Slide 1
“Our son’s rebellion and subsequent legal problems have been the most immense loss of our lives and one we had no idea would or could cast such a profound shadow on these years. We talk about it daily and sometimes multiple times a day. I wake up to it, fall asleep to it … we dream in the night about them and their maybe one-day return and have nightmares about it getting worse with them. Just this morning, during our morning date, we asked each other: are we prepared should Bobby go to prison?” 

Slide 2
“I have heard my entire life that ‘marriage is hard work.’ And people also warned me about some of the stages of raising children: the sleeplessness of the newborn stage, the terrible twos and threes, and adolescence. But no one has ever openly discussed how challenging adult children are. No one! No sermons (not even mentioned during messages on the prodigal son, just a quick leap to God the Father and us as the prodigal), not in private small groups, not even close family friends. I understand that people don’t want to rain on the parade of young parents who are enjoying their children in that stage, but holy cow, one day you wake up and your kids are hurtful and brutal and you’re raw with pain, and it’s usually the first time you realize this happens to anyone and it’s you! Alone!”

Slide 3
Ephesians 2:1-3 “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts.”

Slide 4
· the world
· the devil
· the flesh

Slide 5
“Parent–adult child estrangement in the United States by gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality” by Rin Reczek, Lawrence Stacey, and Mieke Beth Thomeer, The Journal of Marriage and Family (epub December 2022).

28% of daughters and 24% of sons are estranged from their fathers
6% are estranged from their mothers

Slide 6       
Satan is constrained by human righteousness and unshackled by human cooperation.

Slide 7
Paul writes of “the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient” (Eph. 2:2).

Slide 8
There IS human agency against the devil IF WE EXERCISE IT:

James 4:7 “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
Ephesians 4:27 “Do not give the devil a foothold.”

Slide 9
Jesus:
“The prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me” (John 14:30).

Slide 10
Dr. Joshua Coleman

“This is NOT to say, abuse doesn’t matter, it does.
This is NOT to say, ‘You had it better than me, so get over it.’
“I’m saying that the adult child wouldn’t be on this earth were it not for the parent and that there is a debt that comes from that. Not the debt of tolerating abusive behavior but the debt of commitment to work on the relationship, develop empathy, compassion and clarity. That pathway is not just good for the parent, it’s good for the adult child. It’s good for our increasingly fractured, self-absorbed society.”

Slide 11
“For a son dishonors his father, a daughter rises up against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— a man’s enemies are the members of his own household. But as for me, I watch in hope for the LORD, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me” (Micah 7:6-7)

Slide 12
Mark 13:12b-13a
“Children will rise up against parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of my name…”

Slide 13
“From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (Luke 12:52-53).

Slide 14
From now on.

Slide 15
“How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or, how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?” (1 Cor. 7:16).

Slide 16
Dr. Joshua Coleman “Recent findings in child development and genetics show that children come into the world spring-loaded for action far more than anyone previously thought…This research shows that about half of the way that children behave has nothing to do with the quantity of affection and active listening and stimulating environments that we provide, and a lot to do with what that body builder, DNA, tells it to.”

Slide 17
· Siblings
· Birth Order
· Peer groups
· Teachers or close family members.
· Your child’s own giftings, or lack thereof
· Drugs/Addictions

Slide 18
Eph. 2:1
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live…”

Slide 19   
· Feel the pain
· Take the time you need to heal
· Know that you’re not alone
· While it is healthy to make amends and consider your faults, know that you are not ultimately responsible for your children’s character and faith
· Don’t walk through this alone
· Don’t stop praying
· Be eager to forgive and, when it is wise, reunite

I know a pastor of a large church seats about 1500 people. They sponsored a women’s conference. And at the end, the pastor just spontaneously felt led to ask women to come forward. They wanted prayer for what was happening with their adult children. And what happened shocked everybody. The front completely filled up with hurting moms. The women stacked up all the way almost back to the lobby. My agent was there. He also works with another woman who was speaking and she’s an author at that conference. And he asked, he goes, “Look, I, I think when I was growing up, you would have gotten a couple dozen moms, but this many? Have things changed that much?” And the author told him, Kurt, it’s way darker now. If we’re going through this family matter series and you feel like, man, it’s hard for me because I feel like my family is being ripped apart.

I just want you to know. And that’s the purpose of this morning and this sermon. It’s not just you. One of the most articulate friends I have sent this to me. Our son’s rebellion and subsequent legal problems have been the most immense loss of our lives. And one we had no idea would or could cast such a profound shadow on these years. We talk about it daily and sometimes multiple times a day. I wake up to it, fall asleep to it. We dream in the night about them and there may be one day return and yet have nightmares about it getting even worse. Just this morning during our morning day, we asked each other, are we prepared? Should Bobby go to prison? I wrote a whole book on this topic, just gave it to my publisher last month. It won’t be out until next August, but an early reader of it sent me this.

I’ve heard my entire life that marriage is hard work. And people also warn me about some of the stages of raising children, the sleeplessness of the newborn stage, the terrible twos and threes, of course adolescents. But no one has ever openly discussed how challenging adult children are. No one, no sermons, not even mentioned during the messages on the prodigal son, just a quick leap to God the father and us as the prodigal, not in private small groups, not even close family friends. I understand that people don’t want to rain on the parade of young parents who are enjoying their children in this stage, but holy cow, one day you wake up and your kids are hurtful and brutal and you’re raw with pain. And it’s usually the first time you realize this happens to anyone and it’s you alone.

After a horrific week of verbal abuse and threats to do harm to himself from their mentally ill 30-something son, Rachel looked at Lawrence and asked, “Is it going to be like this for the rest of our lives? Is it either him dying, which I can’t bear the thought of, or us enduring this hatred and wrath? Are those the only two choices?” I’ll never forget what Lawrence said to me. “Gary, I wanted to encourage my wife, but I honestly think this probably is our life for the rest of our life. “I Just couldn’t bear to say that out loud. If you’re feeling that family fracture, I just want you to know as a church here, we hear you and we feel you. You are not alone. Now I don’t want to freak out the younger parents. I’m sure none of this will ever be relevant to you, but I also want you to use it as one who’s speaking from the other side to hug those little ones when they still want to be hugged.

It’s a special time in life. I’ll never forget when my son was married the night before he got married. My wife had had this ritual with our son throughout high school and college where she would go in at night and give him a back rub as he would talk about his day. And so she went to see him the night before he got married and she came back to our hotel room and she is just sobbing. I mean, she’s just crying like,” What is it, honey? Did he say something? “She Goes,” No, it’s just, it, it’s the last time I’m ever gonna give him a back rub before he goes to sleep. “I’m Like,” Why would you think that? “She Goes,” Gary, I can’t imagine giving him a back rub while his wife is laying next to him. “Yeah, Okay. Probably missed that. And 12 years later, she was right.

Look, meriting, parenting can provide moments that we wanna remember for the rest of our lives. It can be so good, but many of you know parenting can also provide those excruciating moments that you wish you could forget, but you can’t. What I wanna say this morning is there is a reason for all of this heartbreak. Paul begins to open up the door for us in Ephesians chapter two verses one through three when he writes this,” As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. “All Of us lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. In this passage, Paul points out three things that were against us, our happiness and our spiritual health and not just us, but our adult children.

And those three things are the world, the devil and our own flesh. Now they’ve always existed, but I think I could make the case that in many ways, all three of these are worse than they’ve been in a long, long time. Let’s first look at the world. In short, the world has changed. Family dynamics are undergoing a monumental shift. When I was growing up, everybody just sort of accepted honor your mother and father, even if they weren’t the best, there was just a sense it’s what you do. At least they gave you life. Today in some circles of the therapeutic community, it seems to be protect yourself from your mother and father. And estrangement is the first strategy, not the last. There’s a woman whose mother abandoned her when she was four years old and that sends her to foster care. I mean, just some really awful things in her life.

Didn’t even hear from her mom for over three decades. Then her mom got in contact with her and she decided to meet with her and they began to build a relationship. And you might ask her, why would you do that when a woman abandoned you and left you like that? And her response was simple, she was my mom. I felt like it was the right thing to do. At least she gave me life. Imagine this mom’s frustration when a few years later her own daughter estranged herself from her. And, and, and she had never abandoned her, not for an hour, not for a day, certainly not for 30 years. She’d let her daughter cry on her shoul- shoulder. She had cooked her favorite meals and she was there when she had her own heartbreaks. But then it was all over some stupid political differences where she says,” It’s not safe for me to be around you.

“And This woman thinks,” Are you serious? I forgive my mom for that and you won’t be around me because of this? “Now, I grant that there are unhealthy parents out there that adult children need to be wary of. I even wrote about this in a book, When to Walk Away. “You Are not obligated to put up with continuing abuse, nor should you leave your children with unhealthy people even if they’re related to you.” I don’t take that back. But when I read of a 2022 study, it reveals by adulthood, 28% of daughters and 24% of sons are estranged from their fathers. That seems way out of whack to me. It almost seems like there’s some good news because it says only 6% of, , children are estranged from their mothers. But run the math, that still leaves five million mothers who today have no contact with their kids and many of their hearts are broken as a consequence.

See, it used to be I, I owe my parents because if nothing else, at least they gave me life. What I hear today is, I don’t owe my parents anything because I didn’t ask to be born, but they owe me everything because it’s their fault I’m alive. I, I, I don’t get it. They see life as a burden and they blame their parents. Life hasn’t turned out perfect for me. I face this pain. You laid the burden of life on me, so you owe me, but I owe you nothing. I can’t pretend to understand it. I’m just telling you, I hear it all around me. The world has changed. It’s why I wrote that book When Christian Parents Hurt: How to Find Grief, Face Grief, Find Comfort and Trust God with Your Adult Child. One of the people I interviewed for it was Gigi Graham, the daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham.

I’m not supposed to call her the oldest daughter. She said, “Call me the daughter. They love the longest.” , maybe not the most, but certainly the longest. She is just delightful. She’s wonderful. But she was talking about her prodigals and she freely admitted how superficial those issues seem compared to what parents face today. She spoke of, spoke of navigating things like her kids smoking cigarettes, being embarrassed as the daughter of Billy Graham when she said her son came home with a haircut that made him look like a rooster, , ripped jeans, boys wanting to wear earrings, which really bothered her back then until her mom, Ruth Graham, sent their son, her son, or grandson, her son, a box of earrings for Christmas telling Gigi, look, it’s not that big a deal. Just, just go with it. And, and it’s almost laughable to think of those as the big issues when you look at what adult parents face today.

Anxiety and depression that are off the charts. How many kids are medicated for that? Rampant drug use, LGBTQ issues, porn, suicide, social media, and frankly, just some really weird medical diagnoses that we didn’t even see 40 years ago. And it leaves many parents utterly dumbfounded about how to respond. Parents, you are raising your children in a hostile world that seems designed to corrupt them. It’s not the same. It is way darker now. The second thing Paul mentions is the devil. Maybe we don’t talk about this enough, but if we’ll put up the next slide, Satan is constrained by human righteousness. I don’t know if you ever thought about that, but that’s the good news. The bad news, he’s unshackled by human cooperation. Fewer people are resisting him today and more are unwittingly inviting him in. Paul writes in two: two of Ephesians of the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient.

The more disobedient people there are, the more people Satan has to work with. The good news is that there is human agency to resist the devil and suppress his work if we exercise it. James four: seven says, “Resist the devil and he will what? Flee from you.” Later in Ephesians, Paul will write, “Do not give the devil a foothold.” We can determine his ability to act. The problem is more and more people today are giving him a foothold. In the 1950s, about half of the United States would go to church or synagogue on a weekly basis. Today, that number has dropped to about 31%. I’m not saying that these people are worshiping the devil. I don’t think they realize what is going on, that when you don’t worship the true God, you are so led astray. You think this is good and it’s evil. You think this is true and it’s a lie.

And you unwittingly give the devil a foothold to run amuck in all areas of your life. And we’re seeing this happen today. Now, those of us who are in Christ, here’s the good news. You have no fear of what the devil is doing. Jesus proclaimed in John 14:30, “For the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me.” Yes. It’s why we find our refuge in Jesus. Satan has no hold over us if we are under Jesus and in Jesus and submitted to Jesus. But if people resist Jesus, whether they know it or not, they’re giving a foothold for his enemy to use them perhaps unwittingly, not always unwittingly, to wreak havoc on this world. Those who follow evil spread evil. And many are staying awake to claim our sons and daughters for evil. Some of these people are being voted into office, releasing legislation that is all but demonic.

They are teaching at our schools. Now we have many, many great Christian teachers, but it’s also a place of our society where people will strategically go to corrupt kids, not to teach them. They run the media empires. They make our movies. They sing the songs our children are listening to. Yeah, it is worse than it’s ever been in that regard. The third assault against our children that Paul addresses is in verse, chapter two, verse three, when he talks about gratifying the cravings of our flesh, following its desires and thoughts. Now this has always been true throughout the beginning of history, but there’s something different about it now. This is not hyperbole what I’m about to say. It has never been easier to gratify the untoward desires of our flesh than it is today. It is all around us. So many barriers to acting in a sinful way have been dropped.

Our children grow up in a world of digital sex. They don’t have to go to some corner of a neighborhood where they would have adult theaters. In fact, when I was growing up, you couldn’t buy a porn magazine unless you were, I don’t know how old, 16, 18, something like that. There was a little bit of limit. Now, kids have it in their phones. They, they look at it in their bedrooms. Drugs are legalized. You don’t have to go to a scary part of the neighborhood to find a drug dealer. You just walk into what looks like a normal store. It could be next to a Starbucks. There’s pocket gambling. You don’t have to go through a shady bookie that should wake you up. Do I really wanna do business with this guy? It’s just on your phone. You open it up. There’s materialism that has run rampant and more free time than ever before.

And I know I sound so old when I say this, but let me just say, when I was growing up, there was not a season in my life when I was not working or going to school. And, and, and even when I was a little tyke, I was picking berries in the summer, I was weeding a farm, whatnot. It’s illegal for a lot of kids to do that today. So with all of these opportunities to waste their time, they have more time, they have more opportunity, and then at night, they’re TikTok, doom scrolling, the, the endless streaming options of mindless entertainment like it’s never been before. There really are basically more opportunities to give in to the desires of our flesh and to shape our hearts and minds to crave that than ever before and less safeguards to keep us from doing that. It’s why I agree with the author who told my agent, it’s way darker now.

Now for the adult child who’s estranged, Dr. Joshua Coleman, who’s written some great things about this books and a helpful blog, he points out that there is in the therapeutic community, a new focus on a parent’s liabilities where they were weak and practically nothing on the parents’ contributions. All the good the parents do is downplayed and the faults are emphasized as if the model is perfect parenting, but there is no perfect home. The reality is every kid grows up a little traumatized because all of his parents are messed up. We were messed up, we messed up. We try not to, but we’re not perfect. When I hear from so many parents and they’re just, their heart is just exploding before me, they freely admit, Gary, I wasn’t a perfect parent. I’m like, “Shame on you. All the rest of us were.” No, I, I don’t say that.

But what happens now with the therapeutic community is you take normally imperfect families and you ascribe vicious psychological terms, not catching every practice, having to work maybe 50 hour weeks because your family really needs the money. Well, now that’s called neglect, normal discipline, not agreeing with your child, veining to say that maybe there’s another way of looking at that. That’s called abuse. And if the parent tries to push back against the narrative or say it may not have been the way you think, now that’s called gaslighting. Now, now here’s the challenge. I’ve written about all those. Neglect is awful, abuse, terrible. Gaslighting is real and evil, and we wanna reject it. But you know what’s happening in our society? The way those words are being transformed into something that they really aren’t. There is normal human failure and limitations, and that’s being weaponized with an agenda to rip families apart.

Dr. Coleman, in a very nuanced way, puts it this way. This is not to say abuse doesn’t matter. It does. This is not to say, look, you had it better than me, just get over it. I’m saying that the adult child wouldn’t be on this earth were it not for the parent and that there is a debt that comes from that. Not the debt of tolerating abusive behavior, but the debt of commitment to work on the relationship, develop empathy, compassion, and clarity. This pathway is not just good for the parent, it’s good for the adult child. It’s good for our increasingly fractured, self-absorbed society. I wanna offer a little pastoral perspective here. Parenting is hard. I do think it’s getting harder, but the challenges of parenting is by no means new. We can look back 2,000, 500 years ago, and the prophet Micah wrote this, “For a son dishonors his father, a daughter rises up against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

A man’s enemies are the members of his own household. But as for me, I watch and hope for the Lord. I wait for God, my savior, and my God will hear me.” This is good news for believers. Yeah, the world may be worse. The devil may be more active. Our, our desires may be more open to being manipulated and used, but God is greater than all of those. We don’t go through this without God. The world has changed. God has not. We’ll get into that in just a moment. Before that, I just wanna address the guilt. I just see it overwhelming God’s people. When adult children aren’t following the Lord, it’s not just grief, it’s guilt. Ariana is a good example of this. That’s not her real name, but she’s a classic case where her son was really going off the rails until finally she mentioned Jesus one time and he said, “Mom, I, I’ve had doubts about him for a long time.

Not even sure I believe in him anymore.” Said, Gary, my heart was bursting. I though, okay, fine. Go smoke pot, live with your girlfriend, but please, please don’t tell me that you’re not even gonna follow Jesus. She goes, Gary, what did I do wrong? I, I though I brought him to church. Should, should I have homeschooled? Was I too strict? Was I not strict enough? Tell me what I did wrong. And I said, Ariana, we’re not programming computers. We’re raising sons and daughters made in the image of God, and that image means the ability to make choices we can’t control. So I took her through Mark 12, Mark 13, 12 through 13, where Jesus, in context, talking to believers says, children will, children will rise up against parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because, not you are a bad parent, because of my name.

Look, there are glorious truths I could share as I did about communion, about our forgiveness. There’s some hard truths of the gospel. And Jesus isn’t faulting the parents. He’s saying that your children leaving you may be a consequence of you following me. After we talked through this verse, Ariana’s response was classic. She said,” I prefer the verse about train up a child in the way he should go, and in the end, he won’t depart from it.” <Laugh> We both laughed at that, don’t we all? But Jesus doubled down on the possibility for family division in Luke chapter 12, verses 52 through 53. “From Now on,” we’re gonna come back to that. “From Now on, there will be five in one family divided against each other. Three against two and two against three. They will be divided father against son, son against father, mother against daughter, daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

“What Does from now on mean? Jesus splits history. His allegiance is absolute. And he says,” From now on, things are gonna be different. People will follow me or they won’t. “Now, If everybody in the family follows Jesus and they worship God together, I fully believe, because I’ve seen it, it will bond your family together like nothing else. But if one member decides not to follow Jesus, they might find it uncomfortable being around somebody that shows them the light, that reminds them that they might be living in a way rebellious against God, and they just don’t wanna be a part of that. Now, we don’t wanna be jerks or obnoxious about our faith, but the reality is Jesus is saying here, he’s not blaming us. He’s warning us and telling you this is why it will happen. From now on, everything is different. He warns us.

Careful. This is a hard truth. 2,000 years ago, Jesus warned us that turning toward him may mean that some of our loved ones turn away from us. There are a million blessings about following Jesus, but sometimes there are difficult realities, which means modeling our faith is crucial and it does help. Kurt had a phenomenal sermon last week about expressing love and loving our kids and focusing on that. But the, the purest, highest love can’t guarantee that our loved ones will follow the faith. Our faith doesn’t guarantee our family’s faith. If it did, why would Paul have told the Corinthians in one Corinthians seven, look, if, if your spouse is an unbeliever, is an unbeliever and they decide to leave you, you should just let them go. And he explains why in verse 16, “How do you know wife? Whether you’ll save your husband. How do you know husband, whether you will save your wife?” Paul admits to early believers, “Yeah, model it, stay with them if they’ll stay with you, but you can’t make them follow you.

If they hate Jesus, they might end up hating you.” So I wanted Ariana to see, because this is the bi – thing behind so much guilt, the lie that it is perfect parenting that creates a perfect child. Can we go back to the beginning of time, the garden of Eden? God was the perfect parent. Adam and Eve lived in paradise. There was no sin, nobody bothered him, no pain, no sickness, and they rebelled. Do you think God said, “Oh man, I, what did I do wrong? What could I have given him that I didn’t give him?” Think of Jesus, perfect discipler of Judas. Every word was true. Every act was in love. He gave freely of his time, and Judas still betrayed him even more. Look at Jesus’ family. We know that James and Jude, two men who wrote books in the New Testament, did not believe in Jesus until after Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead and appeared to them.

Jesus was literally a perfect brother. Everything he did was done in love. Every word he said was true and delivered in the perfect tone and attitude. It wasn’t enough to convince his brothers until he appeared to them after he had died. Are we suggesting that Jesus was lacking as a brother? No, he was perfect in one sense. Jesus faced family estrangement himself.

Dr. Joshua Coleman points out that recent findings in child development and genetics show that children come into the world spring-loaded for action far more than anyone previously though. This research shows that about half of the way that children behave has nothing to do with the quantity of affection and active listening and stimulating environments that we provide and a lot to do with what that bodybuilder DNA tells it to. You can nurture all you want, but there is a lot of nature that comes with a child as soon as they’re out of the womb. Now added to this genetic reality, I’d never realized this. Coleman talks about how we think of parents influencing their kids. Have you ever thought about how your kids have influenced you? If you’re raising an angry, rebellious child, that changes you and it affects the relationship. If you’re raising a grateful child, that changes you and impacts the relationship.

It is two-way. It is not just parent to child. It is every bit as much child to parent. Other dynamics that influence the way your children turned out include the way your children’s si- siblings responded to their personality, their birth order, peer groups, teachers or close family members, your child’s own giftings or lack of thereof, were they celebrated and honored? Did they feel like failures, drugs or other addictions? Came across a depressing study that showed kids that would follow some of those violent games like one of the most popular Grand Theft Auto, if they’re spending hours a day watching that after three years qualifying for all of the environmental factors, these kids look like they came from abusive, neglectful homes, even if they came from loving, connected homes, that hours alone looking at these videos literally changed their personality in a way that no parent could overcome if that was allowed in The home.

Drug addictions, I’ve seen it time and again. What an addict does, we talked about that earlier this summer. So look, it is healthy to try to be the best parent you should be. I don’t want to discourage you for that. You matter, give it your whole heart and mind and effort. It is not healthy for you to assume that you are the only influence and maybe even more difficult, maybe even the primary influence in your kid’s life. There is a lot of things going on, even if we wish it wasn’t that way. I’ve seen it go both ways. A counselor in, in Houston told me of what he said, literally, Gary, the godliest couple I’ve ever met. Not only the way they acted, their demeanor, their tone, they were gracious. They brought the presence of Jesus with them wherever they went. Young people flocked to their house because they just had such an impact on everyone around them, but their son hated Jesus, estranged himself from them.

And he was so estranged that when the wife died, the mother died, it was almost a year before that son even found out. He was that estranged, even though he set a great example. On the other side, I think that Dr. John Stott may have been one of the finest churchmen of the last hundred years. His leadership, his books, his commentaries, his sermons. I’ve got his podcast on my phone, old John Stott sermons. Phenomenal. Was raised by Sir Arnold Scott, a noted physician and agnostic. He tried to undercut his son’s faith. He didn’t encourage it. He, he though it was wrong. He would try to make his son not believe. And so how does this work? Two godly parents that fear the Lord, not just in a fundy way, but in a gracious way. And their son goes off. And here’s a man who has nothing to do about Jesus and his son becomes one of the most powerful church leaders of the previous century.

It’s just the way it is. Now let me say, I wanna stay nuanced here. If you’re the adult child estranged from your parent for good reasons, I’m not judging you, but I wanna stress this. Having written the book When to Walk Away, I wanna stress walking away isn’t the same as writing off, right? There’s a difference between walking away and writing off. When Jesus talks about the father welcoming home the prodigal son and says that’s a good thing to do, we can apply that to say he would say the same thing when a prodi – when a good son or a good daughter welcomes home a prodigal father or a prodigal mother because forgiveness is the heart of what Jesus came to proclaim. Look, if it’s not safe for your children to be around your parents, please don’t leave your children with them out of guilt.

If you can’t endure being emotionally beaten up and you just need your space, take your space. That’s a healthy thing to do. But as Christians, we have a higher call than just our own psychological health. It’s reconciliation to show the work of Jesus in our hearts and the work of Jesus in the world. We don’t have to go the way of the world where we just break off from each other. Paul talks about this in Ephesians two: one. We go back to the start of it and he says this, “As for you, you,” what’s that word in italics? “You Were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live. “Paul’s Not talking about the world, the devil and our flesh is something we should be scared of. He’s proclaiming God’s victory over it. God is bigger than the world. God is more powerful than the devil.

God provides superior pleasures than anything our flesh craves. So Paul says that’s who we used to be. We don’t give into the way of the world. He wants us to see what’s going on, but he says in Christ, we don’t have to be slaves to it. There is a power that can bring our families back together. The forgiveness, the grace, the presence of Jesus Christ. Now I’m aware of how limited a 35 minute sermon is. I wish I could give you more. I’ve got this whole book, but it doesn’t come out till next August. There are some little snippets of early chapters that I put on my substack at connecttogary.com, but, , in the meantime, just to sort of stop the immediate bleeding, let’s look at this. I want you to feel the pain and I want you to know that we feel the pain.

This is what’s going on. Second, take the time you need to heal. Immediate reconciliation isn’t always the best thing to do. Know that you’re not alone. I’m just telling you as a pastor, I feel the pain. There’s so many people in this church going through this. Know that while it is healthy to make amends, ask for forgiveness and consider your faults, you are not ultimately responsible for your children’s character and faith. I wanna urge you not to walk through this alone. Don’t stop praying. Be eager to forgive and when it’s wise, seek to reunite. In the short term, we do have a six week class midweek. It’s taught by Mike and Sue Pew called Parents of Prodigals. Next year, Lisa and I are hoping to launch an ongoing ministry, not just a six week thing, but it’ll be more pastoral. There’ll be some teaching, but time to pray and share and cry with each other because we know that this is a real need.

When I was praying in here about this service, I felt like this sermon, it’s just the foundation that God has seen your herd. He wants to launch a ministry where Cherry Hills can be a place of reconciliation and just helping parents and young adults figure out what is going on. Last week I saw this very moving video. I, I love what the wife did. She knew her children probably didn’t understand how their dad grew up. She knew that they would see he’s not a perfect dad, but she wanted them to see how he was a different dad than what he grew up with. Watch this video.

Take one step forward if your dad has ever taken you to the park. Take one step forward if your dad has ever taken you on a vacation. Take one step forward if your dad has ever gone to any of your graduations. Take one step forward if your dad has always lived

With you.

Take one step forward if you remember your dad taking you to school. Take one step forward if you remember your dad ever hugging you, kissing you as a little king. Take one step forward if your dad has ever prayed for you and taught you scriptures. Turn around. Thank you, honey. Thank you for breaking your cycles.

We

Love you so

Much.

I felt it all week. There is so much hurt out there. Younger people, I know your parents weren’t perfect, but Dr. Coleman points out about how difficult it is to come from a background like that and to break the cycle. So in this series, let’s seek to do that. Let’s break the cycle. Let’s pour out the love, as Kurt talked about last week. Let’s seek to reconcile. And when there is brokenness, let’s let the forgiveness and grace of Jesus pull us back together. Father, you know alienation like no one else. We all went our own way. You were the perfect God. We rebelled. We ignored you. We sinned against you and you’ve brought us back. Lord, we’re sorry. Give us strength, hope, and joy to display the same grace that you’ve given to us to those that we’re called to love. Bring healing. Lord, make Cherry Hills a place where the hurting can come and find your grace and comfort and learn to trust you for our entire family.

We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.