“This is the confidence we have in approaching God:
that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 John 5:14).

Much of prayer is wishful, hopeful, anxious, or desperate
praying. This text and the ones below are God’s conditions for answered prayer.

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything,
with prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to
God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your
hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).

“Until now you have not asked for anything in my name.
Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” (John 16:24)

“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to
go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you
whatever you ask in my name. This is my command: Love each other” (John
15:16-17).

“But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt,
because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.
That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord” (James 1:6-7).

“When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with
wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James
4:3).

“If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would
not have listened; but God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer.
Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!”
(Psalm 66:18-20).

Here are the explanations for unanswered prayer: doubting,
anxiety, wrong motives, iniquity in our hearts.

Here are the conditions for answered prayer: confidence, the
will of God, thanksgiving, believing, abiding and fruitfulness, in Jesus’ name.

We have all experienced answered prayer when we violated all
but the last one: “in Jesus’ name.” If God is that faithful to us, then we can
lean on His faithfulness. That is what faith is—trusting in the faithfulness of
God.

The preparation for believing prayer is: 1) a clean heart,
and 2) being saturated in meditation with Scripture. (Faith comes from hearing
the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.) Then
answered prayer will not be a surprise to us, as it was in Acts 12 to the
believers then.

This post coordinates with today’s reading in the Same
Page Summer Bible Reading Challenge. If you are not in a daily reading
plan, please join us at TotheWord.com. We would love to have you reading with
us.

by Chris Schlect

I
was recently* involved in a conversation regarding two distinguished,
voluminously-published theologians. Both are divorced; their wives left them
because they spent so much time reading, writing, and teaching that their
families suffered from neglect. I was also disappointed to hear of a pastor who
wrote a rather helpful book on child discipline, yet has a rebellious child.
All three of these men know their Bibles very well, but their lives have not
demonstrated practical godliness.

Practical
godliness lies at the heart of the Christian life. Knowing good and evil is important,
but it is not enough. Good must be practiced.

The
Scriptures speak of a difference between milk and solid food.
Milk is for the immature, and solid food is for the mature. We often associate
milk with simple, basic truth, and solid food with lofty theological concepts.
But Scripture denies any necessary correlation between godliness and vast Bible
knowledge. The men mentioned above could tell us much about the Bible’s
teaching on family life, but I would never recommend them as family counselors.

We
read in Hebrews that solid food belongs to “those who by reason of use
have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (5:14). The
difference between milk and solid food is practice. Truth doesn’t impact
lives when it is merely affirmed; it must be applied.

A
particular verse may be milk to one person and solid food to another; the
difference lies in how the verse affects lifestyle. When Paul tells the church
in Corinth that he feeds them only milk because of their inability to take in
solid food (1 Cor. 3:2), we should not conclude that his first letter to them
is full of fluff. Quite the contrary—it carries good instruction for both the
young and the mature in Christ. Through perseverance, the young will become
mature.

John
Calvin once wrote, “Christ is milk for babes and strong meat for men.” He was
correct. Every doctrine which can be taught to theologians is taught to
children. As we mature in Christ, we don’t move on to different, “deeper”
topics. The maturing Christian is the one who remains in pursuit of that which
he has sought from the beginning. Solid food always leads Godward. The Lord
remains the same; our lives change.

*Written in 1991.

Walking with God: A Puritan’s Perspective

Many years ago, my wife and I heard a message that we took
very much to heart. It was preached at our wedding. The message had been given
first more than 3,000 years earlier to a people who did not take it to heart.
It was part of Moses’ final talk to the new generation.

“Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them
as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your
children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the
road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of
your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children
may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many
as the days that the heavens are above the earth” (Deuteronomy 11:18-21).

There was very little application of this teaching by the
people of Israel in the Old Testament. I have also observed hundreds of
Christians, senior to me, contemporary to me, and junior to me. My observation
is that evangelical Christians seem to be able to rear children who are nominal
Christians or not Christians at all. Or if some of the children are clear
Christians, some of them are not. I realize that such a statement may bring
many letters from people whose children are walking in close fellowship with
the Lord. It’s worth making such a statement just to get such a barrage of good
news.

When I was
a child, I heard a saying that the preacher’s kids were the worst kids in town.
From my limited experience at that time with preachers’ kids, the saying seemed
to be validated. I remember one such kid. He was not a roughneck, but he sure
was obsequious and unctuous to all his acquaintances. From my self-righteous
view, I looked down on him.

When I
became a Christian years later, I looked back on my earlier years and came to
the conclusion that the preachers I had known were ultra-liberal in their
theology and that’s why their kids were not godly. It was a simple explanation
and may have kept me from being disillusioned with the power of the Gospel.
However, it was not a true explanation.

Over the
years, I have spent many hours with many Christian workers about the
waywardness of their children. These are mostly missionaries and pastors. I
have also spent many hours loving the children of other missionaries and
pastors.

In
addition, the Christian gossip circuit brings to our ears stories of children
of famous Christians who have gone astray. The empathy is great among the
Christians for other Christians who have rebellious children. The empathy is
there because they either have such children themselves or perhaps expect to
have such children.

There are
many explanations, and they may be right, at least in part. “The Jones’
children did not turn out because they sent them to the public schools. We will
send ours to a Christian school or to a Christian boarding school.” Still they
do not turn out right. In all of the empathy and sympathy there seems to be a
lack of hard scrutiny concerning the cause of the problem and a lack of action
taken to solve the problem.

In the
Deuteronomy passage quoted earlier, two things are very evident:

1. The
continuous presence of Scripture in time and place—really all the time and in
all places.

2. The
continual presence of the father with the children.

I think
there is a lack in the Christian home on both counts, but the greater lack is
on the latter. There is very little difference in the time spent with the
children by a full-time Christian worker and by a father in the world system.
In both cases it is very little time. If there is a difference, it is that the
Christian father has a “spiritual” justification for spending so little time.
He is busy serving the Lord.

It may
sound simplistic, but the basic causes of rebellious and unbelieving children
of Christian parents are:

1. Not enough
time spent with the children, or, if there is time with the children, it is not
loving time

2. Not enough
time spent with the Scriptures alone and with the children

Christian
workers will give their time in counsel, in love, in the Scriptures to anyone
in need outside of the family. Children must compete for time with their
father. In most cases they cannot compete effectively. In order to get
attention they have to act as evil as the people to whom their father gives his
time. Even then it does not work because the children have now disgraced the
Lord, their father, and the ministry.

From my
perspective there seem to be many Christian pastors who know that what they are
doing is wrong for the family, yet they keep on doing it. Or they have already
lost one or more children to the enemy, and they keep on doing what caused the
children to defect.

In Titus 1
and in 1 Timothy 3, the Scripture gives the qualifications for being an elder.
Among the qualifications are these:

“An elder must be…a man whose children believe and are not
open to the charge of being wild and disobedient” (Titus 1:6).

“He must manage his own family well and see that his children
obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own
family, how can he take care of God’s church?)” (1 Timothy 3:4-5).

Among
elders who hold to the inspiration and the authority of Scripture, I have
encountered ignorance of these texts, hedging and defensiveness; they thought
their call to preach had a higher authority than the text. There were too many
explanations why the situation in their home was not covered by these verses:

1. “Yes, the
children are not believers, but they are not yet adult. The text does not
apply.”

2. “Yes, the
children are not believers, but they are adult and no longer under our
authority. The text does not apply.”

3. “The texts
apply only to people who are to be appointed elders. They do not apply to those
already ordained.” (If so, is this true also for drunk, violent and quarrelsome
elders?)

4.         “Yes, I
believed that it applied to me, so I submitted my resignation to the church.
The church would not accept it and begged me to continue as their pastor.”
Normally there is much sympathy from the congregation because of the apparent
godliness of the pastor and his wife.

5. “I was in
much confusion about my position as an elder, so I sought counsel from older
men of God whom I respected. They assured me that they had children who had
been far away from the Lord for many years and that they had recently come to
the Lord. They encouraged me to stay in the ministry, and they would pray for
my children.”

6. “This is my
profession. I do not know how to do anything else.”

With very
few exceptions, in evangelical churches we do not find discipline of elders
based upon the belief and character of the elders’ children. The church members
or hierarchy would not take action because of a false view of, “If any one of
you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7)
and “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7:1). I do not think it
is realistic to expect churches to suddenly reverse an attitude that has been
operating a long time. If they suddenly began to make judgment on such issues,
it could happen without love and with bad attitudes. However, it is realistic
and right for elders to judge themselves. As it stands, we have very clear
teaching in the Scripture that is universally ignored and disobeyed.

While you
are rereading and praying over 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, look at all of the
requirements, not just those concerning children. Are you still as qualified as
when you were called to the ministry? If not, then confess and forsake your
sins and begin to obey.

If the
results of your unelderly-like behavior include such things as unbelieving and
disobedient children, then leave the ministry.

These are
the reasons you should leave:

1. If you have
succeeded in justifying yourself, you will not confess the sin, and,
consequently, you are not walking in the light. You are not qualified to be an
elder.

2. For the
church’s good: you are not qualified, even though you have been forgiven.

3. For your
children’s good: they will not have to compete with God (or what they think is
God) for your attention.

4. For your own
conformity to the likeness of Jesus Christ.

It is
likely that your children will turn to the Lord when they find that their
father is godlier, less busy, and more loving.

One of the
results is that you may be back in the ministry with power that you never had
before.

In Ezekiel
18, we are told that we will not be judged for our parents’ sins or our
children’s sins. We will be judged for our own sins. It is our own sins I am
writing about.

Early in
our ministry, when our children were very young, my wife and I made a decision,
a covenant or a very strong vow: if any of our children ever fit the
description of 1 Timothy 3 or Titus 1 and were wild, disobedient, unmanageable,
disrespectful, and unbelieving, we would leave the ministry that same day. We
have not had to do that.

We do not
seem to have many good examples of fathers in the Bible. Noah, Abraham, Isaac,
Eli, Samuel, David, Solomon, Jehoshaphat, and even Josiah were godly in certain
ways, but poor fathers. We do not have the examples, but we do have the
teaching and the promises.

As
much as possible, follow up on the letters by spending time with your
parents. Show them with your attention that they are valuable to you. When
you go home, express affection to your parents physically. Don’t do the polite
hug. Get into it. Really give them a squeeze. Maybe even a kiss! Just rock the
old man. Surprise your mom.

You may receive
a favorable response to your letters. If you do not receive a response, do not
think that you did something wrong. Be patient and keep on giving. Some
cultures (e.g. those of Northern Europe) are not expressive with their
emotions, except for lost tempers. This kind of expression from you may be
embarrassing for your parents. But they still want and need to receive this
expressed love, even if they do not know how to return it.

If your parents
are still alive, it’s not too late to do this. One man I know who is in his
late fifties wrote this kind of letter to his father. His mother replied, “I
have been married to your father for sixty years. When he read your letter,
that was the first time in our marriage I saw tears in his eyes.”

Some
years ago, my wife Bessie and I held a summer school of practical Christianity
at the Delta House of the University of Idaho. Respect for parents was one of
the subjects.  About forty students
attended. Because the class was big, I did not get to know everyone well and
did not know the effect of the teaching.

The
following fall, at a noon Bible study at nearby Washington State University, I
was teaching the same subject again, and one of the students spoke up. “I heard
this at the Delta House last summer, and I took action,” he said. “When I was
sixteen, my father kicked me out of the house and told me he would never see me
again. Later, I became a Christian and married a Christian woman, and now I am
a graduate student in economics. I had never seen my father since he kicked me
out of the house. This summer, I wrote two letters, one to my father, and one to
my mother. I didn’t know it, but my parents were on the brink of divorce,
living in separate bedrooms at home in North Dakota.

“It
took me several days to write each letter, so I sent them a few days apart—but
for some reason, the letters arrived on the same day, and both my parents were
home when the mail came. Seeing that the letters were addressed separately, my
mother took her letter to her room, and my father took his letter to his room.
After reading them, they came out and traded letters, and went back to their
rooms to read the other letter. When they came out the second time, my father
had tears in his eyes. He told my mother, ‘I’m flying out to Pullman to see my
son.’”

He
had seen his father between the summer school and the fall Bible study. It
saved his parents’ marriage.

Another
student who had recently graduated told me of the awful relationship he had
with his father, and I made this suggestion of writing letters. Some months
later, when I was speaking to another group on this subject, he spoke up. “Jim
told me to do this several months ago, but I wasn’t going to. I hated my
father. In fact, one day I was going to write to tell him what I really thought
of him and what a lousy father he had been. I had the entire letter in my head.
But when I sat down to write, instead of that letter, I wrote the kind that Jim
told me. My father got the letter, and he came down from Spokane immediately to
see me. He’s dying now, and I read the Scripture to him by his bedside.” It
reestablished the relationship.

If
you already have a good relationship with your parents, go ahead and write
these letters anyway. It won’t hurt. One young man I know did this, and a few
weeks later, he told me he had gotten a letter back from his dad. I asked him
what it said. “My father said that he wrote a letter like this to his
father when he was my age, and, boy, was it good to get one from me!” That is
your thousand generations, when you do it right.

What
do you do with disappointment? Another student wrote two letters to her mom,
the first about the love and respect, and a second one later asking for advice.
The mother’s response to the first letter was, “Why are you being so soupy?”
and the second reply was in anger: “Why do you need this information?”

You
can expect questions like this the first time around—so send more than one
letter. Likewise, if you come from a family that never hugs, the first time you
hug your father, he’ll stand there like a fencepost. It will be awkward. Keep
doing it. Hug him when you get home, but also, when you’re at home, hug him
every time he walks by.[1]

This
might make him ask, “What’s your angle?” or “What is this going to cost me?”

Say,
“Dad, do you really want to know? If you buy me lunch, I’ll tell you.” Get
together with him. Rather than being disappointed at his response, consider
those questions an opportunity to do more.

Tell
him, “Dad, here is why I’m doing this. I know you love me very much, but I have
had to take it by faith. You have not been the best expresser of your love. So,
growing up I did not think you loved me. You fed me and clothed me and housed
me and sent me off to school. I know that is love, but there’s more to love
than that, and I have needed more. You wondered why I got in trouble in high
school and college. It’s because I needed more affection than you were giving
me. I was boy crazy because I was looking for the male affection I was missing
at home. I don’t think you would want me to get it somewhere else now. I still
need my father, and you need me, so I thought I’d come home and prime the
pump.”

Here
is a very important caveat: if you tell your parents that you are giving them
affection because you did not get enough growing up, be careful not to say it
in an accusative fashion. What makes the difference is your attitude,
your heart, and your manner of speech. Don’t say, “Dad, you never loved me.”
Say, “I know you love me. And I love you. But I didn’t always know that,
and now I want to cause more love.” Say it in a helpful way. Some people will
still take it accusatively, but if you keep giving affection, they will know
better.

You
do not need to become a constant hugger if that is not your nature, but you
should go to the limits of your normal means of expression, which is probably
far more than your parents have been getting, and they do need it. If you keep
on giving affection after the questions you get back, you will soften your
parents. In a matter of weeks, months, or years (the timeline varies with
different people), you will see a real turnaround. Be patient, and keep on
showing love.

There
are two problems to take care of in your relationship with your parents—the
heart problem and the action problem. The heart problem is first. Only a true
heart repentance will 1) stop the curse, 2) cause long life, and 3) turn the
three or four generations of bad news around to a thousand generations of good
news. Your own unlove, your disrespect, and your ungratefulness towards your
parents have to be taken care of in repentance toward God. To write these
letters without being forgiven by God only ensures that your letters will be
insincere and hypocritical. You may have a long wait if you wait for your
father to turn to you first. You cannot afford the wait, so get right with God
now. After you are clean, write the letters. Then continue writing, calling,
texting, and visiting your parents, expressing respect, love, and thankfulness.

Doing
these things will change you. You will become a better husband, son, and
father, or a better wife, daughter, and mother. Your love and obedience will
bring love for a thousand generations.

“Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will
be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be
like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him
purifies himself, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).

“After that, we who are still alive and are left will be
caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so
we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these
words” (1 Thessalonians 4:17-18).

“He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming
soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).

You may have wondered what my eschatology is. I do not often
speak about it. These few words from the text summarize my anticipation:

Hope

Purifies

Encourage

“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”

This keeps me from differing with the saints on the order of
events at the end time.

This post coordinates with today’s reading in the To
the Word! Bible Reading Challenge. If you are not in a daily reading plan,
please join us at TotheWord.com. We would love to have you reading with us.

Here
are some suggestions for how to go about either reestablishing relationships
with your parents or making them better.

First,
write two letters home. Do not write, “Dear Mom and Dad.” If you write that,
who answers the letter? Mom. Dads are illiterate when it comes to answering
letters. In many cases, the father thinks that any communication is between mom
and the kids. He doesn’t think he ever gets a letter, even if it is
addressed to both Mom and Dad. So, write a letter to your father and a separate
one to your mother. Make them very clearly separate. Put on the outside “Dad
Only,” “Mom Only.” (Yes, I am suggesting sending actual letters in the mail. It
will mean more than an email.)

When
you write to your father, include at least five things.[1] I
recommend covering one element per paragraph as follows:

1.
Tell your father how much you respect him. If you do not respect him, do
not write the letter until you do respect him. You must not be hypocritical.
But not respecting your father is not one of your options. How can you do it?

First, confess
this disrespect for your father to God. Your father is to be honored because he
is your father. God has commanded you to honor him. It is not optional. If you
do not honor him, then you have sinned. The same is true with your mother. Sin
is forgivable, and repentance is required.

Now
with freedom and sincerity, write to your father how much you respect him. If
he is not respectable, make sure you are not being dishonest. It would be a lie
if you said, “I respect you for divorcing Mom, for being a drunk, for…” No.
Don’t respect him for anything other than being your father. “I respect you as
my father.”

2.
Tell him how much you love him. 

If you do not love him, that has to be corrected first. You
might object that you would have loved him if he had loved you first, but he
didn’t. I’m sure that is true, and he should have loved you first. As a father,
he should have loved you so that your natural response would have been a loving
one. But we cannot go back to childhood and start over. Even if we could, that
does not guarantee that your father would do it any different the second time.
We address the problem from where we are, not from where we should be.

One
of the reasons your father didn’t love you may be because he had never
been loved. You are turning that around.

If
you had to answer for your father, would he say that his father loved him? I
have asked many college students this over the years. The answer I usually get
is, “No, his dad didn’t love him. He’s told me all the fights they had.”

Next,
would he say that his wife loves him? No, mom doesn’t love him. Would he say
that his children love him? No, he doesn’t think his kids love him. Would he
say that God loves him? He doesn’t know God; he’s not a Christian.

Do
you meant to tell me that your father doesn’t think God loves him, his father
loved him, his wife loves him, or his children love him? And you wonder why he
drinks too much! He sees that everyone who should be close to him does not love
him.

“His
perception is wrong. We do love him, and God loves him.”

That’s
not what I asked. Does he think that you all love him? No.[2]

So
here we have a person who couldn’t love you first because he has never
been loved. He doesn’t know how to love.

I
used to ask this question when speaking to a crowd: “How many of you know that
your parents love you?” Ninety-five percent would raise their hand.

Then
I would ask, “How many of you think they expressed it to you adequately?” Only
half of those hands would stay up.

“Of
those who think it was expressed adequately, how many could have used more
love?” Everybody’s hands stayed up. Nobody gets enough love at home,
even when love is there.

You
are now an adult, and as a Christian you have unlimited access to love and
forgiveness—a love that your family does not have if they are not Christians.
If you are waiting for them to love you first, you’ve got it all backwards. You
are now the source of love for your family. You are the vehicle to love your
parents. Straighten out your unlove for them with God. As a Christian, confess
this lack of love to Him. Is it sin? Yes, it is sin. It is disobedience to the
command of God. We have been commanded to love our neighbors, love the
brothers, and love our enemies. Your father fits into one of those categories.
Confess this lack of love and forsake it. After you have confessed and have
been forgiven, choose to love your father.[3]
This love requires expression, so tell him in this paragraph.

3.
Tell your father how grateful you are to him. You may be grateful for a lot
of things. Enumerate them. Or you might have to go back to preschool days to
think of something. Think of it and thank him. Go back to some nostalgia; tell
him how much you appreciated sitting on his lap when you were three, or the
fishing trip you had that one time. If you are not grateful, then as with
respect and love, it is your problem, not his. The procedure is the same.
Confess your unthankfulness to God. When you are forgiven, express your
thankfulness to your father.

After
I had been teaching this for years, I wrote a letter to my mother. (My father
had already passed away.) Most of it was just news, but I put one last sentence
in of gratefulness and praise to her, and she called on the telephone to talk
to me about it. Nobody gets enough! Start expressing respect, love, and
thankfulness.

These
elements are necessary and required. The next two are suggestions for further
ways to convey respect.

4.
Ask your father for his autobiography. He probably won’t write one, but he
will be glad that you want to know about him. If you live near your parents,
you can ask your dad for this in person. One young woman told me she couldn’t
write home because her parents lived in the same town. I told her to just ask
him. So she asked her father for his autobiography, and this man who is
normally extremely quiet talked for four hours. She asked, and he was so glad
to be asked.

5.
Ask your father for advice, in general and on specific matters. This is
part of honor. Has he given you advice before, and you didn’t like it?
Unsolicited advice is generally much rougher than requested advice. It is
rougher on you because you didn’t want it, and it is given rougher
because you didn’t want it. But when you request advice, the person is usually much
more considerate, much more thoughtful, and the advice will be better.

Ask
for counsel, and be open to it. You might be really surprised at the advice you
get. There are very few parents who are not concerned about the direction their
children go and what they do. When you ask, you might find that they were just
waiting to be asked, and they will be considerate.

If
you are still single, this is especially true regarding anyone you are dating.
Ask your father what he thinks of this guy/girl. You may hear things you don’t
want to hear. When you do, you had better listen. Even if your father is not a
Christian, he’s been around a while. His answers may be sheer prejudice, but likely
they are not. He knows you, and he knows people, so pay attention. If he
dislikes the person you are going with, go slow. Even if this man or woman is
absolutely right for you and you both know it, it is not right until your
parents also know it. It is wise to go slow even if you are right and
they are wrong.

Some
parents will say it doesn’t make any difference to them what you do, and you
should just do what you want. Don’t believe them! They think that is the proper
thing to say because you are an adult. Ask them, “If you were going to
give me advice, what would you want me to do?” If they still don’t give you
advice, but you know your parents well enough to figure out what they think,
pay attention to that, even if they are not willing to tell you outright.

Your
father may not answer the letter you have written him, but he will almost
certainly read it more than once, and he will not throw it away. If you have
Christian siblings, tell them what you are doing and encourage them to do the
same thing.

Next,
write the same kind of letter to your mother, but with one change. The first
paragraph should express your love to her, and the second para­graph should
communicate your respect. Both sexes of the human race need love and re­spect
from both sexes. But of the two, women need love more than they need respect,
and men need respect more than they need love. Tell your mother how much you
love her; then tell her how much you respect her. The rest of the letter can
follow the same pattern as the letter to your father.

Honor your father
and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is
giving you. (Exod. 20:12)

Our
country is full of broken families. Whether you are a Christian or not, from a broken
family or a whole one, God calls you to honor your parents. The apostle Paul
tells us this “is the first commandment with a promise—‘so that it may go well
with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth’” (Gal. 6:2-3).

Your
relationship with your parents affects your relationships with your spouse and
children. If you are not yet married, a good way to prepare for those future
relationships is to reestablish a good relationship with your parents.

The
Ten Commandments give us two statements that relate to this. The first is the
Exodus quote above. Here is the second:

You shall not make
for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth
beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them;
for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin
of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but
showing love to thousands who love me and keep my commandments. (Deut. 5:8–10)

God
says that He will punish children for the sins of the fathers to the third and
fourth generation. This has stumbled and troubled people for a long time. How
can a just God punish you for someone else’s sin? The answer is that He does
not.

Yet you ask, “Why
does the son not share the guilt of his father?” Since the son has done what is
just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely
live. The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the
guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The
righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness
of the wicked will be charged against him. (Ezek. 18:19–20)

God
does not hold great-grandchildren responsible for what great-grandfather did.
Ezekiel says very clearly, “The soul that sins shall die” (v. 20). The person
who is in sin is the one who will be held accountable.

What
the Deuteronomy passage is saying is that sin flows downhill—and it does
so for three and four generations. Look at your parents and grandparents. Can
you see how you are affected by the things your parents did, and how they were
affected by your grandparents? The sinful influence of our ancestors affects
us. This is generational bad news.

However,
the sentence in Deuteronomy does not end with verse 9—it continues with
something more wonderful. “But showing love to thousands who love me and keep
my commandments” (Deut. 5:10). God punishes the children for three and four
generations, but He shows love to thousands—not just thousands of
people, but thousands of generations. “Know therefore
that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of
love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his
commandments” (Deut. 7:9). Sin and hatred of God cause downward movement
to three or four generations, and obedience and love of God cause upward
movement to a thousand generations.

How do we turn our lives from three and
four generations going downhill to a thousand generations going uphill? If you
are part of a broken family, the solution seems obvious: get converted, leave
home, and marry a Christian. That should turn it around, because you are not
going to do life the way your parents did, right? You are going to love God and
keep His commandments.

Certainly, a major part of the solution
is to become a Christian, keep God’s commandments, and marry a Christian who also
keeps His commandments. You must do those things. Without them,
you can expect more bad generations.

However, although these actions are a very important part of
the generational turnaround, they alone bring no automatic guarantee of halting
the curse. We still have the descending promise of three and
four generations, and leaving to establish a new home does not change that.
Even if you have no contact with your parents, you carry those relationships
and the effects of them with you into your marriage. I have heard this
many times: “I decided I was not going to be the kind of father (or mother) who
raised me. I would become a Christian, marry a Christian, and do it right. I
became a Christian, married a Christian, and I am doing it wrong, just like my
parents.”

Leaving your parents is not the answer. What
you need to do is to reestablish relationships with your parents. When
you get married, you will have children, and those children are going to need
grandparents. If you are estranged from your parents, your children will be
deprived of a very important part of their growth. They need grandparents; they
need aunts and uncles; they need cousins. The entire family is important. In
fact, the family is more important than the church. God created the
family first. Of course, the best family is a Christian family, but your own
extended family is what God speaks of and gives examples of in the Scripture.

My family holds regular reunions. The
year my mother was eighty-four, her six sons, their wives, their children, and
their grandchildren all met for a reunion in Moscow, Idaho. To see how all the
children and grandchildren got along with each other was great. It was a
wonderful time, and it was very important. Every family needs this.

If
you are in the second or third bad-news generation, you do not have to wait through
more bad generations. Tt is possible to turn the descent around now. But unless
you change your relationship with your parents and grandparents, you will have
to wait two more generations. (And preaching the gospel to your parents does
not change the relationship. It needs to be repaired first.)

About
400 years before Christ, the prophet Malachi gave a negative conditional
prophecy: “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and
dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their
children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come
and strike the land with a curse” (Mal. 4:5-6).

The
angel Gabriel alludes to this prophecy in Luke 1:17: “And he [John] will go on
before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the
fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous,
to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Notice that to stop the curse from
happening, hearts must be turned both ways.[1] Unless
you do this, you are asking for another generation of bad news. You cannot
expect to be a good husband or a good father, a good wife or a good mother, if
you have not turned your heart to your own father and mother.

Because
we have not obeyed God’s command to honor our parents, we may be in the third-
and fourth-generation promise, and we will not live long on the earth (cf. Eph.
6:1). The land is in danger of being smitten with a curse. The Malachi text is
a call to repentance, a turnaround of the heart.

We can turn our family around by obeying
what the Ten Commandments tell us: Honor your father and your mother (Exod.
20:12). We are promised that a thousand generations of blessing come from
keeping God’s commandments, and this is one of them. If you want to turn the
flow around, this is primary.

How
do you honor parents who are not honorable? You may have parents who are
divorced. You may have a father who left home before you were born, and you
don’t even know him. You try to get in touch with him, and he does not want to
know you. How do you honor someone you don’t know? How do you honor someone who
is an alcoholic, mistreats his wife, or mistreats his children?

The
Scripture says to honor your father and mother because they are your father and
mother, not because they are honorable. When God tells us to love our
enemies, does He mean that our enemy is lovely? Does he have to deserve
love? No. Love is based upon the person who does the loving. Likewise, honor
has to do with the person doing the honoring, not the person being honored.

Do
you know any children who have been mistreated at home? How do they act in
school? Poorly. On the other hand, if children are treated with respect at
home, how do they act in school? Generally, they do well. If you want to make
someone unrespectable, treat them with no respect. The opposite is true
as well. Just as love makes people lovely, respect causes them to be
respectable. As Christians, we do not honor, love, and respect people because
they deserve it; we do it because they need it. Fathers and mothers need
it. “No, they’ve got to earn my respect first.” No, they don’t. If you want to
turn your family around, then you obey God’s command: honor your father
and your mother. If you have not honored them, confess that as sin first and then
choose to honor them.

Based upon the Word of God, if you are in a homosexual
relationship, you are either a very disobedient Christian, or you are not a
Christian.

Things that would indicate that you are not a Christian are the
complete absence of a sense of guilt and your current manner of life.

The points for being a Christian are your conversion, if you
have had one, and any previous record of Christian living.

Galatians 5:19-23 gives us two lists: the works of the flesh
and the fruit of the Spirit.

“The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality,
impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy,
fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness,
orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like
this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and
self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

Which list describes you? The first list is descriptive of
things a man does, and the second is description of things a man has
or is. The second list is not a personality description. It is the fruit
of the Spirit. Regardless of your temperament or personality, these things will
be evident in your life.

Concerning the physical sexual relationship, God made man
and woman. In the beginning, He made one of each, and He has been making 50% of
each ever since. That comes out to one apiece. God made reproductive organs
which are pleasant means to express love and reproduce. Because God made
the sensation pleasant, man has made the pleasantness an end and
has prostituted it outside of God’s moral law. He has done this in many ways:
adultery, fornication, multiple wives, concubines, prostitutes, male
prostitutes, bestiality, homosexuality, etc. All of these are outside of God’s
moral law. Some of them are outside God’s moral law but still within His
natural law. For instance, divorce and remarriage is outside of God’s
moral law but still within natural law.

Homosexuality is outside of both God’s moral law and His
natural law.

Concerning emotional friendship with another man, that is
biblically alright. Jesus and John, David and Jonathan are two biblical
examples of close friendships. When these close friendships become exclusive,
become sexual, or replace a wife, then they have gone beyond the legitimacy of
man-to-man friendship.

Adult magazines and online content get used for vicarious
sexual satisfaction. You might justify this as innocent release. When you do
this, the enemy sets you up for a fall. Sex outside of God’s moral and
natural laws and outside of vows to a spouse cannot be called a deep
friendship. If you keep doing this, the result will be your “conscience being
seared as with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2). The nerve endings of your conscience will
not work anymore. They do not conform to the teachings in the Scripture. You
are allowing your conscience to determine right and wrong, and it does not work.

Read the first nine chapters of Proverbs. Although they
speak of a woman (adulterous) instead of a man, the truth is the same.

If you are married, your vows to your wife are sacred.

“Drink water from your own cistern,
    running water from your own well.
Should your springs overflow in the streets,
    your streams of water in the public squares?
Let them be yours alone,
    never to be shared with strangers.
May your fountain be blessed,
    and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
A loving doe, a graceful deer—
    may her breasts satisfy you always,
    may you ever be intoxicated with her love.
Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife?
    Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman?

For your ways are in full view of the Lord,
    and he examines all your paths.”

(Proverbs 5:15-21)

“Another thing you do: You flood the Lord’s altar with
tears. You weep and wail because he no longer looks with favor on your
offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. You ask, ‘Why?’ It is
because the Lord is the witness between you and the wife of your youth. You
have been unfaithful to her, though she is your partner, the wife of your
marriage covenant. Has not the one God made you? You belong to him in body and
spirit. And what does the one God seek? Godly offspring. So be on your guard, and
do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth. ‘The man who hates and divorces
his wife,’ says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘does violence to the one he
should protect,’ says the Lord Almighty. So be on your guard, and do not be
unfaithful. You have wearied the Lord with your words. ‘How have we wearied
him?’ you ask. By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord,
and he is pleased with them’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’” (Malachi
2:13-17).

Read these paragraphs over and over until you think God’s
thoughts after Him.

1 Corinthians 7:3-5 says, “The husband should fulfill his
marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body
does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the
husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive
each other except by mutual consent and for a time so that you may devote
yourselves to prayer.” Your body belongs to your wife, and you are
depriving her.

If you have children, you cannot fulfill your responsibility
to them as their father. For children to grow up secure, they must see the
closeness of their father and mother. Also, if they respect you and know
what you are doing, they may wish to follow suit. And to be consistent, you
should be able to endorse their homosexuality, which you cannot do. If they
know you are a Christian and are immoral and do not honor your marriage vows,
they could well reject Jesus Christ. And it is more likely that because they
will not be getting enough affection and attention from their father
they will seek other male affection. The result will be that they will be taken
sexually in junior or senior high school.

You cannot go only on feelings. You must go on God’s
absolute standard of right and wrong. Choose to turn away from
homosexuality based upon truth, not on subjective feelings nor on cultural
standards. Guilt is not about how you feel. Repentance is an act of the will
based upon turning from real guilt.

Leaving your homosexual partner is a must in the
repentance. Do not buy the lie that he will be hurt, as if that were primary.
That was not important to you in leaving your wife and children.

Hedonism, a life of selfish pleasure, is where you are and
where you are headed. You must turn around.

1 Corinthians 5 requires that you be removed from the body
of Christ and turned over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the
spirit may be saved. This is not to be done if you are repentant.

If you are a Christian, that means accepting the Word of God
as your authority. Do not accept an interpretation of the Word from someone who
is violating the Word. Do not accept a justification for murder from someone
who has committed murder, nor on divorce from someone divorced, nor on
homosexuality from someone who is practicing homosexuality.

An attraction to the same sex is no basis to practice
homosexual acts any more than an attraction to the opposite sex is a legitimate
reason to practice heterosexual acts.

You know that God loves you, and that Christians in your
life love you. Accepting or endorsing your sin would not be love for you.

by Bessie Wilson

Victorious
Christian living means walking in obedience to God in all areas of our life.
Obedience is something not many Christians are interested in. We dismiss the
commands of Scripture with spiritual words and nuanced arguments of why we
don’t need to obey a command that seems difficult, instead of simply asking,
“How do I do this?” If we want to live a victorious life, we must be committed
to obeying God with everything we are: physically, mentally, morally, socially,
and spiritually.

Physically.
Physical obedience means recognizing God’s ownership of your body. This relates
to your marriage as well. Are you withholding physically from your husband?

What
if it’s hard? You don’t love him anymore, or you’re tired, or you’re just not
in the mood. “I can’t; not tonight.” I come up with the same excuses, and the
Lord used a verse about the man with the withered hand to show me the way. One
Sabbath, Jesus went into the synagogue, and there was a man with a withered
hand there. Jesus told him, “Stretch forth your hand” (Mark 3:5).

What
could the man have said? “I can’t—it’s withered!” That’s what we women
sometimes say. “My emotions are withered—I can’t!” The Lord says, “Stretch
forth your hand.” What did that man do? “He stretched it out,
and his hand was completely restored” (v. 5). God’s commands are His
enablings. If He tells you to stretch out your hand in love to your
husband, He will enable you to do it.

Don’t
give in to your feelings when it comes to the spiritual life. We should say,
“God commands me to respect; I will respect. If He commands me to love
physically, I will love physically.”

Mentally.
Christians should be alert and thoughtful and should use their brains. Have you
ever been bored by a fellow Christian woman, so bored you felt like going to
sleep? Single women, don’t denigrate your brains. The right man will appreciate
them.

What
if people don’t have much mental equipment? God saves the entire body, and He
can make you think. Help me to think, Lord. You don’t need to be constantly
running to counselors if you just use your noggin. Let me encourage you to use
your brain and be creative, in your homes, at work, or at school, wherever God
has put you. Be creative. Before you go to bed tonight, ask the Lord to make
you creative in your mental processes. He can do it.

Morally.
If you are living with a non-Christian or a defeated Christian, your moral
standards have probably gone down. That’s just a fact. There’s
no such thing as a plateau in the Christian life. You are either going up, or
you are going down. So, be very scrupulous with your morality. Your husband
should be able to trust you. Proverbs 31 says, “The heart of her husband doth
safely trust in her” (v. 11 KJV). I’m amazed at the number of jealous Christian
husbands I’ve known. They couldn’t trust their wives out of sight! If you have
been living with a non-Christian man, you may have allowed things to be slipped
under the rug. Take a stand on moral issues. I don’t mean become a raving
moralist. But it is refreshing to meet someone who quietly speaks up for morality.
Let me encourage you to do this.

Men
want to marry Christian women. Even non-Christian men want to. When they
decide they’re ready to settle down, they want a clean, good woman. That’s why
it is so dangerous for girls to be impressed with a man because he is nice or
loves classical music and so on. He may be a non-Christian man looking for a
good woman.

Socially.
Are you a social creature, or are you naturally shy? When Jim was still in the
Navy, he told me one time that we had to go to the captain’s cocktail party,
oh! it was stressful for me. A former missionary, going to a cocktail party? I
was heavily pregnant with Doug, and you’re not at your best at classy social
occasions when you’re heavily pregnant. I had to look on it as a social
witnessing opportunity.

We
got to the marine club in San Diego and met the gorgeous captain’s wife, and
she was so gracious and sweet. Then I was introduced to some of the other
women. I stood beside one woman, and she immediately said, “I don’t really want
this drink; I just drink it for the olive in the bottom.” My fame had gone
before me—they knew I had been a missionary! I was an embarrassment to some of
them. Jim had said, “We don’t have to stay very long. After a while, they’ll be
so tubed out that you can’t say anything to them, anyway.” So it was. We left
early, and the next day the captain’s wife made her way to my place. She told
me how those fellows had gotten drunk and wrecked the club, and the captain had
to pay for all the damages.

Socially,
a Christian should walk into any situation with their head high, and say, “I’m
a child of God.” The best person who ever did this was Helen Palm. Her husband
was a colonel in the army in Washington, D.C., when Jim and I first came to the
States from Japan. What a couple! He conducted Bible studies in the chapel, and
Helen did her best evangelism at cocktail parties. She could point to woman
after woman that she had led to the Lord. “I just get them to the side, and I
take their wrist, and I talk to them.” One woman was so impressed with this
method that she gave Helen a thick silver bracelet, “Because you held me so
often by my wrist and talked to me of the Lord.” What a gracious,
socially-alert woman she was! She wasn’t embarrassed about being a Christian.
She went everywhere bubbling over with the joy of the Lord.

The
Palms would also give Bible story books to new parents they knew. The parents
would read to the children, the children would ask questions, and the parents
would go to Col. Palm’s Bible class to find the answers. Together they led
scores of people to the Lord.

I
met some of the ladies that Helen led to the Lord, and they were sophisticated
women. I had been timid about approaching high-society women when we were in
Japan. In chapel there one day, Jim had pointed out a woman sitting a couple
rows ahead of us. “That’s the couple that might come to our Bible study.” I
looked at her, just from the rear, and I thought, “Whoo! What a cool cookie!”
Everything about her was immaculate—every hair was in place, her earrings were
perfectly straight. I was intimidated.

Her
husband came to the first Bible study alone. He went home and said, “Arlene,
you have to come, too, because Mrs. Wilson was there.” She had said it was only
for men. So they came together the following week, and it was just the four of
us. Jim and I did what was very embarrassing to us, a Bible study back and
forth to each other, because those two didn’t say anything! We were on 1 John 1
that night, so Jim and I studied it together in their presence. I was so
embarrassed. Then they went home.

Later,
Arlene drove me along the bluff in Yokohama. She put her head down on the
steering wheel (when the car was stopped!), and she said, “Bessie, that night
after the Bible study, nine years of bitterness was poured out before the
Lord.”

She
was a backslidden Christian. Her first husband had died in the Air Force. They
hadn’t been married long enough for him to change his insurance over to her.
His mother got everything, and Arlene didn’t get anything. She had gone through
nine years of bitterness over it.

Then
she married Dick. He was not a Christian, but he was willing to be led in
spiritual things. She knew the truth, and she wanted him under the sound of the
gospel, but didn’t want him to take it seriously. Then after coming to our
Bible study she repented and poured her bitterness out to the Lord.

Dick
told us later, “If I ever invited anyone home for dinner, the banging that went
on in the kitchen!” She knocked pans around and put up a fuss. Arlene had to
have two weeks’ notice if anyone was coming over. Then everything changed.
“After that night when she confessed her bitterness to the Lord, I had a
different wife.” She became the woman would collect strays after church and
take them home. She might have a dozen or more people home to eat every Sunday.
She lost the cool, poised look and became a warm, friendly person. God
transformed her socially. But it was the confession of sin that started it.

Spiritually.
This is the last aspect of victorious Christian living. Of course, the aspects
are all connected. What you are doing physically is going to affect you
spiritually, and if your mind is all screwed up, you’re not going to be
spiritually alert, either. The main thing to keep yourself in good spiritual
shape is to keep close to the Lord. Be in the Word and in prayer every day.

I
would like to end this chapter with a prayer of Amy Carmichael’s. It is a
simple prayer. “All I need, all I want, is Your ungrieved presence with me,
Lord.” That is profound. All I need and all I want is Your
ungrieved presence with me, Lord. Can you pray that today?

At
the time of this writing, I have been a Christian for fifty-four years. It gets
sweeter all along the way. I identify with the Psalmist who said, “Whom have I
in heaven but Thee? There is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My
flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my life and my portion
forever” (Psalm 73:25-26). All I need, all I want, is Your ungrieved presence.

If
you are not unequally yoked, but you know women who are, there is much you can
do to help them. But don’t get too sympathetic with them. If they have married
out of the will of God, say so. And say, “Confess this, be forgiven, and
let’s get on with the solutions.” Do not get sucked into a never-ending
“counseling” where you hear the same old story over and over again and never
get anywhere. Give them positive reinforcement for living an obedient life.
“You did a good job with that one! Now let’s go on to another one, and see how
you do on that.”

I
pray that the single women reading this will be spared unwise marriages, unholy
marriages, that you will become such women of God that you will recognize God’s
will when it comes, and that you will be united with men of like mind. For
those women who have disobeyed and are suffering for it, let me encourage you
to walk closely with the Lord.