Is it your fault if your child is lost on this edition of Truth and Love?

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

I'm joined this week by Dr. Jim Neuheiser, who is the executive director of the Institute for Biblical Counseling and Discipleship

and a fellow at the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors. One of the most difficult problems that a parent can face is with a grown child who has

left the faith. They've walked away from the faith that maybe they professed as a child. Maybe they

never did profess faith and that has sort of solidified itself in adulthood. And parents can feel

guilty. They can feel ashamed. And one of the questions

that they face is, is it my fault that my child is not a believer? The question you raise, Heath,

is one that families have faced since the beginning, the very first family in history with Adam and Eve.

Their first two sons were Cain and Abel, and one served the Lord, honored the Lord, the other one, grew up in the

exact same family, same influences, no internet, smartphones, MTV, bad influences like that,

and yet Cain, because of the sin in his heart, rebelled against his parents.

Even when the Lord himself admonishes Cain, Cain will not listen, and he chose to rebel.

And so my understanding from Scripture, actually, is there are three factors that determine

how a kid turns out.

One is that we as parents have an influence on our children.

Trait up a child in the way he should go, and he is old, he will not depart from it.

And all these verses and proverbs that describe the responsibility we have in Ephesion 6,

to discipline them, to instruct them, to avoid provoking them to anger.

And so the faithfulness of parents in doing that is a wonderful influence,

and God so often uses that to save children. And you see Christian families who just rejoice

over children like Abel, who honor the Lord. But the statement in Proverbs, train up a child

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