Daily Bible Reading 7th November 2026 // Luke 15:11-24
11 And he said, “There was a man who had two sons. 12 And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. 13 Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. 14 And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. 16 And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.
17 “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! 18 I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ 20 And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 22 But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. 23 And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. 24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.
But let us look more particularly at the story of the prodigal, for it has depths that we have by no means yet exhausted. There is a sense in which it gives us, in pictorial form, our Lord's version of the Garden of Eden story, His interpretation of the tragedy of the Fall of man. It is when we look at it like this that we see how essentially superficial the general understanding of this parable has been when it makes us think of a prodigal as one who 'wastes his substance in riotous living'. The form and expression of the younger son's sin is simply incidental to the main issue of the parable's teaching. It could just as well have been any one of a number of different expressions of sin. You do not have to go away from home to be a sinner; you do not have to 'live it up' in a permissive society to be a sinner. And the most sinister expressions of the human malady do not necessarily belong to the gutter, the pigsty or the farmyard. The message that comes across in this story is that sin is a wrong relationship to God. To be a sinner means to be wrongly orientated to God. This was the heart, and the hurt, of the prodigal's condition. It is the father, not the son, who suffers most. It is always so. The boy's sorrow was long in overtaking him, and even then it was soon turned into joy by forgiveness. But the father's heart was broken the day he went away, and remained broken for many days, and every day it bled afresh at the thought of him.