body-container-line-1
27.07.2018 Family & Parenting

To Mothers of Prodigals: 6 Reasons to Keep Your Hopes Alive

By Hallelujah.co.ke
To  Mothers of Prodigals: 6 Reasons to Keep Your Hopes Alive
27.07.2018 LISTEN

Mother’s Day has come and gone.
Thank God, some women say.
You may have noticed them wiping their eyes in church while the sweet, sappy, I love you, Mom, you’re the best! video played. They weren’t crying because they were touched by the sentimentality of the footage. They were crying because their hearts were breaking.

They were wondering if they’d ever hear their adult children say I love you, Mom again. They were looking at someone else’s child holding up a finger-painted card and wondering what went wrong with their own. They were watching the gangly preteen read a carefully written prayer thanking God for mothers and remembering their own children’s most recent words, which were anything but thankful. And instead of hurrying to collect their children from the nursery after service, they rushed home hoping to find a message on their voicemail.

Only to be disappointed.
Again.
They are the mothers of prodigals.
If you are one of the ones who cried during that video for all the wrong reasons, I have six things to say to you.

1. God cries for prodigals, too.
He wept over Jerusalem, which he longed to gather to his breast, and he wept over adulterous Gomer, whom he wanted to heal and restore. God weeps for your children, too.

2. God is sovereign over rebellion.
Jonah was running hard away from God.
Hard.
But God saw him, pursued him, chastised him, and won him back.

“But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up” (Jonah 1:3-4).

“. . . But the LORD provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights (v. 17).

God knows exactly where your child is, and he can engineer circumstances large and small to pursue him and win him back. Sometimes it’s the goodness of God that leads our children to repentance, and sometimes it’s his judgment. We can trust God to know which is most effective.

body-container-line