| Devotional Hours with the Bible |
Chapter 36 |
Page 5 |
Wonderful is the influence of home. It was a vision of home that first flashed its divine light upon the prodigals’ soul. He said, “How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough to spare!” As he sad there watching the swine and famishing, there came back to him a memory of the days of innocence and plenty in his father’s house. Many a man has been saved far on in his years by such a memory. The old home tugs at our hearts, no matter where we wander. The child of sin who has wasted all her beauty in evil, when the hectic flush comes on her cheeks and the ominous cough racks her body, creeps back home to die in her mother’s bosom. The soul’s true home is in God. That is where we all belong. In our childhood life heaven lies about us. This is a world of sin, and we are fallen creatures, but there are in us fragments of the defaced image of God — gleams of tenderness, flashes of nobleness, pulsings of good feeling, longings for better things, and visions of purity — which tell of an origin above this world. It is a blessed moment when one living in sin there comes a vision of the love of God and of holiness. Home is the one place in this world whose door is never shut in a man’s face, howsoever evil he has made himself.
Quickly the young man made up his mind. “I will arise and go to my father.” The glimpse which memory had given him of the home, bright with love and joy, while he was wasting his life in wretchedness, was enough. He saw in a vision his father’s house, and beaming there in the doorway he saw the face which had looked into his the morning he came away, with love and yearning. Even the servants in that home had enough and to spare. Relentlessly, the old home drew on his heart.
Many people resolve to do right, and then take no steps toward the doing of it. This young man, however, carried out his good resolve at once. It was not easy to go home. He had come away rich, well-dressed, happy, and proud; he must go back stripped of all, a poor beggar, with penitence and confession. But he did not hesitate. He was too much in earnest to think of the cost of his repentance.
Page 5