Repentance is central to Christian preaching. Both John the Baptist and Jesus began their public ministries with calls to repent, and Jesus told his disciples after his Resurrection that “repentance and remission of sins should be preached.” Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son describes that son’s repentance. He fled home as sinners flee God, wasted his inheritance, and fell into misery. His folly was a kind of madness. Whole societies can go mad for a time. Both Naziism and communism were a kind of madness that stopped many from seeing the murderous truth about them. America’s sexual revolution has now been revealed as a source of misery in all sorts of ways, not liberation, but this madness still grips our society. Misery helped the son come to his senses so that he finally admitted what he knew to be true. Even the servants in his father’s house ate well. His father saw his son’s condition even more clearly. He was a lost son who was dead. The son went beyond remorse and regret to repentance. He decided to go home, and he rehearsed how he would confess his sin: he had sinned against heaven and against his father. And home he went, repentance and humble. What welcome would he get? Whatever harsh things he may have thought or said about his father when he left home, he knew his true character. He would be merciful. And so is our Father in heaven. In Christ, he calls to us to come home.
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Bill Edgar has been the pastor of the Broomall Reformed Presbyterian Church since 1981 and a teacher of mathematics at East High School in West Chester, Pennsylvania since 1980. He was graduated from Swarthmore College in 1968, attended the Reformed Presbyterian Theological...
