Amelia Church of Christ - Christian Church in Amelia, OH near Cincinnati in Clermont County

There’s a man who has a street ministry in Chicago who tells this story. “A prostitute came to me in wretched straits, homeless, sick, unable to buy food for her two-year old daughter. Through sobs and tears, she told me she had been renting out her daughter—two years old! – to men interested in kinky sex. She made more renting out her daughter for an hour than she could earn on her own in a night. She had to do it, she said, to support her own drug habit. I could hardly bear to hear her sordid story. For one thing, it made me legally liable—I’m required to report cases of child abuse. I had no idea what to say to this woman.

At last, I asked her if she had ever thought of going to a church for help. I will never forget the look of pure, naïve shock that crossed her face. ‘Church!’ she cried. ‘Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.’”

That’s a stinging indictment of the perception that people have about church. Don’t go to church if your life is messed up. They’ll just condemn you. They’ll make you feel miserable. They’ll tell you that you’re a sinner and that you don’t belong in church.

But then, you’ve got Jesus. A guy whose best friends were sinners. A guy who buddied with boozers and hung out with whores.

And there’s one simple word to describe why: grace.

Grace is the linchpin of Jesus’ story. It’s the central point of the gospel. And yet, we still have a hard time believing it. We have a hard time accepting it.

Jay Kesler wrote, “Christians have always struggled with grace. It’s far easier for us to accept the reality that a holy God hates our sin than it is for us…to believe He loves us, forgives us, and truly wants what’s best for us, even when we sin.”

But listen to what the Bible says. “We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are. (Did you catch that? Grace is available to you no matter what. No matter what you’ve done. No matter who you are.) For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous.

He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood.” (Romans 3:22-25, NLT)

We’ve all blown it. We’ve all fallen short of God’s standard for us. We’ve all sinned. Sin is the great equalizer. It’s the only universal human trait that I know of. But God answered with nails. He answered with rugged wooden beams that formed the cross. If Jesus’ death can’t forgive anyone and everyone of their sin, then it was a total waste. If the cross can only forgive a select few people, then it’s powerless.

But the message of the cross is that it has the power to forgive all sin, including yours. Some of you have never submitted your life to Jesus. You’ve never sought his forgiveness and grace because you don’t think he can forgive you.

Others of you have been Christians for years, but you’ve never truly experienced grace. You’ve never allowed God to fully and finally remove the guilt of sin that you’re carrying around with you.

But the gospel message is that God’s forgiveness can reach you no matter who you are or what you’ve done. Jesus tells a great story of grace that we often refer to as the Prodigal Son. Philip Yancey took that story and rewrote it in a modern day context. The story goes like this.

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. "I hate you!" she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.

She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, drugs, and violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.

Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she's ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she's ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: Her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car—she calls him "Boss"—teaches her a few things that men like. Since she's underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring that she can hardly believe she grew up there. She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline, "Have you seen this child?" But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.

After a year, the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. "These days, we can't mess around," he growls, and before she knows it she's out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don't pay much, and all the money goes to support her drug habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. "Sleeping" is the wrong word—a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

One night, as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she's hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she's piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

God, why did I leave? she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She's sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, "Dad, Mom, it's me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I'm catching a bus up your way, and it'll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you're not there, well, I guess I'll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada."

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn't she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? Even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.

Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. "Dad, I'm sorry. I know I was wrong. It's not your fault, it's all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?" She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn't apologized to anyone in years.

The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the road, and the asphalt steams. She's forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, "Fifteen minutes, folks. That's all we have here." Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and wonders if her parents will notice. If they're there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect, and not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of 40 family members—brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They are all wearing ridiculous-looking party hats and blowing noisemakers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads "Welcome home!"

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She looks through tears and begins the memorized speech, "Dad, I'm sorry. I know … "

He interrupts her. "Hush, child. We've got no time for that. No time for apologies. You'll be late for the party. A banquet's waiting for you at home."

Tonight we’re inviting you to get on the bus. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve run away, it doesn’t matter what you did while you were there, get on the bus. Come home.

As the band plays, we want to invite you to get up and walk to one of these side tables and pick up a bus ticket. You don’t have to come immediately. Just come to on the tables when you’re ready to get your ticket home.

Some of you who are Christians have started to stray. In certain areas of your life, you’ve ran away from what God wants for you and you’re trying to do it your own way. And it’s not working. Get a ticket. Get on the bus. Bring that part of your life back to God. Find that forgiveness and that second chance that he’s got waiting for you.

For others of you, you’ve never accepted Jesus as the Lord and Savior of your life. Come get a ticket. Take your ticket and spend some time searching your heart. Is God calling you home? Is he calling you to come to cross, repent of your sins, and be buried in baptism to wash your sins away? If he’s knocking on the door of your life, don’t ignore him.

Whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, there’s a bus ticket home waiting for you. We invite you to pick it up tonight.

Mike Edmisten

Tags: APEX, grace, Prodigal Son, Romans 3