Within every one of us the voice of a child that desperately wants the approval of a loving father. Some of us will know this reality more richly than others, but deep in all of our hearts is a longing for the face of our Father in Heaven. This shouldn’t surprise us because it has been written into us by our loving creator. When God created man and woman, he created them for fellowship and communion with himself.

Unfortunately, since being ejected from the garden, men and women have been turned away from the face of God. With Cain we cry out, “Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden.”¹ Or like the Psalmist, “Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit.”²

Yet what is even sadder than this is that all too often we feel the emptiness and void of not having the smile of the Father and instead of turning to him, we seek to satiate the desire in created things. To our horror, we discover that our longing increases and our profound dismay grows. As the Lord says to Israel, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”³ Rather than filling our longing in the Lord, we turn to the opinions of men, the beauty of women, the intoxication of alcohol, and the shallowness of popularity.

The depressing outcome of our cheap antics? The longing of our heart is silenced, not because it has been satisfied, but because we have gagged it with empty pleasures.

The only solution to the cry of our hearts is to do what every true child does: To run into the arms of the Father who welcomes us in his Son. The Son embraced the judgmental frown of his Father that we might be called children of God. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.”⁴ The story of the prodigal son is not just for the unbeliever, but for every believer who begins to look away from the all-satisfying face of God.

1. Genesis 4:14. ↩︎
2. Psalm 143:7 ↩︎
3. Jeremiah 2:13 ↩︎
4. 1 John 3:1 ↩︎