The True Home | A Man Had Two Sons | Drew Ritchie

A man had two sons. The younger son told his father, I want my share of your estate now before you die. So his father agreed to divide his wealth between his sons. A few days later, this younger son packed all his belongings and moved to a distant land. And there he wasted all his money and wild living. About the time his money ran out, a great famine swept over the land and he began to starve. The young man became so hungry that even the pods he was feeding the pigs looked good to him. But no one gave him anything. When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, At home, even the hired servants have enough food to spare. And here I am, dying of hunger. I will go home to my father and say, Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you. And I am no longer worthy of being called your son. So he returned home to his father. And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming. But with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. His father said to the servants, Quick, bring the finest robe in the house and put it on him. Get a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet. We must celebrate with a feast. For this son of mine was dead and has now returned to life. He was lost, but now he is found. Your brother is back. The older brother was angry and wouldn't go in. Your brother was dead and has come back to life. He was lost, but now he is found. Good morning, Hills Church family. It is great to be with all of you. My name is Drew Ritchie. I'm one of the ministers here.

And whether you're joining us in person at one of our four campuses or online, I'm so glad to see y'all. I've had a blast getting to go through this series we've called A Man Had Two Sons. And just thank you so much for the encouragement. I've received so many kind messages. And I've just thoroughly enjoyed being with all of you. I have told people, though, whenever they say, I'm really liking this, I've thought, you know, if you can't preach a series on the parable of the prodigal son, you might want to change professions. Because that's God really giving you a softball right there. But it's summertime, as you know from being outside and being in the weather. And with summer comes big-time movie blockbusters, right? And I could not have asked for a better setup for this third sermon than the fact that the biggest movie that's come out in a really long time, that's not a superhero movie, is Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably live under a rock. Because literally everywhere I go, people are asking, have you seen it? What did you think? It's the talk of the town, right? And I haven't had a chance to see it yet. I did think for this sermon, maybe for homework, you know, the church should sponsor me going to the movie and, like, buying me an Icy and popcorn. But Rick and David said that I couldn't go with them. So, anyway. But I have read the book. When I was in high school, I read this book. And I don't think I'm spoiling anything too big, because you've had about 3,000 years to read this book. But the basic premise, this whole story is the story of a man trying to get home. And The Odyssey is not a story that they didn't invent that idea.

It's not the only place where we see this. You can look all over the place and see just how much the idea of people wanting to come home is everywhere we look. I had a blast getting out a notepad and just thinking, what are the movies that are about this? What are the books that talk about this? What are the songs and the commercials? And I just sat down and I had a great 10 minutes just writing out idea after idea. And I don't have time to tell all of them. And I'm sure you could think of plenty. But here are just a few that I thought of in that time. All right? So, here's a movie that many of you have probably seen starring the great Tom Hanks. Castaway, right? This guy really, really wants to get home very badly. This next movie is one that this is for all my 90s kids out there. How many of you remember Homeward Bound? Come on! If you watch this movie and you don't cry when Shadow comes limping up that hill, pizza! You know, come on! Like that? The music's swelling. If that doesn't make you cry and it doesn't make you want a golden retriever, you don't have a soul. All right? I also, I was thinking, okay, what are some books? And this just shows you the stage of life I'm in. But the first book that came to mind is one I've read approximately 2 million times, which is this book, Are You My Mother? How many of you have read this book a bajillion times? This little bird is going around asking everybody and everything, are you my mother? Because he's trying to get back to the nest, trying to get back home, right? Now, I'm not, as you can probably tell, I talk way more about movies and books than I do music. I love music, but I just don't have the library that many of you have.

But I thought, what is the song that talks about coming home? and you probably maybe already know where I'm going. I don't know what song you would pick, but this is the person who I thought of first, right? John Denver, I'm not gonna sing it, but you know, Country Roads, Take Me Home. Come on, okay, let's sing it. ♪ To the place I belong, West Virginia ♪ Okay, we won't keep singing, but I will say, as a proud Texan, that's probably the only time I've sang a song about another state that's with that kind of authority, but I actually asked Catherine a few nights ago, I said, okay, I'm gonna use a song illustration, and I think it's a no-brainer. You know, like, what song do you think of whenever it's like, I'm, you know, someone coming home, and she sat there, and she's like, I don't, is this, are you doing the, ♪ I'm coming home, I'm coming home ♪ I was like, oh no, no, I'm not going with P. Diddy, but it did make me remember, it made me remember, and I was like, oh, I have a perfect illustration. I can't believe I didn't think about this. So this was a late add to the sermon, but there was a very famous person, still a famous person, that years ago made a lot of people upset whenever he said, I'm taking my talents to South Beach, Miami, and then years later, he won a lot of those people back

when he came out with this article right here, this magazine, and he said, I'm coming home to Cleveland. I'm coming home to where I'm from. I'm gonna win a championship for my hometown state, and he did. It was amazing, and it was something where it's like, wow, this, even if you, whether you like LeBron or not, there was something about coming home, something about winning a championship, and how cool it is that he's just always stayed there, you know, faithful to his state. No, I'm just kidding, yeah. But it was funny, one of the people helping me with this slide saw the news on Friday and said, is this gonna mess up your sermon? I was like, no, that's gonna help even more. But we see it everywhere. Songwriters, storytellers, authors, musicians, marketing agents, they think and they know something that speaks to everybody is home, the longing that we have for that. And that's exactly what the Bible is about. It's the story of humanity coming home. And so week one, we talked about the younger son. Week two, we talked about the older son. And now, to finish, we're gonna talk about our true home. While the Odyssey is the story of a man spending years trying to get home, history is about our God spending from before time began trying to bring us home.

In fact, God is dying to bring us home. Now, that's a Rick line right there, okay, come on. With all three of these stories in Luke 15, with the sheep and the coin and the sons, there is no resolution in the story until what was lost is found and is brought back home. And so together, these stories point to one of the greatest, if not the greatest, theme in all of the Bible, which is that we long for our true home. I don't care who you are. I don't care where you live or where you grew up or when you grew up. Home evokes something deep within us that we long for. People who are from another country, when they find a restaurant that's truly like, wow, this is authentic, this reminds me of home, they go back there over and over because of how much we long and ache for a place where we feel like we truly belong, where we're truly ourselves, where, you know, when you get home and you just feel like I'm not, there's no pretense anymore, I'm not trying to be someone else or worry about earning anyone's approval, I'm just home and I can relax and we long for that. That's why Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of our favorite days of the year where we're surrounded by people we love

eating food together. And it's also one of the reasons why those two days are some of the most painful days of the year because there's people all over the world that are saying, I don't have that, I have baggage and scars from my home and all these people are so excited, all these Christmas commercials of people coming back, I've never felt anything like that. It's why people have a hard time at Christmas and Thanksgiving because they spend all this money to recreate this perfect home feel only to realize you can't buy the feeling of home. In the book, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis, he has this surprising, pun intended, definition of joy. He describes joy unlike anyone else has ever described joy. He describes it as a bitter, sweet, deep longing for something that the world can't satisfy. He says that even though you would think that is not a joyful feeling, it brings him joy because he believes it points to something divine. He uses food as an illustration. He says, you know, when I'm hungry and my stomach's hurting and I'm hungry, it's evidence to me that there is something out there like food that's gonna satisfy this hunger. And the longing and the aching that we have for our true home, he finds surprising joy in that longing because he believes it's evidence

that points towards our true home someday with the Father. I believe this is maybe what Solomon had in mind. when he wrote this Alzheimer verse in Ecclesiastes, God has planted eternity, that longing for something more in the human heart. The Bible tells us on the very first page why we have this longing. God, when he created us, he created humanity in his image and he put us in a garden where there was no sin, no sickness, no death, no separation from him whatsoever. We were completely together walking in the garden. That was our home until we were deceived to think that life might be better if we decided for ourselves what was right and wrong. Until we decided, you know, maybe out there outside of the Father's authority might be better. And by doing that, we walked out of our true home. Tim Keller, he writes, it's no coincidence that story after story in the Bible contains the pattern of exile. Just look, it's everywhere in the Bible. The message of the Bible is that the human race is a band of exiles trying to come home. The parable of the prodigal son is about every one of us. The author of Hebrews 11, he writes, instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one.

Therefore, God was not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. Whether you know it or not, you and I, we go about our lives every day all the time trying to recreate a type of home that we lost. But Scripture says that home isn't something that we can ever create. It's not something we can ever buy, and it's not something we're ever gonna find someday. We found it. But Scripture says that it's a someone that we must return to. Because home is where the Father is. If we just consider home a place, a building, then when we look at our stories of the two sons, only one of them would be lost. If we only think of home as a place. But we talked about last week, both are lost. Their lostness wasn't determined by their physical distance from the home. Their lostness was determined by their lack of relationship with the Father. Remember, the younger son who leaves physically the home, he's the one that calls his dad Father three times. But the older son who is physically not lost is the one that never refers to his dad as Father. And so we see that proximity isn't the issue. Intimacy was. And neither son is home until their relationship with the Father is restored back

to the way it was meant to be. When I think about this idea, this concept that home is more about people than it is about a place, I think about one of my favorite places in the whole world, which is Salado, Texas. I don't know if any of you have ever been there before. But back in the late 60s, early 70s, my grandparents bought land on Salado Creek in Salado. And it's been in my family ever since. And there is no place that I could ever go that feels more like holy ground for me than that place. I remember my first birthday with Catherine and I being married, she had a surprise for me. She said, we're gonna get in the car, you don't know what's gonna happen. And we get in the car from Houston, and we drive to Salado. And when I get there, my family and my friends are there. Because she knew the thing I would probably enjoy the most was to be at my grandparents' land. This is a place where, it's so weird to explain, but when I was in college, I just have these memories of driving back there, and I might have a test or a paper or something on my heart and mind. But the second I would drive through those gates, all of that would just go away. It's like nothing existed except for me

just being at home with my grandparents. And the thing that you need to hear is that I hope that that house stands for forever. I would love for a Richie to live in that house for the rest of time. But the day when my grandparents aren't with us anymore, it won't be the same. Because what makes a home a home is not the drywall, it's not the fireplace, it's not the back patio with my grandparents' patio table where we had pimento and cheese sandwiches and lemonade and SunChips. It's not the creek where we fished or swam or had the rope swing. It's not where all me and my cousins did all those crazy things. Home is about the people. It's about my grandparents, my nana and papa. That's what makes Salado special. And what makes our true home our true home is the Father. I could have picked a billion verses from the Bible about this, but here are three that came to mind. Moses is, God is upset with the people of Israel, and God says, you know what? I told you I was gonna take you to the promised land. I'm gonna be faithful to my word, so y'all just go to the promised land, and I'm gonna stay here. And Moses says to God, he pleads with him

in verse 15 of Exodus 33. Moses said, if your presence does not go with us, don't send us from here. We don't want the promised land if you won't be there because then it won't be the promised land anymore. We'd rather be in a place that's less than with you, because that's home, than be in the promised land without you. He says in Psalm 90, Lord, through all generations, through all the seasons, through all the years of our people, you have been our home. The prophet Ezekiel, he has this amazing scene in the 40s of Ezekiel, where he's talking about when the Messiah comes to establish his kingdom, his city, his temple. And he does this thing that is the classic, when you're going through your Bible reading plan, you get to and go, do I have to read these chapters? Because it's just, this wall was this long, and this wall was, you're all the blueprints, right? Kind of the like, okay, let's put this on 2.0 speed, so I can say I still listened to the Bible today. And yet, at the end of it, we have this amazing line in chapter 48.

It says this, and the name of the city from that time on will be, the Lord is there. That's why it's the city of God. That's why it's God's home. Not because of the dimensions of the walls and the blueprint, but because God is there. From Genesis to Revelation, the story is the same. Home is where the Father is, and our Father wants his children home with him. So follow me on this, you ready? If we believe that home isn't a place, but it's a person, and it is God the Father, and we believe that because of what the Spirit does, because of Jesus making a way, we now have the ability to cry out to God and call him Abba Father. That we have the ability to enter the throne room of God without worry or anxiety, but in confidence. If we believe that's true, then that means we can have glimpses of our true home even today. That's unbelievable news. How many of you have ever been on a long trip? You've been away from home,

and something happened that reminded you of home, right? You were maybe on a mission trip, or you were on a vacation somewhere else, and I feel like for me, a lot of times it's food related. You know, you eat something, and you think, oh, this reminds me of home. I'm someone that's not really a huge fan of McDonald's. No offense if you love McDonald's, but when I'm in another country, and sometimes we get to the end of the trip, and I'm in the airport, and that quarter pounder with cheese, with fries looks amazing, because it reminds me of home. Whenever I eat, someone cooks Texas sheet cake. When I eat that, it reminds me of my mom's chocolate sheet cake, and I feel like I'm home again. But no matter how much sights, or sounds, or anything like that can bring you back home, nothing brings you back home like people's faces, right? I remember being on a trip in Paris with my grandparents, and going into a store, and running into a couple from the church where I grew up at. Nothing makes you feel more like home. Like, hey, what are y'all doing here?

What a coincidence. Nothing makes me feel more like home than when I'm on a trip, and I get a FaceTime from Catherine and our kids, right? And it's like a competition to see whose face can be in the, like, no, let me, let me. Okay, there's one of my kids. They're fighting, and you know they always argue over who gets to push the red button. Anybody else's kids? Like, no, me. I get the red button this time. Okay, well, I'll miss y'all. Oh, okay, it's over, right? Soldiers, whenever they go off to war, soldiers do not take pictures of their house. Soldiers don't take pictures of their kitchen, or their living room. They take pictures of people that they love, because they know home is about people. So I want you to think about, what are the gifts that God gives us today that gives us glimpses of home? We've already done one today. We've, even though it was a small cracker and a little bit of juice, we got a glimpse of the feast that will someday be ours forever in eternity.

Every time we pray, we've prayed today. We've worshiped today. Every time we do that, you may not feel something, but you've created a space where we could have a glimpse of the Father, and a glimpse of Jesus, and a reminder of our true home. How many of you, when you're in community with loved ones, and you see Christ in someone else, how many of you realize, like, I just got a glimpse of what it's gonna be someday, when we're all together with the people of God? And if you're anything like me, then the place we see this most is at a funeral for someone who loved Jesus, for someone who walked with the Lord. You can't tell me that when you're sitting there, and we're singing It Is Well, as a community, that you're not getting a longing, a surprising joy from the longing that we have of our true home someday, when we will all be reunited in Christ. And the Lord haste the day, when those glimpses that we have today will turn to sight, and we will be with the Father fully. Now, there is a message underneath everything I'm saying, underneath this whole story of Luke 15, and underneath our lives. Neither son, I've said this over and over,

neither son is possibly capable of coming home on their own. The younger son has wrecked his life, the older son is trapped in his self-righteousness. Neither one of them has any right to earn, or do anything to be welcomed back into the family, and neither can we. The hope of the world is that Jesus is the way home. Last week we talked about patterns in Luke. Here's another pattern for you. In Luke 15, the first story is about a sheep that runs away. And a shepherd leaves the 99 to go after the lost sheep to bring it home. The second story is a lost coin. And this woman, she turns over the whole house in pursuit to find this coin and bring it back into relationship with her. And so we get to this third story of this younger son who insults his father, humiliates, shames his father, runs away to the far country, and the pattern has got all of the audience asking the question, who is going to be the one who goes after the younger son? Someone went after the sheep, someone went after the coin, who's gonna go after this son? And the answer is that Jesus is trying to say to the Pharisees, and the crowd is saying, listen, all along you've been called God's son. The people of Israel, look throughout the Old Testament, they are referred to as the son of God. And they were meant, the promise to Abraham,

I'm gonna bless you and I'm gonna bless the world through you. You will be a light to the nations. And instead of being a light to the nations, the Pharisees and the older brother in the story have not only been a light, not a light, they have been a barrier to people coming home to God. And yet, the story is setting up the anticipation that unlike the older brother in the story, Jesus is our true older brother who leaves the father's house and goes into the far country for us. Listen to this passage from Hebrews 2, and tell me it's not 100% connected to what we've been saying. It says, God, for whom and through whom everything was made chose to bring many children into glory. And it was only right that he should make Jesus, through his suffering, a perfect leader, fit to bring them into their salvation, into their restored relationship with the father. So now, Jesus and the ones he makes holy have the same father. That is why Jesus is not ashamed to call them his younger brothers and sisters. Jesus is the true older brother. Let's revisit something from, I mentioned this in the first week, and I tried to say it kind of fast so that I could really point this out this time,

but in the very beginning, Luke 15, verse 12, we have this line in the story that if you don't slow down, you might miss a really important thing. It says, the younger one said to his father, father, give me my share of the estate. So the father divided his property between them. This is a huge detail that I've never noticed until this series. Every time I've heard this story, I picture the father, he is asked by the son for his stuff, so he gives the son his stuff, and then he keeps the rest for someday. That's not what the story says. The story says the father gave all his stuff, and he divided it between them, and we know from Israel tradition that the oldest son would get a double portion, so what's happened is the father has given a third to the younger son and two thirds to the older son, and so the father literally doesn't have anything anymore except for his status as the father. Throughout the story, all of his decisions, let's throw a feast, let's do that, it's not because he owns it anymore. It's because he's the patriarch of the family, and so literally, the robe that he gives the younger son, the ring, the fattened calf, all that stuff belongs to the older brother. It's his stuff.

When the father says at the end to his son, everything I have is yours, that's not metaphorical, that's literal. Everything I have is yours. Isn't that enough for you? And so we see from the story, the setup is that welcoming the younger brother back comes at a tremendous cost to the older brother, and that's why he's so bitter about it, and welcoming us back came at a tremendous cost to Jesus Christ, and he was delighted to do it if it meant you coming back home. You know, we see mercy and grace, those are words we use, and if they are earned or merited in any way, then they're not mercy and grace anymore. It must be freely given for it to count as mercy and grace, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting it. We pointed out with this verse that we just read, we pointed out that the lines, so he divided his property between them, that the Greek word property is the word life, bios, and so I said, I made the point, the father loves his son so much that he tore his life apart for them, and Jesus told this story knowing that he would love the world so much that he would tear his flesh apart so that all of God's children would one day be home. He was stripped of his robe

so that you and I could be clothed in his righteousness. He was cast out of the family so that you and I could be brought in as the adopted children of God. He died so that we could come home. That's why Jesus says in John 14, he says, I am going to prepare a place for you. He doesn't say, hey, someday there's this place and I'm gonna show you where it is, I'm gonna point it out, hey, look, it's over there. No, Jesus says, I am the way that you're gonna get there. I am the truth, I am the life. Colossians 1 just has this amazing verse that points out everything we're talking about. Right after we've just said that Jesus is the firstborn son of God, the true older brother, right after we've said that, we have this line from Colossians 1, 21. Once you were alienated, you were in exile, you were in the far country from God, and were enemies in your minds. Notice this, he doesn't say you were enemies because you were far away physically, he says you were enemies because your minds were far away. Remember I said you're more lost than you think. Proximity's not the issue, intimacy is. And how is he gonna solve that? But now God has brought you back, he's reconciled you, by Christ's physical body through death. How cool is that?

You're lost in your mind, and the way I'm gonna win you back to come to your senses is by what Christ's body did on the cross, that is really cool. And to present you wholly in his sight, without blemish and free from any accusation, just like a father running to his younger son and embracing him and saying, you don't have to earn anything anymore, you don't have any guilt anymore, your shame, it's gone, and your place at my table is secure because I say so. And no one's ever gonna change that. You are home. And guess what? The story doesn't end when we come home. Jesus now invites us to join him in helping others find their way home too. We invite others to Jesus until everyone is home. Found people, brought home people, join God's mission to find people. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes, all this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and then gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them, and he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, and this line should give you chills right here, as though God were making his appeal to the world through you and through me. We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

The God of the universe who made all of this, who made us in his image is saying, I want your help. I want Drew's help to bring people home. What an honor that we get invited to do this. I think about something I do with my kids. We do this at dinner, we do this at bedtime, but it comes up in other ways too, but we have these five Ritchie rules that we'll say, like rule number one, rule number two, and I'm not gonna go through all of them, but rule number three is protect your brothers and your sister. That's rule number three, and I hope, now the one-year-old and the three-year-old are still working on it, but when I say to my kids, what's rule number three, they can say, protect my brothers and my sister, right? And what I'll do is, and I know I'm guilty sometimes of talking to my kids like they're 40 years old already, but I'll say, all right, y'all, listen. Dean, eyes up here, come here, man. I'll say, I need y'all to realize this. There's two of your mom and I, and there's four of y'all, and I need y'all's help to bring each other home. I'm not gonna be able to individually disciple you like you deserve, but as a team, we can get each other home. As a team, we can make sure that we're saying, like, hey, brother, hey, sister. That's not wise, and I'm not doing that

because I'm trying to be a mean sibling. I'm doing that because I'm trying to help you become the person who God made you to be, and I also get to tell them, guess what? Not only do we need to do this for each other. Landry, Joe, I need you to do this for Marshall. Marshall, I need you to do this for Dean and your sister. We need y'all to do this for us. Your mom and I are trying to get home, and you are gonna help us get home, and what I kept thinking during this sermon is that is exactly what God is trying to get into my head about everyone in the world. God's trying to say, Drew, rule number three is all of these children are mine, and I want you to help me bring them home, so when I'm standing there for school pickup at Snow Heights and I'm standing there looking at my phone, God is saying, Drew, get off your phone and build a relationship with these people. Drew, make friends with these folks. Pray for them, ask them their names, ask them their story. I want them home. So wherever you're, whether you're at the gym, whether you're at your favorite breakfast spot, whether you're with your golf buddies or your Mahjong crew, wherever you are, I want you to say to yourself, God is gonna implore through me, God is going to implore through me. implore these people to be reconciled to God and come home.

I love the way N.T. Wright puts it in this quote. He says, how can we become people through whom resurrection happens to others? How can we be people, like in this story, through whom lost to found happens, through whom dead to alive happens? Maybe you've realized over these last few weeks of this series that you've been longing for a home and an embrace like the Father's your entire life. We love stories and movies about people coming home. We love Apollo 13 and Les Mis and Saving Private Ryan, and we watch the whole time thinking, please let them come home. And we do that, and it moves us so deeply because they remind us of how badly we want to come home. We want someone to find us and bring us back to our true place of belonging. C.S. Lewis, he said that ache that we feel, the reason it's joyful is not because it's proof that there's something wrong with us, even though it is. It's proof that we were made for another country, and it's proof that we need a Savior to help us get there. We were made for home. C.S. Lewis writes in The Last Battle, this unbelievable quote where he says, I have come home at last. This is my real country. I belong here. This is the land that I have been looking for my whole life, though I never knew it till now.

Come further up, come further in. One day, this story from Luke 15 is not gonna be a parable anymore. It will be reality. Every child of God will finally step across the threshold, and the father will run, and there will be no more shame, no more wandering, no more exile, just the embrace we've been longing for since the Garden of Eden, and the words, well done, good and faithful servant, enter into your rest. We spend our lives, we spend our money, and our time, and our effort searching for stories that have satisfying endings like that. We'll read a book, and we'll close it. We'll watch a movie, and the credits will roll, and we'll think, that's how I want it to end. That's how it's supposed to end. But no movie, no song, no story ever told can compare with the ending God is writing, because the greatest story ever told ends with the father embracing his sons and daughters, and we will be home. And it won't be home because the streets are gold. It won't be home because of the mansions. The reason it'll be home is because the God is there. The Son is there. The Spirit is there. And all those people that we love, who died in Christ, who went before us, will be there too, and we will once again be reunited with them,

because there is no such thing as saying goodbye for the last time for people who are in Christ, and the celebration will never end. So I've said this every week, and I'm gonna do it again. If you have never declared Christ as Lord, if you've never done that, your father is scanning the horizon, waiting for you to make that choice, longing for you to be home. The Son is on his way right now, saying, I'm the way home, I'm trying to bring you back. The Spirit is calling your name. Listen, right now, do you have this longing and this ache? The Spirit is saying, I am the only place you're gonna answer that. Come home. And if you've already surrendered to Christ, let's spend the rest of our lives every day trying to help more people come home, because there's more seats at the table, and every single one who comes back is worth celebrating. Because the heavens are celebrating. Let's pray. Father God, I am praying for the person that's out there that hasn't made this decision yet. What are they waiting for, God? There's no better news than your Son. God, I'm sure there's lots of arguments, there's scars, there's baggage, there's so many things that I can't begin to process

what exactly is holding them back. But God, I pray that they know you have spent all of history trying to get them to come home. God, you tell us that you stand at the door and you knock, and that anyone who opens the door, you will come in and you will make their home with them. So God, I pray that homes are made today because of relationships with you are restored. It's in the Father's, in the Son's name we pray, amen.