Fighting despair in the Christian life

Despair, Family Disappointment, and Drifting Children

And I've felt this temptation, I think I felt all of them and at times given into them. But there are times you think of with your children, you try from the earliest days, perhaps you homeschooled or you chose a church that you felt would be a healthy environment for them.

And as they grow, and they're little, and they're memorizing their verses, and maybe you're using a catechism, and you know, things are, they just seem on a wonderful course. But as they get older, and they're allowed to make decisions on their own, you notice that their heart has no real attachment to Christ.

So you speak to them, and you pray for them, you redouble your efforts. And things get worse, not better. And then they go to college and they, you know, they become independent, they live away from home, maybe they get married, they get their occupation.

And every time you see them, you see more and more that they are drifting, even from the most fundamental moral codes of Christianity, of even of, you know, Judeo-Christian ethics. And they are more and more embracing the lies of the world, and your heart is broken.

Losing Confidence in the Gospel and the Spirit

And if you're not careful, you can, because of this sustained disappointment, you can begin to adjust your views of the scriptural truth, of the power of the gospel in the hands of the Spirit. And you say, well, it didn't work with my son, it didn't work with my daughter, maybe I haven't seen it work with any of my kids yet, or just a few of my kids.

And you can become bitter. Not a fatalist. You still seem to care. You're not indifferent. You're not blaming your own God in the sense that, well, it's up to God and He's not going to save them, so I don't need to worry about it anymore.

But the heart is still there, but it's there in a way that's broken and bitter. And you blame God for not using your homeschooling, and your church, and your catechism, and your Bible verses, and your bedtime stories, and your family worship.

And the kids still aren't converted, so you blame God, and you go off course. Let me give you one other wrong response, and this is very popular, and it's that since we lose confidence in Christ, in the truths of Christ, the boasts that we made in the gospel, we no longer boast so loudly.

The hope of the work of the Spirit in the heart of the unbeliever, we no longer talk about that so clearly. We've backed away from that without openly denying these things, and we have become enamored, really impressed with new tactics.

If you do this, your kids will love church. If you do this, your kids will embrace Jesus. If you do this, your church will grow. And you begin to use these, what Paul calls craftiness, adulterating the Word.

It doesn't mean you became a heretic, it just means you watered down some spots of the Bible which are offensive, and they don't seem beneficial to what you're trying to accomplish. Build a church, keep your kids happy with Jesus.

So you kind of de-emphasize and take the sharp edges off some passages, and you over-emphasize other passages, and you find that what we're going to talk about next week in chapter four, yourself, you find that you've lost heart.

Crafty Methods Versus Faithful Ministry

But instead of giving up like a fatalist or being bitter, you just switch tactics. You think, well, those old tactics don't work in modern day. So here's my new tactic. And what Paul calls that is choosing things that you should have put away.

You're doing things that you kind of hide, manipulative tactics that you're hiding because you're ashamed. If someone saw them, you would be ashamed. You're adulterating the Word, you're watering it down, you're being crafty.

And this is what we do when we lose confidence in the truths of Scripture and in the power of the Spirit to use our witness, our lives. But we do still care. We do still want to see people come to church.

We want to see the people in the church stay and grow. We want to see our children be genuinely converted, and we want to see them grow. We want to see the people we work with. We want to see the town that we live in, the soccer team parents that we sit next to two nights a week.

We want to see people helped. But having lost confidence in God, we despair and we choose other methods. I'm taking the time to reiterate these things because I feel that it's just so easy to do, and we are tempted that way all the time.