| Devotional Hours with the Bible |
Chapter 36 |
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After waste came want. “When he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that country.” In the famine the boy found himself without friends. It is a pathetic record which says that in his dire need he went and “joined himself to a citizen of that country.” He hired himself out. He had made no friends in the far country. He had spent his money there, in banquets and revels and social dissipations, in which evil companions had shared. But now, when he had no money, and was in need, he had no friends. Sin does not bind bonds of affection between human lives. Sinning together does not make people friends. A man spends all he has at a salon, but when he has no more to spend the saloon-keeper does not become his friend and take him into his house as a brother to shelter him and make a home for him.
So we see this young man, erstwhile a carefree and popular spendthrift, feeding swine for the citizen to whom he had attached himself. This pictures the degradation to which sin drags down a man who leaves God and chooses the evil way.
At last hope dawned. “He came to himself.” He had been beside himself in the sad days of his sinning. When a man stops in his evil course, repents, and becomes a Christian, his old companions say, “The man is crazy.” But the truth is he was crazy before, and now he is in his right mind — come to himself. Sin is insanity; religion is saneness.
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