There isn’t all that much “Christian fantasy” out there, so each badly-written book hurts the market that much more.
BTW, this wasn’t the first time I suggested turning Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son into a novel. Come to think of it, you could do that with any number of His parables. Only Jesus Our Lord, though, could pack so much meaning into so little space.
What a month for liberals! President *Batteries Not Included leaving office. Crooked Hillary kept out of the presidency. And now the loss of that beloved communist dictator and all-around nice guy, Fidel Castro.
Great Lenin’s ghost! What next? The UN runs out of money and has to close its doors? Al Gore buried in an avalanche? Bill Maher converts to Christianity?
And the pope, the Red Pope, Francis I, grieves El Comandante‘s passing. (https://www.yahoo.com/news/pope-francis-grieves-prays-atheist-revolutionary-castro-132527432.html) In the name of all the priests and nuns and lay Catholics murdered or imprisoned by the Castro regime, Pope Francis drops a tear for Castro. I thought only Methodists did that.
O Lord our God, do to us as you did to the Prodigal Son: who came to himself and understood his sin, who turned from his folly and went back to the father who loved him, and was saved: so do to us, O God.
Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that he cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear. –Isaiah 59:1-2
Father in Heaven, you have raised up wicked and ungodly rulers over us, as chastisement for our sins. We must confess that we have sinned against you, repeatedly. We have been cold and indifferent to you, and ungrateful, and have constantly rebelled against your law. We have willfully listened to false prophets and followed blind guides: and now we are so deep in sin and folly, we can’t possibly escape.
As you did for the Prodigal Son, O God, help us as a nation to come to our senses, and turn away from our sins and our idols: exert your strength on us, O Lord, and turn us to salvation; turn us back to you.
Save us, O God, not for our sakes, but for Jesus’ Christ’s sake, who is our only savior; not for our sakes, but for your own great mercy’s sake, as a Lord who loves to give mercy; not for our sakes, but for your own h0nor and glory’s sake, so that the whole world will see your power and might.
Father, how high and how proud must these wicked and ungodly rulers grow, before you cut them off?
Please, Lord, do not let our nation fall into Hillary Clinton’s hands; but let her rather fall into the hands of justice, long delayed.
Bring us back, O God, bring us back to you. We are lost and cannot find out way; but the Good Shepherd knows the way.
Come, Lord Jesus, come! Amen.
In Luke 15:11-32, Our Lord tells us the Parable of the Prodigal Son, a story which most of you have heard.
Consider, though, the prodigal’s elder brother, who is all bent out of shape because his father killed the fatted calf and threw a party for the son who came home. Most of us can easily understand the elder son’s jealousy, because we are sinners like him: we would probably react as he did.
Because I’ve been reading, all along, Notes on the Parables of Our Lord (first published in 1860) by Dean Richard Chenevix Trench–remember his lesson on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, which I posted last month–and learning some good lessons from it, I said to myself, “Wait a minute! This is like the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, in which those who worked all day, and were paid handsomely for it, objected because the owner awarded the same payment to those who came late to the job.” And yes, the similarity is there.
To his elder son the father says, “Son, thou art ever with me“–he might have added, “as opposed to the other numbskull, who went out into the fallen world and almost starved to death”–“and all that I have is thine.” The elder son already had “all.” What more could he have asked for?
Dean Trench points out that the elder son, because he was his father’s son, had a perfect right to walk right into the house and join the party, where his portion of the fatted calf was waiting for him. Why didn’t he? One gets the impression that he wanted the whole calf for himself.
He already had all that he could have, and had been spared the experience of leaving his father and winding up in desperate straits. He lost nothing by the father’s forgiveness of the prodigal, and yet he was jealous. In truth, his jealousy and self-righteousness blinded him to the blessings that he had, and to the grace of his father, who was the source of all those blessings. Just as the vineyard owner, out of the goodness of his heart, was generous to the later hires, the father in this parable shed his grace on both his sons. And the one son was jealous and ungrateful.
As Steve Brown would say, “Now you think about that!”