September 5 Daily Devotional

In wonder lost, with trembling joy
We take the pardon of our God.

I have no doubt that up to a point [the Prodigal Son] thought he had been hardly dealt with. He left home for the far country. He was going to assert himself, but things went wrong.... Then he came to himself and he went home and said, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and I am no more worthy to be called thy son’. That is just another way of saying the same thing [as Psalm 73:22]. Nothing to recommend us, no excuses; we have just been unutterably stupid, like beasts. We have failed to think and to reason; we have failed to apply these Scriptures. It is this horrible self that has been in control, and ... nothing and no one is right but ourselves. Let us face it; let us unmask it; let us analyse and face ourselves with it. Let us look at it honestly until we are heartily ashamed of ourselves. Then let us go to that gracious loving God and acknowledge that... we have no claim upon Him at all, and no right to His forgiveness. Let us tell Him that we do not wish to be healed quickly, that we feel we do not deserve to be healed at all.

... the trouble with many of us is that we heal ourselves too quickly. We feel we have a right to be forgiven. But the teaching of the Scripture and the example of the lives of the saints is that, like the Prodigal Son, they deserved nothing but damnation, that they had been like beasts in their stupidity, and that they had no claim at all on God. Indeed, they were filled with amazement that God could forgive them. Let us examine ourselves in the light of that. Do we rush back to God feeling we have a right to forgiveness? Or do we feel we have no right to ask for forgiveness? This is how this man felt.... Paul, after years of preaching, looked back across the past and said he was the ‘chief of sinners. He was still amazed that God could ever have forgiven him ... he was still amazed at the wondrous cross and the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Faith on Trial, pp. 84–5