pastor figure or whatever that you were trying to attach to.

I don’t know why they did not love you well, but it wasn’t about. You, they were broken, but the father, God, your father, I can tell you what he’s like, and he’s not focused on your performance. In fact, he’s in love with you. He can’t stop thinking about you. All he wants is to hold you in his arms and smother you with kisses of compassion and gift you with gifts.

He just wants you home, not to control you, but so that you can be free.

And so as you pay attention to how your past, my past, how it impacts our experience of this story, I’m also going to invite you to allow yourselves to feel this story. We’re incredibly addicted to our left brain in Western Christianity and have been since the age of enlightenment. So we tend to approach the scripture first with analysis.

What are the meanings of the words? How does this story fit in with the other parts of the biblical literature where a particular author writes? What does this paragraph mean? We tend to focus on our left brain, but here’s the deal. The way our brains are wired, we sense. Before we make sense. We are feeling this text if we’ll allow ourself to, because our brain meets it with our emotion first, and then we make sense of what we’re feeling.

What we know about our wounds in our brain is this, that false beliefs about God often are embedded in our experience. And because those false beliefs are embedded in our experience, they can’t just be healed by words. They have to be healed by a counter experience to that wound. That’s one of the reasons why Jesus told this very deeply moving story is so we could feel the Father.

I’m going to invite you to lay aside your analysis for a moment and enter into your story as it engages emotionally with this story. As this is one parable divided into three sections. We’ve already talked about it, at least in passing, the shepherd that loves the lost sheep goes to find him.

The woman who lost some of her money to literally buy her bread. She went to find that one lost coin. And now we’re talking about a father in this last section of this parable that so loves his sons. And it’s interesting. The word love is never. in the text, but the father’s love is everywhere. Sometimes like even when I’m saying over the years of my marriage, I love you to my wife.

I’m aware sometimes that my words don’t have much meaning unless she has felt my love in her experience. So here, God doesn’t have to inspire Jesus, his son. To use the words love, he’s saying, tell them about who I am so they can experience my love. And so this is about a father who loves his son so much that he pursues them with undying passion, no matter what.

So here’s what I’d like to share. Number one, first of all, and there’s so much, there’s so much. I will go home today and beat myself up this afternoon, likely. Because I will think of two more things I really needed to share about this. So you pray for me when I go home today, because that’s what I’ll tend to do.

Pray that I can hear my own message here. All right. Feel this story myself. God is a loving father who gives us freedom. This is so counterintuitive. That gives us freedom to not love him back. Now, without retelling the whole story, you’ve got to know this younger son wants his dad dead. In the ancient Near East, when you said, give me my inheritance before the father was gone, he was said, go kill yourself, which would have been unbelievable.

You couldn’t have been a worse son as we start comparing ourselves in this story as the father loves these sons and you go they weren’t as bad as me. You have no idea how bad this son was in the ancient Near East. And then, of course, you’ve got this older son who is whiny, self absorbed, and ungrateful, and disrespects his father in ways that have been so unacceptable in the ancient Near East.

So a modern father, let alone an ancient Near Eastern father, would have been expected to reject them immediately. But he does not. And now, and so beautifully points out in this book, That it’s the reason he doesn’t reject it. The fact that he accepts them comes at the cost of his own suffering. And so when you look at this painting by Rembrandt, who had, by the way, by this time in his life, he had lost three of his Children and lost a wife.

So he had gone through a lot of pain himself. His earlier renditions of this story were not like this here now in comments that Rembrandt, probably out of his own pain, paints the picture of a father whose eyes are almost blind. And you can tell the creases on his forehead. You can tell how he looks down and humility and passion.

With grief, with his tender hands on his younger son’s shoulder. You might say these sons needed to be punished. The father knew they had already been punished enough in their own spirit. You talk about eating pig food. Are you kidding me? When he lost everything and the older brother was so jacked up inside of himself, so miserable inside, they didn’t need punishment.

They needed a father who would grieve with them. Who would come close to them, even in the rebellion, and feel their pain.

Amen, sister. Or brother.

I know because I know people and I know me. So many of us live with an intense fear that we will do something at some point that will force God’s hand to reject us.

Or we’ll do a certain thing too many times. He would say the first 20 are fine, but number 21, I’m done. And Jesus tells this story, my brothers and sisters, to shout, never. He’s the kind of father that is so filled up with your wounds in himself. Really, a foreshadowing of the cross. This story is a foreshadowing.

These broken hearted eyes are foreshadowing of the Christ who will take our wounds into himself on the cross. Our God is a father whose love is so deep. It is never contingent upon our behavior.

For those of you who know I’m a father, you were waiting for me to bring up my little girls. And on the left, Oh, that picture, man, I look like a GQ. Not really. I don’t know why that color. I don’t know why I wore those shorts. I have no idea. What was I thinking? I was a fairly intelligent guy. I had a master’s degree by this point, but and you can see our little girls.

Two of which attend here. One of my daughters, it lives in Boulder and will come every once in a while, but we’ve just been, this is soldier field. The parking lot across the street is the Chicago aquarium. It’s a beautiful place to go and they all had their little orcas or whatever. Leanne, I’m not sure what you have.

I think you have an otter there. And then over here on the other side is my 70th birthday, just a couple of months ago. And we added a fourth daughter there. As you can see, actually, that’s my wife. There is nothing they could ever do. Nothing. They could flip me off, tell me they never want to talk to me again. They could disrespect me publicly. They could steal the few pennies we have in our bank account. There is nothing they could do. To make me not love them. In fact, it’s not that when they were little, I’m human that certain points in time with their behavior that I didn’t act out because again, I’m human.

I’m not God the father. But when I was in my best moments, I was just there with them, no matter what they were doing to me. Because with a good father, it’s never about what the child is doing. It’s about who the father is. I might have told you this story, but I can remember when we went into middle school with Leanne in the sixth grade, she walked in, she got overwhelmed, and she just collapsed on the floor and said, I can’t do this.

And again, this wasn’t an error on her part, it was just where she was. But instead of me making it about me, it was one of my good moments as a father. What I did is I got down with her on the floor and I just held her.

Because that’s what the father, that’s what a good father is like. That’s the picture that we just showed. That’s a picture of a father that allows us to reject his love and feel the pain in his own self of us rejecting that love. In fact, he’ll feel it until we choose to come home. Secondly, God is a loving father who sees us and pursues us no matter what.

Over the years as a pastor, I pastored 35 years, three different parishes, and even now with my work with pastors, our work as a non profit with pastors, I can tell sometimes when I’m looking, I’ve looked into many eyes of many young men and women, older men and women, I like to look right into their eyes.

To feel the love that I have for them, channeling the love the Father has for them. And I’ve noticed over the years how difficult it is for many folks to engage my eyes. And I believe it’s because so many of us have never felt seen with eyes of love, which the therapists say that’s our greatest need, to feel seen, safe, soothed, and secure.

Starting with seen, to feel seen, not categorized, not marginalized, not judged, not looked through, not looked over, but literally seen. If you read the gospels, Jesus saw folk. And then at the end of his life, he said, if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father. He’s trying to say, this is how the father is. He sees us.

Notice. When he was still a great way off, his father saw his son and began to race to him. The father, in spite of the rejection of the younger son, never stopped checking the picture window for a glimpse of his son coming home. Never. He was seeing his son in his mind’s eye from the moment he left until the moment he came home.

And then the older brother, I’ve paraphrased verse 28 because it doesn’t actually say when the father saw, but the reason the father came outside of the party that he was hosting for his younger son is because when he got into the party, all he wanted to see was his older son. And when he couldn’t see the older son he had a sense of panic.

And so he ran outside the party to look and gaze, to see if he could see his son, who he couldn’t see inside of the party. He had all kinds of dignitaries there. Everybody important in that area would have been there. He didn’t see any of them. He was just looking for his son,

man. I see my girls now, even when I’m not in their presence to see them. I can’t get them out of my mind.

And if I could go back to when they were little, when they had those little, the orca and the, that other little furry animal in their arms, I’ve come to believe that what I would do is I would just stare.

I would just gaze at them because they’re my girls. I love them so much. I would just look. I would hope they would look up at one point and see my eyes looking at them because they would sense, they would feel that my eyes were looking at them, not with judgment, but with deep love.

Many of us don’t feel seen today. And if we do feel seen, we feel seen with eyes of disappointment, maybe sometimes even disgust. This parable says right now he’s looking at you. I don’t want you to be creeped out. I want you to feel the warm gaze of your Abba toward you, no matter where you came from last night, no matter where your head is this morning, no matter where you’ve been living, He sees you.

He’s gazing upon you with His fatherly eyes of love, but He doesn’t just see us. He takes the initiative. Some of our families of origin, we always had to go back to repair. If there was a rupture, we had to go back, but this father, he’s always moving toward us envision that the father coming outside of the party, almost frantically looking for the older brother and envision this father.

You I’ve shown you this picture before, I’m sure, but this is the context for this picture. Envision the father who. sees the sun coming back up over the hill toward the city or the town where they lived. And he begins to run, pursue, to run toward his younger son. And in fact, the Greek word here for run could be translated race.

In fact, it was used by Paul, used by ancient Greek authors of the races, the foot races that were run in the ancient Greek stadiums. And what you have to know is that a father in the ancient Near East culturally would never, ever even walk fast. He would certainly never run. It would have been absolutely unacceptable and absolutely undignified.

He would have to pick up his robes and they would see his legs. Which would have been scandalous. This guy was a landowner. Obviously he had money. He was the key figure in the town, but he basically says, who cares about my dignity? I care about my son. So he begins to bear his own shame running toward his son.

And you might say, but why just because he sees them? Yes, that would have been enough, but there’s something else. And we learned this by anybody that has written about the ancient near East. I commend this book to you, the cross and the prodigal by a man who spent, I don’t know, four decades in the ancient near East.

Unpacking the Jesus life in cultural context. And he says there was a tradition in that day called Kizasa and it meant to cut off. So if a Jewish young man squandered his family’s inheritance. With Gentiles, with non Jews, and then dared to try to come home. The community, if they got wind of it, would meet him at the city limits and they would take a symbolic pot and they would cry Kazasa and they would throw that pot on the rocks and shatter it and they would cry so and so Kevin is cut off.

Aaron is cut off. Peter is cut off. In that moment, that son would bear the shame of what he had done to that father into that community by proxy. He would become a non person. He would have no identity. He would have no home. So the deeper reason why this father is running is because and bearing his own shame in the running is that he is racing to the city gates to get in front of the Kazzazza shame bearing ceremony to take on his son’s shame before his son had to take it on for himself again.

foreshadowing of the cross.

I want you to feel this. I want you to allow yourself to drink this in because I know that for many of us, whether it’s at the, in the workplace, in a marriage, sometimes as children, when there was rupture in the relationship, We would feel like we had to run some kind of gauntlet of shame to get back toward the person that apparently we had offended.

And we, I can envision dads and coaches and pastors. I can envision myself doing that at my worst when I was a young dad with our arms like this saying, give me what you got and I’ll see if I want to forgive you. And here’s what I want you to hear. That is not forgiveness. Our God is running toward us, no matter where we find ourselves or how many times we found ourselves there.

He is already running toward us to bear our shame and to begin the process of bringing us home. To his heart. I want you to feel this that obviously we’ve been taught here and we’ve been taught philosophically in church history and whatnot. We’ve been taught that our hearts are longing to be home with our God, our father, but he longs to be home with us.

We are. He is not just our home. We are his home.

This is the story of the scripture him racing after us. to come and be with us in the wilderness. He said, I’m going to live in this little tent, this tabernacle. And then they built a temple so he could live there in the midst of his people. And then the incarnation, God wanted to be with us, to be in us, his home so much that he came in Christ.

And then when Jesus left, he said, I’m going to send the Holy Spirit to be in you. And then we’re called the body of Christ. He literally lives within us because we are his home. Revelation 21, the end is not about us going to be with him, but I saw a new Jerusalem coming down. God will now be with his people again.

The whole story, my brothers and sisters, is about God loving us toward up to so much that he never stops pursuing us. He’s always coming toward us. Because we too, we’re, he’s not just our home, but he, we are his now and said something that I don’t think I saw the first seven times I read the book, how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of a God who is hiding out and making it as difficult as possible for me to find him.

And have you ever felt that? But instead, he’s the one who is looking for me while I’m the one doing the hiding. Here’s the question for this morning. It’s not a test. It’s just a question. Can you accept that you’re worth looking for?

Can you accept it made up a broken dad like myself never stops thinking about his daughters? And when he gets near them, he sees them. They don’t know this probably, but almost always when I walk in and see them again, I get tears in my eyes, but I don’t want them to see that. Cause I don’t want it to be about me in that moment.

If a dad like me can feel that way about my daughters, could God, the father who was infinitely full of love, feel that way. about you.

Could you begin to feel this morning that the God that Jesus is talking about simply desires to be with you

right now, wherever you are, no matter how many times you have been there, he sees you with his love and he’s already on his way. He’s already on his way. He’s running. He’s racing, bearing the shame of pulling up his robes, coming outside the party where he would have been expected to be the host. Why is that guy leaving?

What a loser he’s coming toward us to take our shame on himself so he can get his arms around us and begin to bring us home.

And then thirdly, God is a loving Father who doesn’t just see us and pursue us. He always pursues us with compassion. There’s another place that we’re very familiar with in Scripture that because I think of maybe a bad translation, this would be my opinion. I took two years of Hebrew. Who am I to say what’s a bad translation?

But I think this is a bad translation. Psalm 23, the very last line, which can become a throwaway line, right? Surely, goodness and mercy will follow you, will race after you all of your life. And I’m hopeful to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. That’s a teaching poetic way of describing what’s happening here in this parable.

Surely goodness, goodness is a good translation for the Hebrew word Tov, which is about being good, goodness. But the second word translated mercy is, you’ve heard this talked about many times from this stage, the word Chesed. Which means loyal love. It’s a love that pursues, that is not dependent upon anything that we do, but simply pursues because it comes from a God who is infinitely in love with us.

Surely, goodness and chesed will run after you all the days of your life so that he can bring you home, so you can dwell in his house forever. This is such an emotional scene. It’s so emotional that I couldn’t even find a good picture. I went into the, I went on the Internet, which I’m not. I was going to call it the interweb.

I went on the Internet. Not really. I’m not quite that bad to find an image. Couldn’t find it. And my wife and I just finished up Ted Lasso, and I don’t know what you think of Ted Lasso. There’s Man, I grew up in a locker room and I’ve never heard so many F bombs as I heard in Ted Lasso that I would, there were times when I was like, stop, but if you can believe this, in my view, there’s a whole lot of Jesus in Ted Lasso.

And so there’s that one character, Nate the Great who is a little, he’s a guy that puts out the towels and they elevate him to be a coach. And then he betrays Ted and his coaching staff. And it’s this man, it’s his story. And then that scene where, especially where his assistant coach is called the Beard goes to find Ted or goes to find Nate the Great.

And Nate the Great’s what are you doing here? Are you going to beat me? Are you going to, in fact, I think he even says, hit me. You need to hit me. And the Beard, this coach just embraces this little guy, just buries him in his love. And I got teared up because I thought, that’s God. That’s the story. The only other thing I thought about doing, and I looked at the stage and I thought, can I, yeah, I think I can do it.

I thought, I want to show you what this feels like. And I was looking around for some brothers that I might be able to say, will you let me embrace you? And would you let me embrace you? I’ve embraced you before. Would you mind if I embraced you now? No, you shouldn’t be him. Would he mind if I embraced him?

You wouldn’t mind. Are you saying no, don’t embrace me, or you wouldn’t mind if I embrace you? Could you give your sweet wife your Bible and just let me stand up here with me for a minute? Man, he’s got a big old Bible. There you go. Thank you, my brother. This is what it’s like.

And then he kisses him. And then you know how men are. It’s about time to let go, right?

Thanks. Love you. Love you too. Thanks, my brother. Pray for me. Okay, I made it. That’s it.

When look, I don’t know you, but many of us have never been hugged like that by a human, ever, last decade. Maybe never by our parents. I don’t know.

When our God sees us, he begins to run after us, passionately racing because he has such deep compassion. And for those of you who know the Greek word splant, that’s this word compassion. It means he has a gut ache. That word is used in non religious or non philosophical terms of just having a stomach ache, man, like a gut ache, something you feel deep in your gut, in this part of your being.

So when God sees us in our pain of running or stonewalling outside the party,

We expect anger. We expect him to be holding out. We expect punishment, but instead he feels a deep ache for us. And in the moment we would expect to go like this. He has caught up with us and he is taking us in his arms and smothering us with kisses. Again, now in comments, his compassion comes from letting the sons, the sins of his Children pierce his heart.

We expect to be punished, but, and yes, God can feel anger. Love can feel anger in behalf of God’s children. He cannot, but love in our relationships today, we can feel, but always underneath the anger is deep grief and compassion. And Jesus tells this story, no mention of anger to let us know. That this is God’s primary way as our father of responding to us, no matter what we’ve done, no matter how many times we’ve done it.

This is his primary movement toward us. He sees us because he never takes his eyes off us. And immediately he begins to feel an ache for us because we’re not home. And he knows we’re aching in our lives, we’re acting out because we’re not home. We’re filled up with our religious stuff, but we’re not happy because we’re not home.

We’re acting out in our addictions, but we’re not fulfilled because we’re not home. And instead of planning to discipline us, he is moving toward us to discipline us. Take us in his arms and to begin to heal us by allowing us to experience his love. It’s fascinating to me that he does not preach a sermon to his younger or his older son.

How many times when we get with a believer or a nonbeliever in pain, we got to preach.

Preaching, talking. Doesn’t really do much for the deepest anguish in our hearts, but this can. So here’s what I want to say to you today, as we wind this down, God is not mad at you.

He’s not mad at you.

You may have flipped him off recently. He’s not mad at you. It’s not about you. It’s about who he is. It’s not about you getting it right. It’s about who he is. And how he feels toward you, and he’s not just tolerating you. I know I felt this so much when I was a kid. God bless my mom and dad. They did the best they could with what they had.

But so often I felt like I was living on the edge because I was being tolerated instead of seen and embraced. He is not tolerating you. By the way, the worst thing you can do is compare yourself with another son or daughter. Look how comparison works for the older brother. God never compares. He never compares.

You know what I secretly, now it won’t be a secret, what I tell my daughters when I’m with them alone, don’t tell your sisters, but you’re my favorite. I think now it’s gotten to be a joke, because here’s what they know, they’re all my favorites. I don’t compare them. I don’t think Leanne did it this way, so Andrea needs to, but maybe Caroline will come.

No, they are individual daughters of mine and Carla’s. I take them right where they are. And I do not tolerate them. I delight in them, even in their worst moments. And that’s how God feels about you and me. That’s how he feels. That’s how he feels. And you say, but you don’t know what I’ve done. You don’t know what I’ve done.

And you don’t really understand how bad these two sons are in that context, in that cultural context. And in fact, a couple of chapters later, we got Luke 23 with Jesus on the cross, left next to a brigand who’s, he doesn’t even have a name. He was at the lowest rung of Roman society, probably a murderer.

And without him doing one religious thing, Jesus looks at him and says, today, you’ll be with me in paradise. It’s not about what you’ve done. It’s about who he is.

And by the way, you can’t miss. That all he wants to do is throw us a party. If you go through this parable and it’s three sections, the word joy or rejoice is used nine times.

And then he’s just, he’s throwing gifts all over the place. And if we could have time, we’d do a study of the gifts that he gives the son. They’re all about identity. The greatest gift that God gives us when we let him come close and embrace us in our stuff is he gives us the gift of reminding us that more than anything else, we are his beloved son.

We are his beloved daughter. He gives us the gift of our identity. where we can stand, where we can, as though as the world blows and the shame comes at us and we screw up again the 47, 000 time in that one area, we can stand in the gifts of identity that he gives us. He is our father. It’s not about what we do.

It’s about who he is to us. Finally I forgot that, didn’t I? But I told you about it. Finally, we’re called to become the father to other lost sons and daughters.

Man,

everyone you’re gonna meet today outside these walls and many of us inside these walls. You know what we’re looking for? The father.

And the plan is that for You and me, as we receive this love, this unconditional love,

it begins to change everything.

I don’t have time to get into my story, but I was a dutiful. I was more the older brother than the younger son. And I was dutiful to the age of 36. And then I crumbled and I wanted to kill myself. And then the father, he was already on his way. He was already on his way, and he wrapped me up and whispered his love to me.

And in the times I’ve screwed around since, he keeps on chasing me down, keeps on giving me that compassion and those kisses and those gifts of identity.

It changes everything. It’s changed everything in my life. The far country will fight it until we get home to glory, but it loses. It’s a lot of its attraction,

the duty that calls us be dutiful begins to lose its attraction. When we receive this love, our eyes begin to be open to other sons and daughters around us looking for that love. And what begins to happen inside of us is all we want to do is help them find their way to his arms and to home.

We become the father as we receive his love and affection. We become him pouring ourselves out. Listen, no strings, no labeling, no judgment, no sermonizing, not because we’re trying hard, but because we are overwhelmed with the love that is ours from his heart to us. All we’re about is seeing and pursuing.

With deep love and compassion, sons and daughters who are looking for him. We move toward them and help love them home.

I’m going to close with this short video. It’s some of you will immediately recognize Oprah Winfrey, of course, but you will also recognize Maya Angelou’s. Many of you will. Here was a woman who became known for her writing, her poetry, her just an unbelievable human being. But she was a member of a Baptist church in South Carolina for 35 years.

She was abandoned. She was abused. And she tells us in two minutes right now, I, I thought, how can I close this? Maya Angelou tells us in two minutes what happens to us when we allow, in spite of all of our wounds, when we begin to heal and receive the love. that changes everything for us and brings us home.

Take a listen.