Episode 393: The Father Who Runs

So, Father John, if I can, just to kind of remind our friends what we did in our last episode.

So we began talking about what some of the obstacles were, uh, to our trusting and surrendering to God, whether that's our circumstances or our suffering and our weaknesses.

But we, we, we acknowledged that not just some of us, but all of us, right, have a distorted image of God for any variety of reasons.

And we talked about that it's difficult to surrender to someone or to trust someone that you haven't met, or that you don't know, or someone that you don't understand.

And it's impossible to trust someone who you think is distant, or is removed, or demanding, or...

I'm just thinking about a conversation I had with someone about three weeks ago, God's simply putting up with me.

Mm.

Mm.

You, you know, that, that's not God the Father.

And then we talked about how the enemy is constantly out in, in the farmlands, if you will, of our lives, casting seed-

Mm

... casting, um, lies about God, that He's not trustworthy, that He's not faithful, that He's deaf to our cry, or whatever those lies might be.

But Jesus came to do much more than to forgive our sins, right? We talked about his one homily.

You have Him wrong.

He came, right? To what? To reveal the Father.

So on this episode, we're gonna do something a little bit different.

We're gonna turn our attention to a parable that most of us are very familiar with.

It's the Parable of the Prodigal Son that we read about in Luke 15:11-32.

And it's a title we've heard for so long that I don't know about y'all, but I rarely stop and give thought to, um, what is the, what, what is Jesus' heart as He's teaching about this? And Father John, one of the things that you do with leaders when they come to us, and you did this when we were in Wichita, is, um, you encourage folks to encounter the Father again in a fresh way.

But what you do is you suggest that there's a better title or a different title than the prodigal, um, the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

You said, "Wouldn't things change dramatically if the title of the parable was the Parable of the Father Who Runs?" And as soon as you say that, no matter what the context, there's this hunger and desire, like, what? Like, what is Father John talking about? Because that, that's a, a s- that's a simple and subtle shift, but it's a shift that, that changes our hearts and our minds and makes us a lot more, a lot more receptive.

So here's what we're gonna invite y'all to do.

If you're in your car and you're listening to this, wait till you're home to play it out, uh, to, to play the rest of the podcast.

If you're home or you're in a place right now, we would just encourage y'all, wherever you are, to hit the pause button.

Hit the pause button on the podcast and run to your scriptures, open up to the 15th chapter of Luke, and read this parable to yourself, and then see what stands out.