You recognize the symptoms of your prodigal’s settling:

• Filth, wearing clothes repeatedly without laundering, dirty sheets and towels, unkempt appearance.
• Survival mode, jobs that barely keep them alive; poverty; meaningless jobs that don’t match with gifts, talents, or calling; or lucrative jobs that impress but leave them empty and overworked, with little time for God, family, friends, and other important things.
• Unhealthy relationships, lack of relationships, jumping from one relationship to another, having a string of one-night stands, neglecting their children, affairs/infidelity, marriages outside God’s plan for marriage, estrangement from family, loneliness and isolation.
• Unhealthy ways, junk food, terrible sleep habits, staying up all night, lack of exercise.
• Laziness, and lack of motivation.

Addiction, estrangement, shame, and other strongholds exacerbate a prodigal’s settling for less. Rather than the abundant life God has planned for them (John 10:10), they settle for unsafe places to live and unfulfilling lives, which are counterfeits from Satan. They settle for evil instead of the good God has planned for them. Often, because this is the way they’ve lived for so long, they don’t know how to live differently. It feels like their norm, and they have been lulled into believing this is what their lives will continue to be, and they feel they can’t do anything to change it. They believe this is what they deserve, and experience tells them not to hope for different, for better.

Jesus tells us as recorded in John 10:10: “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” One way the enemy works to steal, kill, and destroy is through counterfeits.

But God!

God has good and perfect gifts for our prodigals if they will just surrender to Him. “The thief” may have come “to steal, and to kill, and to destroy,” but Jesus came “that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (emphasis added).

There is even more hope found in 1 Peter 5:8-11, that even though our “adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour,” we and our prodigals can resist him! Want more good news from this passage? After they “have suffered a while,” God can “perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle [them]. To Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.”

They may be making really bad decisions now, settling for something God doesn’t want for them, but they don’t have to stay that way. We pray our prodigals will forget “those things which are behind and [reach] forward to those things which are ahead” and “press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14). God has other plans for them, “a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11), a future in which they are perfected, established, strengthened, and settled! After all, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17 NKJV).

Yes! “To Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.”