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Outdoor adventurer, Bear Grylls, shares his faith journey, overcoming challenges, and about the most exciting and difficult project of his life - writing about The Greatest Story Ever Told - the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Popular personality Bear Grylls shares how he’s found meaning in knowing Christ, not in having a great career.

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There was a time when single parenting was kind of an exception in America. Not any more - millions of families where it's just a mom or a dad now. There's been a lot of conversation and a lot of articles written...a lot of commentary about the impact of not having a dad who's really being a father to you. A little while back, one of the leading health officers in the United States said, "The greatest issue facing us is fatherlessness." Then Time Magazine commented on women who actually choose to have a fatherless family. Here's what they said: "They are bringing a child into the world with a hole at the center of his life where a father should be."

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I'd like to have A Word With You today about "The Father Hole In Our Heart."

However you feel about those comments and those quotes, we all know that life's a little tougher if you don't have a dad or somebody who isn't acting like a real dad.

Our word for today from the Word of God comes from Luke 15. This is the familiar story of the prodigal son, who got his inheritance early from his father, went to a far country, spent it all, ended up feeding the pigs and having to eat with them. Verse 17 says, "When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father, and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.' So he got up and went to his father."

This is the story of a searching man whose real problem was that he was away from his father. Maybe that's a picture of you right now. In the story, God is the father, and God has told us He wants us to know Him as our Heavenly Father. You say, "Well, if he's like the father I had, I'm not interested." Well, remember this. God is not like the father you had on earth. He's like the father we all wish we had, and what you're feeling down deep in your soul, that's father lonely. We have a hole - a daddy deficit - that we're waiting for a father to occupy.

How do we lose Him? How do we find Him? Look at the verbs in Luke 15. It says that the young man "set off for a distant country." The Bible says actually we've all done that. It says, "We have all sinned and fallen short of God's glorious ideal," we've wandered away like sheep. (the Bible says) We are away from God by our own choosing. The next verb says, "He squandered his wealth." See, all our years away from God are squandered years. They're wasted years until you know the relationship with a father that you were made for.

Then the next verb says, "He spent everything." You can do that so easily. We spend, in search of the missing part of us. We can't find ourselves in achievements. We can't find ourselves in relationships, or pleasure. We spend everything, and then it says, "He longed to fill his stomach." Maybe you feel an emptiness inside of you like a hunger that never goes away, a hole that's never been filled.

Then we read, "He came to his senses." Maybe that's where God is bringing you right now. It's hard to live without God. It's hell to die without Him. It says that the son went to his father. And see, there's only way you can get to the father you were made by and made for. In John 14:6, Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me." What would happen if you came to Him today? It says, "While the boy was a long way off, his father saw him, ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him." That's the welcome you would get from God today. He runs to you with His arms wide open no matter what you've done.

Why don't you run to Him and be born into His family today? Don't you want to begin this relationship? Tell Jesus, "I'm yours."

In so many areas of life we have no choice. “It’s not fair,” we say. But the scales of life were forever tipped on the side of fairness when God planted a tree in the Garden of Eden. All complaints were silenced when Adam and his descendants were given free will, the freedom to make whatever eternal choice we desire. Any injustice in this life is offset by the honor of choosing our destiny in the next. Wouldn’t you agree?

It would have been nice if God had let us order life like we order a meal. Would’ve been nice. But it didn’t happen. When it came to many details of your life on earth, you weren’t given a choice, a voice or a vote.  But when it comes to life after death, you were! In my book that seems like a good deal.  Wouldn’t you agree?

Read more He Chose the Nails: What God Did to Win Your Heart

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