Full Transcript
How do I love my adult child when I disagree with their sexual choices?
There are an awful lot of parents who are walking through this right now, and I think it’s really important to distinguish between loving your child, which will never end, and feeling like you have to give affirmation or approval to everything they’re choosing. And sometimes that can be a very tricky walk in today’s day and age because often kids will experience love only if you fully approve of everything they’re doing. So ask God for wisdom of what it looks like to love your child while also in the right way and in the right time, helping them understand that you’re not supportive of some of the choices that they’re making.
And here’s the hard part, being a parent of an adult child, these are their choices to make. You did your job in raising them. There are things you did well and things you didn’t do so well because there’s no perfect parent. Don’t take that blame on yourself, but recognize that your child is their own person. They have their own choices to make, they have their own relationship with God to navigate. And what we wanna do is we wanna be role models, encouragers, people that love them well, while giving them the freedom to do their own wrestling with making their choices for their life and really their choices and their walk with God.
And the final thing I would say is play the long game. You know, we see in the scripture it says, what you sow, you will reap. And we know that in the long term sin, including sexual sin, will not bring happiness. It’s not gonna bring fulfillment. And so you wanna play that long game where you’re gonna be in your child’s life. You’re gonna be that person that they can come to if their world starts to fall in. I just think of that beautiful story in the Bible of the prodigal son. The father was at home, his heart was broken, he was grieving, he was probably praying for his son. And when his son came back, he was the first to go meet him in the field and celebrate. And that’s the posture that we wanna have as well.
