Following is the story Kevin Swanson shared in the message given on October 21, 2007. . .
Let me tell you the story of a nice evangelical family attending a good evangelical church. I remember they lived next door to a pagan family in 1970. The evangelicals never bothered to evangelize the pagan family because this family was the worst of the worst. A new boyfriend shacking up with the woman every month, drug busts, you name it; and there might have even been some homosexual activity going on over there.
Well, over the next 40 years, this evangelical family lived out their life. The father never really took family devotions seriously. I think that he tried it once or twice. But many seeds were planted through those years. The hedonist, materialist principle drove hard. The illicit pleasures hovered menacingly. An illicit glance here and there. A lingering over the plate or the bottle. I mean, minor stuff. No hard core porn. Just R-rate movies and undue note of cleavage. Friends of the children never tempted them to drugs. They only tempted them to dishonor their parents in dress and music. You know, minor stuff.
Throughout the 1980s, there were a thousand golf games while a son was left home with his video games. Early on, the son wanted to be with his father. But hearts grew apart. There were 10,000 hours of overtime, for good reason. There was the 1200 square foot house, and then the four-bedroom place with the swimming pool, and then I think they settled into a 6,000 square foot place in 1992.
Sure! There was an occasional infusion of vision. A visiting pastor preached a hard message once on idolizing materials, and used the R word - Repent. A radio program message hit heartstrings when impressing the importance of getting a childs heart and saving his soul from hell. And there was an occasional challenge to the sacrificial life of self-denial using yourself up in the service of Christ, in things like disciple-ing children for God and serving the widow and orphan.
But each message only seem to harden the heart over time - maybe not the first time it was heard. But when it settled in the gut, it sort of turned sour. Over decades, the church's message seem to soften almost imperceptibly as hearts hardened. Their pastor resigned after an adulterous affair in 1978. Their next pastor resigned after his homosexual trysts became public in 1999.
They tried home schooling for a year, but it really didn't work out. Too much of a hassle. The kids did Awanas for a few years, as I recall. When they were young, they were usually in the church Christmas pageant.
When the family's oldest daughter was 13 years old, that father caught his little girl leaving the house in an outfit that forced an audible gasp from his lips. But he didn't say anything. He couldn't. He didn't have the moral courage. He had already compromised his position, and besides he had no real relationship with the girl. So when she turned 15 in 1983, she had her first date. The boy took her to some drive-in theater. Her father wasn't all that hot on it, but what could he say? Maybe that purity talk at the youth group last Sunday will do some good. She was pregnant at 16.
During those teenage years, the tensions ran pretty high in the home. Irreconcilable differences took the marriage apart. But it worked out alright, because both signed up for divorce recovery workshops in different evangelical churches in the area.
The high school where the kids attended was among the best in the state. In fact the children's aunt taught history at the same school. Granted the school refused to teach the fear of the Lord as the foundation of knowledge and wisdom, and the puritans were pilloried in the American literature class, especially when they went over Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. But nobody really thought that the Diversity Awareness Fair at the high school would make much of an impression on the youngest son who was 17. But that was the day he announced to his family that he was out of the closet. Maybe it was the pastors fault.
Now, forty years later looking back on this good evangelical family made up of two people who gave their hearts to Jesus at a Billy Graham Crusade in 1967, we are wondering what happened. After all those years, now two of the four children are divorced, one is a homosexual, and the oldest son is serving out a 10-year prison term on a fraud charge.
Oh, did I mention the family that lived next door to this nice Christian family back in 1970? Apparently, one of the sons coming from that home was marvelously converted in the 1980s through the work of a street evangelist in Denver who faithfully instructed him over three years in a weekly Bible Study. Then this young man witnessed to his three siblings, and they were all brought to faith in Christ. Two are homeschooling their children today and the last time I heard, one is serving as a missionary in Vietnam.
Lessons Learned From this Parable
1. Time is the great determinant of a walk. Time is the teller of the heart. Our lives are made up of 1000s of choices, opportunities to hear the truth and respond to it either properly or improperly. There are 1000 tiny forks in the road, and the general direction taken is ultimately determined by the condition of the heart.
2. There is a flimsiness in modern evangelicalism that betrays a weakness in its epistemological and metaphysical foundations.
3. There is a strong connection between the state of the church and the state of the family. The way the church goes is the way the family goes. The weakening of the faith in the church will inevitably produce more chaff for the wind.
4. The first shall be the last and last shall be first. Even as the prodigal's brother refuses to live a life of humble repentance himself, the humble prodigal receives the blessings. |
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