The Father Who Runs After Prodigals

November 16, 2026

I like to wear one ear bud. That way I can hear the world around me, but I can also listen to stuff on my cell phone, or have phone conversation. Has this ever happened to you? One day I was checking out my shopping list with my wife while heading to check out. We start chatting about couple stuff while going through the line. Just as my turn to check out arrived, I say, “I love you,” much louder than I intended. The look on the clerk’s face was very confused until I raised my phone and pointed to the ear bud.

Relationships can be funny things, but that should be expected since they are always complicated. Since life is all about relationships we should expect nothing less. Consider Jesus’ most popular parable, The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). A younger son asked his father for his share of the inheritance while the father was still alive. The father gave it to him. The son left home, wasted the money, and ended up feeding pigs. Not a good job for a good Jewish boy. He realizes his father’s slaves have it better and heads home. While he was still a long way off, the father saw him, was filled with compassion, and ran to him. He threw his arms around him and kissed him. The son began his prepared speech. The father interrupted it with a robe, a ring, sandals, and a feast.

This is a story about relationships, especially about the lengths God has already gone to so we can have one with Him. We are the ones who left home. We waste what He has given. We treat other people as less than neighbors, the way the priest and the Levite treated the wounded man in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). We even treat anger and contempt as small things, though Jesus said they put us in danger of judgment (Matthew 5:21-22). Yet the Father does not wait for us to clean ourselves up. He runs to love us.

The same God who runs is the God who defines love. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16). Love is not a warm feeling we wait to have. It is Jesus’ life laid down. The Father did not send a message from a safe distance. He gave the Son, and the Son stayed on the cross until the work was finished. That is how we know what love is.

Then John presses the point further, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16). The two verses belong together. The first shows us the shape of love in the death of Jesus. The second tells us that the God who is love comes to live in the people who receive that love and then live it out. We do not merely admire the cross from the outside. We are drawn into the life of the One who died there.

The spiritual disciplines are some of the gifts God gives us to keep our relationship strong. A spiritual discipline is anything we do regularly to draw us closer to God. Worship, prayer, Bible study, tithing, evangelism, servanthood, and fellowship are not a checklist we complete to stay on God’s good side. They are the ordinary, repeated ways we remain in the relationship the Father has already restored.

Worship brings us back into His presence no matter how hard the week has been. Prayer is the conversation we keep having with the One who ran to meet us. Bible study keeps His voice louder than our own. Tithing trains us to trust Him with what He has already given. Evangelism, servanthood, and fellowship turn the love we have received toward the people around us, because a restored relationship with the Father always spills over into restored relationships with others. None of these practices earn the robe or the ring. They simply keep us close to the Father who already put them on us, and they keep His love from staying locked inside our own hearts.

What is your prodigal story? Where have you taken the Father’s gifts and spent them far from home? What would it look like this week to turn around, even if all you can manage is the first step of the speech you have been rehearsing?

I invite you to start home. The Father is already watching the road. He will not make you finish the speech. He will run, and His name will be lifted high. (To learn more about Al Earley or read previous articles, see www.lagrangepres.org. You can purchase my books at Amazon.com: My Faith Journal, a compilation of 366 articles as a daily devotional, and Star Chasers, a Christmas story about the kings that visited Jesus. Check out my podcast on YouTube, called “My Faith Journey”).