“Children Gone Astray” – FBC Morning Light (7/3/2024)

Well, a good Wednesday morning to you and the eve of Independence Day. I trust you're going to have a good holiday. Some people celebrate stuff tonight with fireworks and all that sort of thing and then get the day off tomorrow.

Well, anyway, however you're celebrating the holiday this week, I trust it'll be a good time for you. Well, today in our Bible reading plan, we're jumping back to the book of Isaiah and reading the first couple of chapters and then also Micah chapter four.

Children Who Have Gone Astray and the Limits of Parental Blame

But when I read, especially Isaiah chapter one, I was reminded of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with an old friend that I ran into at a conference. I hadn't seen him in years and years, literally probably 30 years, but we were friends in high school.

We went our separate ways and just hadn't kept touch. Well, just accidentally, I mean, neither one of us knew the other would be at this conference and here we were. We ran into each other. And so we got catching up a little bit on life and family and so forth.

And as I got to talking with him and he's telling me about his family, I could see the countenance fall as he recounted how one of his children had completely abandoned the faith and chose to follow a homosexual lifestyle and had a boyfriend and was a guy with a boyfriend and they were living together and so forth.

And there were tears in his eyes and there was just a brokenness of heart. And I know other Christian families who've experienced the same thing. I know of a family who, a couple of daughters and one of them ended up marrying another woman and they too, just heartbroken over this because this was definitely not the way they were reared, the children.

They were reared in the church, they were taught the morality of God's Word, they made professions of faith in Christ at some point in their lives, and yet they reached adulthood and completely abandoned it.

And here's the thing about such a matter. I mean, there's an awful lot of this because there are plenty of books written from a Christian perspective trying to encourage and help parents whose adult children have left the faith or they've completely turned their back on the training that they received growing up.

And the thing about this is that there are always the critics, always the critics. There's the guy who will be very quick to say, this is your fault as a parent because the Bible says you train up a child in the way he should go and when he's old he'll not depart from it.

And look at what your kids have done, they have departed from it and so therefore it's your fault, you didn't train him up in the right way. And you know, a lot of parents really, really struggle with that and beat themselves up over it.

And on the one hand, you know, who's a perfect parent, you know? I mean, every parent I know, self-included, has made their mistakes and plenty of them. And the key, of course, is owning up to them and especially if they've involved the children directly, you know, you deal with the children and confess those mistakes and so forth.

But here's the thing, here's the thing, here's where Isaiah 1 comes in. None of us, as parents, are perfect and try as hard as we may and with a longing of heart to bring our children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

And as fathers do our best not to provoke them to wrath or to discourage them, we will fail from time to time because we're not perfect. And because of our lack of perfection, when the child strays, we can beat ourselves up.

I don't think we should do that. I don't think we should do that. Yes, we should do that if we have been absolutely hypocritical and, you know, overbearing, authoritarian, heavy-handedness. Okay, there can be some responsibility where we have driven our children away from God and from the faith, where they say, man, if that's what Christianity is, I don't want anything to do with it.

I get that. But that's not the majority of the parents who are distressed because of kids who go.

Isaiah's Description of Rebellious Children

Astray.

The majority have been parents who love the Lord and tried to rear their children rightly in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and they end up in distress and beating themselves up over their imagined failures.

Well, here's the thing I want us to see. In Isaiah 1, I want you to notice how God describes his erring people. In verse 2, he says, Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord, Yahweh, has.

Spoken.

I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master, a master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not consider. And in verse 4, he says, Alas, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, and then he describes them as children who are corruptors.

They have forsaken the Lord. They have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel. They have turned away backward. All right, so I have a question to the person who is quick to jump to the judgment conclusion of any parent whose children have gone astray, where the judge says, it's your fault, because if you would have trained them up in the way they should go, they would not have departed from it.

So you're the failure, all right? Are you going to level that against the Lord? Heavenly Father, I pray that those of us who, as parents, have experienced the heartache of children who have strayed from the faith, strayed from the teaching and the morals that they were brought up with, I pray that we would, in our hurt and anguish of heart, we would find encouragement in not jumping to the conclusion that it's all our fault, even as we see that your people, whom you call your children, have also forsaken their father and have rebelled against him.

Oh, Lord, I pray for any parent out there who hears this, who's struggling with this very issue, that you would just encourage them. Encourage them today from your word. We pray it in Jesus' name and for his sake.

Amen.

All right, well listen, have a good rest of your Wednesday, and I pray the Lord will bless.

You in it. Good day.