Releasing Your Prodigal Child God's Way
Written by Karla Downing
If you have a prodigal child, releasing isn't your first response. Your first response is to hold on tighter and try to force change any way possible. God has prodigal children too. He feels the same about them as you do yours. Releasing your prodigal child God's way is healthier than holding on and trying to control. Here is how God deals with this problem:
God doesn't give up. He continues to long for the return of his children and hopes for it. He never stops loving or waiting. This is the heart of a loving parent who longs for a healthy relationship with their children and who is pleased when their children make good choices. When you love someone, you want what is best for them. Wrong choices will break your heart, as they do God's. You don't have to give up. You just have to let go while continuing to hope.
God recognizes the individual's right to choose. God doesn't violate free will because he created us to have it. What this means is that people have the right to make wrong choices. God doesn't force people to make choices against their will. This is one of the hardest things for a parent of a prodigal. In order to "fix" your children, you attempt to manipulate their choices by coercion through threats, nagging, lecturing, punishment, and guilting. There is a time to speak the truth in love and to decide how you will respond to the dilemmas in your life and theirs, but when you cross the line and try to choose for them, you take away their dignity.
God allows natural consequences to occur even though it pains him to see it. God created the natural law of reaping and sowing. It is meant to reward people for choosing the good and to teach those who choose the bad to make different choices. God doesn't intervene when he sees his children suffering because he knows that the pain will reap a benefit (Heb 12). Parents of prodigals often intervene and as a result enable their prodigals by preventing the consequences that could teach them to make different choices. Enabling only prolongs the problem.
Releasing your prodigal God's way will make the relationship healthier and allow God to work in your child's life without you getting in the way.
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