Here I Am, Day 3 — Repentance: Still Far Off (Luke 15:11–32)

Here I Am · Study 3 of 5 · Repentance

This is part three of a five-part study through Isaiah 6. In the last study Isaiah saw God’s holiness and saw himself. Being honest about sin is necessary, but if you stay there it turns into shame. Something has to move. That movement is repentance, and Jesus told one story that shows it better than any definition. Each study has three sections:

• 📖 Study: walk through the passage phrase by phrase: what the words mean, the world behind them, and the truth underneath.
• ✍️ Journal: honest questions with room to write.
• 🛠️ Practice: small, concrete steps for the week.

Have a Bible, a pen and something to write in. Read all of Luke 15:11–32 before you start.

🗺️ Where this study fits

Isaiah 6 is one encounter with God that changes a man in five moves. Each study takes one of them.

See God. See yourself. Confess. Be cleansed. Say yes. This study is the hinge: what you do once you’ve seen the truth about yourself.

📱 The picture: your phone is your heart

In the Bible your heart is your control center, the place where choices get made (Proverbs 4:23). Picture it as a phone. This study looks at its 💾 storage: what you’re holding onto.

You know the moment. You’re trying to record something that matters, and the phone says Storage Full. Something has to go so something else can exist.

That’s repentance carried forward. Not God grabbing things from you, but you making room on purpose, because you want what He’s bringing more than what’s sitting there.

📜 Start where Isaiah stopped

Isaiah doesn’t explain, compare or defend. He confesses. And notice he names the specific thing, his lips, the very part of him that would carry God’s word. Real confession is specific. The question is what comes next. Isaiah’s chapter answers it with a coal from the altar (Study 4). Jesus answers it with a story about a father on a road.

🔄 Step 1 · What “repent” actually means

The New Testament word is metanoia: literally, a change of mind. But in the Bible a changed mind always means a changed direction. The Old Testament word, shuv, is even simpler: “turn” or “return.” Repentance isn’t mainly a feeling. It’s a U-turn.

The Bible holds two things together. Repentance is something God gives (2 Timothy 2:25 speaks of God granting it), and it’s something God commands (Acts 17:30). You can’t produce it on your own, and you still have to actually turn.

👥 Step 2 · Two crowds are listening

Luke 15 opens with a scene. Tax collectors and sinners are crowding around Jesus, and the religious leaders are grumbling:

So Jesus tells three stories in a row: a lost sheep, a lost coin and a lost son. Each one ends with a party. The stories are aimed at both crowds: the ones who know they’re far from God, and the ones who think they aren’t.

🎒 Step 3 · “Give me my share”

Asking for your inheritance while your father is alive was, in that culture, close to saying “I want your stuff, not you.” The father gives it anyway. God lets us walk away. Then the money runs out, a famine hits, and the son ends up feeding pigs, the most unclean animal a Jewish listener could imagine, wishing he could eat what they eat. Nobody gives him anything.

💡 Step 4 · “He came to himself”

This is where repentance starts. Jesus doesn’t say “when he felt terrible” or “when he got religious.” He says the son came to himself. He woke up and saw his situation clearly. It’s the same thing that happened to Isaiah in verse 5. Seeing clearly comes first.

📝 Step 5 · The speech he practiced

It’s an honest confession, but look at the last line. He’s planning to earn his way back. He’ll come home as an employee. Most of us do this: we come back to God with a plan to make up for it. Pray more, serve more, be extra good for a while. It sounds humble. It’s still about us.

🏃 Step 6 · “Still far off”

²⁰ He arose and came to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion, and ran, fell on his neck, and kissed him.

Luke 15:20 (World English Bible)

This is the heart of the story. The father sees him while he’s still far away, which means he had been watching the road. He is “moved with compassion”: the Greek splanchnizomai is a gut word, a feeling deep in the stomach. And then he runs. Many scholars note that a respected older man in that culture didn’t run; he’d have to hitch up his robe and look undignified in front of the village. The father doesn’t care. He reaches his son before the son reaches home.

💍 Step 7 · The speech gets interrupted

Read carefully and you’ll catch it. The son never gets to his last line, “make me as one of your hired servants.” The father cuts him off with gifts:

• The robe covers the rags and honors him.
• The ring most likely signals family authority and belonging.
• Sandals: servants often went barefoot; sons wore sandals.

Every gift says the same thing: you’re not coming back as a servant. You’re coming back as a son.

😠 Step 8 · The brother who stayed outside

The story doesn’t end with the party. The older son, who did everything right, is furious and won’t go in. “These many years I have served you,” he says. He’s been living like a servant too, just a well-behaved one. The father comes out to him as well. And Jesus ends the story without telling us if he goes in. Remember who was listening: the grumbling religious leaders. The open ending is an invitation to them.

👑 Two kings, two confessions

The Old Testament gives a side-by-side picture of confession that explains and confession that turns. King Saul, confronted for disobeying God:

Saul said “I have sinned” twice, and both times he kept something: an excuse, then his image. King David, after adultery and a murder, was confronted by the prophet Nathan:

No excuse. No request to look good. David cared about getting God back, not saving face.

💾 Repentance carried forward: making room on purpose

Repentance has two halves. One is turning away. The other is turning toward. The son didn’t just leave the pigs; he came home. Repentance that is only subtraction leaves an empty space, and empty spaces get filled again by the next thing.

That’s where consecration comes in: setting something apart for God on purpose and keeping it set apart. The Old Testament picture is the Nazirite vow in Numbers 6, where a person chose, for a season, to live differently as a sign they belonged to God. Not to earn anything, but because they had been claimed.

🚫 What this story doesn’t say

• It doesn’t say sin has no consequences. The inheritance was gone.
• It doesn’t say you have to clean up before coming home. He came home in pig-pen clothes.
• It doesn’t say the “good” brother was safe. He was outside the party.
• It doesn’t say repentance is a one-time feeling. It’s a turn you keep making.

Find a quiet place. Write honestly; nobody else needs to read this. If one question hits hard, stay there instead of rushing on.

Small steps, done for a week, change a heart more than one big moment. Check them off as you go.

• 📜 Write three, choose one. On three slips of paper, write the three things from your journal. Choose the one you’re laying down this week. The other two aren’t approved; they’re just not this week’s decision.
• 🙏 Confess like David, not Saul. Tell God plainly what it is. No “but,” no explanation, no promise to earn it back. “I have sinned against You.” Then sit quietly and receive what He says.
• 🌱 Name what you’re making room for. On the back of the slip, write what you’re turning toward: time with God, a friendship, rest, honesty, a calling. This is the half most people skip.
• 👥 Say it to a witness. Tell one trusted person: “This is what I’m setting apart, and this is what I’m making room for.” A decision nobody heard tends to quietly die.
• 🗣️ Drop the “but.” The next time you apologize to someone this week, leave out the explanation. Say what you did and that you’re sorry.
• 📄 Keep or release the slip. Tear it up, or keep it in your wallet as a reminder. The dramatic version isn’t the holy version. The honest one is.

If what you wrote involves something serious, like an addiction, abuse or something unsafe, don’t carry it alone or with just a friend. Talk to a pastor, leader or counselor you trust.

📚 Go deeper

• Luke 15: all three stories. Notice the party at the end of each.
• Psalm 51: pray it slowly in your own words.
• 1 Samuel 15:22–31: Saul’s confession. Spot the excuses.
• 2 Samuel 12:1–13: Nathan and David, “You are the man.”
• Numbers 6: the Nazirite vow, a picture of consecration.
• Acts 3:19: repent and turn, and refreshing comes.

🗓️ The five studies

The thread under all five: God is my Father. I am His child. So, be holy as He is holy.

Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain). Words in [brackets] are added to show who is speaking. Cultural notes on the story draw on common scholarship, including Kenneth Bailey’s work on Luke 15.