Children and the Promises of God
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The following thoughts are excerpted from my conference material on what I call “off-script kids,” the adult children of Christian parents whose life choices have diverged in a significant way from their parents’ hopes and expectations.
The author of a book on the subject of what we should expect from God with regard to our children wrote this for parents:
“I believe that faithful parents can be sure that their children will be saved and go to heaven. This assurance is based on the promises of God to them and their families. There are conditions that parents are to meet, by God’s grace, as the normal means to the salvation of their children. If parents abandon their responsibilities, then they have forsaken their agreement or covenant with God and have no reason to expect that the promises of God for their children’s salvation will be fulfilled.”
The author goes on to say, and this is a point that is made throughout the book,
“. . . if our children die in spiritual rebellion . . . it would prove only that we failed . . .”1
It’s because of teaching like this, buttressed by confident assurances and dire warnings, all with a Bible verse attached, that many Christian parents of off-script kids are in such mental, spiritual, and emotional turmoil regarding their children.
Such teaching, so prevalent when those words were published in 1995 and still with us today, is utterly irresponsible. It is tinged with just enough truth to be tenable, and it is presented in such a way to make we who love God and Scripture vulnerable to believing it. But it is untrue and is to be rejected. It is such a prevalent idea in some corners of Christian thinking that to reject it can feel, in fact, like we are rejecting Scripture itself. We are not. What we are rejecting is a false expectation of God that has been presented so consistently and so confidently that it has left in many a profound psychological scar.
The thinking that many Christian parents carry with them is that they have, as the author above accuses, failed. The charge is made that for “faithless” parents there are conditions which if overlooked negate the promises. The weight of children’s salvation is placed on the shoulders of the parents to bear. Believing this, many bear that burden valiantly. They take their kids to a good church. They make sure they plug into Sunday school and the youth ministry. They have family worship and frequent conversations about faith. They set a wonderful example of being faithful followers of Jesus. They are people of integrity. They love and are faithful to their spouse, and they laugh and spend time with their kids.
And still their children go off-script.
At first, under the weight of such teaching, they believe they have failed. But some, and all at some point, wonder if it is not they who have failed, but God.
We shudder at that conclusion. We have to believe that God always keeps his promises. And yet, we take these mixed up thoughts down the same path of the psalmist Asaph in Psalm 73. He could see that
Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart.
But he was not seeing this goodness land in his lap.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,
my steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. (Psalm 73:1-3)
No, he was not experiencing the promises of God as he expected them to be fulfilled, and he therefore questioned God. Whatever Asaph was dealing with, Christian parents of off-script kids will experience something similar with regard to their children. In so many words, they say,“God, you are good to other parents - why have you not been good with me?” If they are not crushed under the weight of what others say is their failure, they begin to believe that either God has not kept his promises, or that there are no promises at all. And that is a frightening place to be.
To misrepresent the promises of God pushes Christian parents into dark and dangerous places.
There is a way out of that place. There are good and hopeful and solid promises that God has made regarding the children of Christian parents. But before parents can lean into those, they need to be purged of the wrong ideas. They need to come to grips with what God has not promised if they are going to find any hope in what he has promised. To do this requires some biblical and theological heavy lifting. The false representation of God that has circulated for so many years has made such a wreckage that quite a bit of effort is required to set it straight.
But the bottom line, once that is done, is that you, parents, are not responsible and that God has been, is, and will be faithful to all his promises. When this foundation is rebuilt, and parents can once again see the beauty of God’s promise to be a God to us and to our children, then we will be in a place to move forward in trust and in prayer for the children we love.
Edward N. Gross, Will My Children Go to Heaven: Hope and Help for Believing Parents (United States: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1995), p. 154, 155.