Hi and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five day a week daily devotional where we share the word prayers in our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

Well, hello, hello. We are wrapping up another week's worth of shows on the Friday Five, Five word prayers daily around here, and you guys love this

Friday 5, which makes me so happy. Today on our list of 5 things, we're diving into a topic

a lot of you ask me to cover. How do you deal with a prodigal? Meaning, if you take out the

Christian lingo, a child who was raised in the faith, but for whatever reason, they leave the

faith and for the moment aren't returning to God. I know it's a deep ache for many parents, and some of us who may not

be in that place right now may find ourselves one day there, so we should pay close attention to

what approach to take when this happens, because we all know that while we parent children,

we are ultimately only responsible for one person,

and that's ourselves, right? All of us get to choose. All of us get to move away from God and faith if we want to.

And so I think the best thing as parents we can do is talk about how to help the best we can in our approach of a prodigal child.

You ready? Let's go. So let's get into it. Five ways to deal with a

prodigal in today's Friday 5. Number one, take the direct approach, talk to them. I think this is

the tendency of most parents, at least at first, we want to talk with our

prodigal and try to talk them into coming back to God.

While I do think we ought to be honest about what being away from the Lord can result in,

we need to shoot them straight about that.

I'd like us to try to remember that we must be wise in our approach and remember that the

goal is to endear them to Christ.

People choose what they desire ultimately. We all do, not what we're talked into or certainly

not what we're strong-armed into. Nobody really ever can accomplish anything with that.

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