The Pharisees could see in the eyes of Jesus an invitation to come to the party and be restored to that forgotten Father, the Father whose greatest law turned out to be love. Were these teachers going to lay down their pride and join the feast? Or would they continue to lurk at the fringes, finding fault and promoting misery?

That question, my friend, is left open. Because Jesus looks up one more time, even past the Pharisees, to another set of eyes. He looks down through time to this very moment and His eyes meet yours. He wants you to know that whichever son represents you in this story, the result is the same.

God loves you, even when you don’t love Him.

God is after you. It doesn’t matter how far you have wandered, or what you have done. It doesn’t matter if you attend church every night of the week and obey every rule you can find. All that does matter is that God loves you with a deep and abiding passion—that on your road of life, He is gaining on you. He won’t stop until you are enveloped in His great, prodigally affectionate arms.

Now He is inviting you to that party, a sheer celebration of the lost being found, of love being restored. Will you accept? He is waiting for your answer.

SEVEN

God Loves You When He’s Correcting You

Whom the LORD loves He corrects, Just as a father the son in whom he delights.

—PROVERBS 3:12

The train chugged its way through Indiana at twenty-four miles per hour. That doesn’t seem like a frightful speed. That is, until you take into account how long it takes to stop a 6,200-ton train… and what lay upon the tracks ahead.

“That’s a baby!” yelled Robert Mohr, the attentive conductor.

The engineer, Rodney Lindley, had thought it was a small dog, but the thatch of blonde hair and the colorful clothes made it all clear.

Emily Marshall, a child of nineteen months, was playing on the rails. She had strayed from safety as her mother picked flowers in the garden.

It was all chaos and shouting at the controls of the train. The engineer hit the brakes, but there was no way the train could stop short of disaster. Mohr, forty-nine and a Vietnam vet, had to think quickly.

He threw open the door, moved along a catwalk to the very front of the engine, and leaned precariously forward, steadying himself with one arm as Lindley continued to pull frantically at the brake. The train slowed to about ten miles per hour—still much too fast. Lindley said, “It felt like we were just eating up the rail, going faster and faster.”