Help! My Teen Is Abandoning Christ

Ask Pastor John

Desiring God

John Piper, Unknown, 163859, Pastor, Ask, Theology, Desiring God, Religion & Spirituality/christianity, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Questions

4.8 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2017

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If your child has turned from Christ, don’t despair. God loves to hear your prayers and can meet your situation with power.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Today's sobering question comes from a mother of a teenager who asks this,
0:05.0	hello Pastor John, what would you do if your 14 year old says she no longer wants to pray because she
0:11.4	is no longer a Christian? She doubts the existence of God and doubts that Christianity is any better
0:18.0	than any other religion. She considers the Bible to be true just for Christians, considers church
0:23.1	not essential, but she has to attend and attends politely because being part of a family that values
0:28.6	God and the things of God, that's what we do. Pastor John, as parents, how do we proceed wisely?
0:36.9	Maybe the most helpful thing I could do is recommend a book that meant a great deal to me
0:45.6	at one point in my own parenting when one of my children was in exactly this situation.
0:52.0	And the book is called Come Back Barbara by John Miller and his daughter, Barbara Giuliani.
1:01.5	I think his daughter was 18 when she ran away, moved out, got involved with a guy and wanted
1:09.6	nothing to do with the family's faith. And the book describes what her parents felt and did,
1:16.2	and then Barbara, who subsequently has returned, wrote responses to each of those chapters,
1:23.6	which gives the book an unusual realism for how parental efforts were coming across.
1:31.2	And maybe the second best thing I could do is to point this mother to an article my son wrote
1:39.3	after that period of wandering. And he wrote it and we published it at DG. It's still there.
1:45.9	I checked it today called 12 ways to love your wayward child. So the things that he felt were
1:54.3	significant while he was on his departure. But here are my front burner thoughts for right now.
2:05.1	One, realize that this is something you utterly and totally have no control over. Faith
2:12.2	is a gift of God. Perhaps a better way to say it would be that the eyes of her heart,
2:18.6	not just the eyes of her head, must see Jesus as true and beautiful and desirable in order to
2:25.5	be a Christian. And only God can open those eyes. That's the point of Ephesians 118,
2:31.9	to Corinthians 4, 6, 1 Corinthians 2, 13 and 14 Ephesians 2, 8. God does use parents and pastors
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Desiring God, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Desiring God and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.