The Father's Heart 1 - ABBA!

We live in the midst of a fallen, fatherless world.
But prodigals are now realizing they have wasted much, spent all and accomplished little.
Our generation is coming to the end of its lie: itself.
Having sought fulfillment in their thoughts, things and themselves, many are now crying out from distant wastelands in which they have sold themselves, desperately seeking freedom from their self-made pig-sties. Our society’s love of money, pleasure and pride has deceived us and we are ensnared in our own 3-D Reality Shows of debt, distress + discontent. Lives stagger about drunken, alternately weaving from cries for equity and justice to lies of empty bottles and butts that once temptingly promised an end to our pain. And many, like those they have served, now themselves lie empty and strewn about: wasted transients in empty hotel rooms.
The consumer society has consumed itself.
The consumer has become the consumed.
However, the love of passing pleasures is itself passing away.
A deeper longing for our true ‘Home’ is replacing that painful, mournful lament.
And it’s growing louder daily throughout this earth.
Out of the prodigals’ emptiness also comes a growing awareness, a heart cry for that innermost need, a longing for revelation they have not known, but now sense they have somehow lost.
All the things of this world have not satisfied and never can satisfy that deep heart yearning.
Reality reveals they have lost at more than fantasy video games. They have lost at life as they thought.
They have come to the ends of themselves.
They are lost.
But they are also now ready. Ready to hear what they formerly mocked and rejected.
Ready to admit their real need, and receive hope, truth and good news for real life - redemption!
For the Spirit of God is also crying out in this world: for its lost to come home and be healed.
It reaches out to bind up broken hearts, heal wounded souls, and bring wholeness to this fragmented generation.
It’s time! Many now hunger and thirst for true spiritual substance that their substance-abused souls long for, but cannot comprehend.
Too long have the fatherless lain wasted!
Too many have perished for lack of good news for their souls.
But as the father in Luke’s parable waited for his prodigal son’s return, so our Father God has waited for wayward sons to hear His Spirit crying out, ‘Abba!’, come to their right minds and return to Him.
‘Abba!’ - the first letters of the first word. The ABC of the Hebrew-Aramaic dictionary calls us back to the basis of life, back into relationship with our roots, back to life with Our Father God... Daddy! Without even realizing, prodigals are now seeking: answers to the ‘eternal questions’ of life; a home and rest in their quest that only their Father God can give.
His call has gone out to the ends of the earth. All creation groans and labours.
Birth pangs are upon us.
Don’t mistake them for death throes. His cry is in the earth NOW!
NOW is the time for children of God to hear your Father’s Voice and arise from your graves!
NOW is the time for sons and daughters to see Light, come out of the dark, empty caves ironically called ‘entertainment centres’, and return to your Heavenly Father. Those are not your homes!
Your Father’s Heart awaits your response: the answer of sons and daughters, tired of doing life their way, empty of their own selfish ambition, ready... to come home.
From the depths of your heart, can you hear your Father calling?
Then answer Him.
‘Abba!’