On Orphans, Prodigals and Jesus

We seem to be in a phase of fairly deep ministry lately with needy people.

We've been running into many spiritual orphans- people who for one reason or another have issues with their biological fathers which lead to them being crippled spiritually. Being a spiritual orphan leaves people unable to accept God as their heavenly Father or to submit to the authority of others.

I've written about this here. In our experience, people either welcome this insight into their malady and move forwards rapidly to wholeness, or else they flee from it as fast as possible.

Today we had a visit from a young man whom we've been ministering to for a number of years. He goes through terribly destructive cycles of addiction. For a while, he pursues God, has a settled job and seems to be going OK. Then he stops coming to church for one reason or another, eventually gets into some form of addiction and then loses his job and money. He's now coming out of a particularly destructive phase which has seen him write off an expensive vehicle which was uninsured, lose his licence and generate thousands of dollars of fines. Like the Prodigal Son in the parable,his life is a mess and he is finally coming to himself. At the heart of his problem is a lack of a real father in his life. The cure is to become accountable to a more mature person who can help him through the financial and spiritual mess he has descended into.

For all of these people the problems are too big for human solutions. But they are not too big for the grace of God.