Brent Shepherd’s Reviews > The Waiting Father: Sermons on the Parables of Jesus > Status Update

If we could only learn to come to the end of our pretensions as the publican had come to his. Then God could make a new beginning with us. If only we could learn not to keep pushing ourselves forward and showing off before God. Then he could finally become our Father. And we—well, we could then be new, free persons.

When he hung upon the Cross, he did not envy the executioners and drunken soldiers standing idle upon Calvary. He was writhing in pain and thirst, hanging from the cruel nails, while these rude fellows walked beneath the Cross free as air. And they were uncomplicated enough to not let it bother them. They were free and full of life. But Jesus did not envy them; rather he prayed for their souls.

But where Jesus is, the air is clean and clear. Here, dirty hands are called dirty; Houston is called sin and dishonesties called dishonesty. Here the wisdom of the world is not equated with godliness. We Christians can be utterly honest with ourselves because we have nothing to fear, because we don’t need to be so painfully worried about putting up a good front. For we know about forgiveness.

The very reason why Jesus can afford to pray so diligently and give the best hours of the day to this communion with the Father is that he knows that while he rests in eternity it is not that nothing is happening but that in doing this he is rather giving place to God’s Spirit, that then God is working and the seed is growing.

In folded hands, all pious and fleshly zeal is quelled. Still runs the season in which there creeps upon us, the dread question, “Lord, is it I?” Have not I on many a night, sowed poisonous seed in many a heart and become a stumbling block to many? Let him who stands take heed lest he fall; and above all let him not judge when he sees others fall, but reach out for his brother with compassionate hands.

But to hear and hold on to the Word and budget one’s life upon it, this is the great test. And this means to count on it and reckon with it, simply to take seriously the fact that Jesus can break our chains and that therefore we do not need to go on staring with horrible fascination at these chains.

So he came, because of love, in great stillness, and you can hear and see him only if you hold your own heart completely still. If you are afraid of the stillness, then you must necessarily miss hearing him altogether.

What a wretched thing it is to call oneself a Christian and yet be a stranger and a grumbling servant in the Father’s house. And what a glorious thing it is to become aware every day anew of the miracle that there is Someone who hears us. Someone who is waiting for us.

He is not merely imagining a picture of an alleged Heaven that is open to sinners; in him the kingdom is actually in the midst of us. Is he not the very voice of the Father’s heart that overtakes us in the far country and tells us that incredibly joyful news, “You can come home. Come home!”? The ultimate secret of the story is this: There is a homecoming for us all because there is a home.