Don’t worry about it.’Įinstein nodded appreciatively. It wasn’t there, so he looked in his briefcase but couldn’t find it. He couldn’t find his ticket, so he reached in his trouser pockets. When he came to the famous professor, Einstein reached into his vest pocket. The man had to lose everything before he could be rescued.Īlbert Einstein, the great physicist, was once traveling from Princeton on a train when the conductor came down the aisle, punching the tickets of every passenger. Eventually, the captain approached him and said the most miraculous thing: ‘We saw your smoke signal, and so we came.” He wondered if it was a mirage, because about a few hundred yards away, there was a ship, docked with sailors moving back and forth. Eventually his exhaustion gave into sleep.īut when he woke up, the strangest thing appeared to him. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he contemplated a bleak future. In a state of deep discouragement, the man sat on the beach contemplating death, wondering whether there was any hope left for him having lost everything. At this point he realized that not only had his shelter burned up, but all his tools as well. Lightning had apparently struck while he was trying to find food. One evening, as he completed his foraging campaign, he returned to see his shack in flames. Not wanting to miss any chance of being saved, the man would forage for food in the early evening. Every morning the same routine, scan the horizon for ships. Once the shelter was built, the man had one goal: to find a ship that could rescue him and take him home to his family. With just a few items in his pocket, he was able to build a small shelter to protect himself from the rough weather they often experienced. He was fortunate enough to land on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. Samuel Rodriguez, Shake Free: How to Deal with the Storms, Shipwrecks, and Snakes in Your Life, Waterbrook, 2018.Ī ship went down in a storm, and only one man survived. If you feel lost, stuck, or caught in a rut, consider this: When was the last time you stopped to ask him for directions? He’s right there with you and has big plans for where he wants to take you. Whether you feel as if you’re blazing a trail in the wilderness or maintaining a predictable plateau, God knows where you are and where you’re going. We hadn’t really been lost, of course we just couldn’t see where we were in relation to where we wanted to go. Suddenly it was easy to regain our perspective and see how we needed to proceed in order to get to our destination. Then my son grabbed my hand and pulled me over to a giant map of the park-you know, the kind with the big arrow pointing “You Are Here.” The kids began to worry that we’d never find our way back. In our pre-GPS world, I thought I knew the way but ended up taking us to Space Mountain instead. After wandering around for a few hours, we wanted to find our way back to Cinderella’s castle near the entrance. The park was so big and probably seemed enormous to our three children. It reminds me of when our kids were small and we visited Disneyland for the first time. God knows where you are and has never left you, regardless of how you may feel or how uncertain you are of where you’re going. Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (New York: Dutton, 2008, p.36, 43). Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. …Here, then, is Jesus’ radical redefinition of what is wrong with us. Both were alienated from the father’s heart both were lost sons. Each one, in other words, rebelled-but one did so by being very bad and the other by being extremely good. They each wanted to get into a position in which they could tell the father what to do. Both sons resented their father’s authority and sought ways of getting out from under it. The hearts of the two brothers were the same. The real point of the parable is that both the older and younger brothers are lost, just in different ways. In fact, as he demonstrates elsewhere, the parable concludes with the older brother outside the fellowship of His father (in other words, outside of the Father’s salvation). 15) is only about the lostness of the younger brother. In his excellent book, The Prodigal God, Timothy Keller corrects the notion that this classic parable (The Parable of the Prodigal Son, Lk.
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