Home Is Where You Left It: The Three Gifts Of The Redeemed

Intro: We are living in a time of runaways. All around us we are hearing of cases of children and teenagers running away from home in search of the “good life”. We have adults that are packing up and leaving their families, marriages, and responsibilities behind to start a new life; all because the old life wasn’t meeting their needs. The church too has felt the blows from runaways; members and saints are leaving it all behind because they feel as if their needs are not being met by the Church and by God. All around us we are surrounded by runaways. Satan is convincing people that there is always a better way, one that is more gratifying than the latter. Today church I want to talk to you about “Home is where you Left It: The Three Gifts of the Redeemed”.

I. It starts when he wanted to be on his own.

A. The Prodigal Son is back drop for many sermons and scenarios. The text can be a type of the fall of man paralleling with the account in Genesis 3. But its most common use is that of a former child of God or son of the flesh leaving to join themselves in the World. It is this back drop I will use, but with a different angle added. That angle being what provoked this son to leave.

1. We are introduced to a father that has two sons. The younger decides one day that he wants to leave and go out on his own.

2. He is not leaving his father to cleave to a wife but rather to a new life and experiences.

3. Upon examining scripture the first thing that sticks out is that the younger son is the one that wants to leave. The young are always a type of inexperience, immaturity, and inpatients. The term youth refers to a condition of life as well as symbolic of one’s moral, spiritual and social state.

4. Such a young man was this Prodigal; full of life and zeal looking for adventure, willing to break tradition and taboos, breaking the restraints of his up bringing, in search for the “good life”.

5. This young man would take all that he had and leave in search for home.

B. Before we lay all the blame on his age lets examine a few possibilities in his thinking that would cause him to go to his father and ask for his portion.

a. This young man could have fought a battle with anger and frustration. A battle within him over his mind over who he was. This battle could have caused him to vent and become angry and frustrated.

I. Such anger and frustration could have resulted from a disagreement with his older brother.

II. This young man could have become a victim of living in his brother’s shadow.

III. He could have felt that he was never taken serious enough and that the older brother was always instructing him and giving him advice. Never giving him a chance to spread his wings.

IV. This advice and instructions could have been looked upon as the older brother being domineering and manipulative toward his younger brother. Instead of loving brotherly advice and instruction.

V. Fueling a rage of emotion within until the conclusion was made that the brother never wanted his younger brother to become more successful than he.

b. But maybe it was a disagreement with his father that started him on his journey from home.

I. Sometimes it is easy for a parent to favor one child over another. A parent may do this act without knowledge of there action, but they are sometimes fully aware of there actions.

II. Such was the case for Joseph in Genesis 37. He was loved more than his brothers because he was the first born of the wife that his father loved.

III. It was such favoritism that caused Joseph’s brothers to sell him into slavery and fake his death.

IV. Which ever the case may be within this young man there may have been an anger and frustration kindled against his father for not loving or spending equal time with him or what he felt was amply time.

c. Either or both of these scenarios could have been possible or it could have been a case of rebellion against his father’s rules.

I. The rules of his father could have been too much for this free spirit, a yoke to keep him from enjoying life, and all that it has to offer.

II. Within this mind these rules were nothing more than unobtainable values that were not in respect to the times in which he lived. These rules had there place long ago but were not for this time. They were nothing more than a reminder of what could never be.