you give birth to a beautiful little baby you nurse that baby you feed that baby you kiss that
baby you love that baby you provide for that baby you change that baby's dirty diapers that baby
means everything in the world to you and they are the most beautiful thing that you've ever
seen you raise them up as best you can in a christian home you take them to church you
teach them right from wrong you read the bible to them at night before they go to bed you
you do everything you can as a christian parent to teach them the ways of jesus
and then one day your greatest nightmare or one of your greatest fears comes to pass
that same child that beautiful baby boy that beautiful darling innocent little
sweet little girl comes to you and says that they are having same-sex attraction or maybe
they come to you and they say that i'm out i'm gay i'm lgbtq how do you process that what do you do
how do you put the dreams that you had for that child on the altar
when everything that you thought that they would be now comes crashing down
how do you move forward let me first say that if you are watching this video and you are
dealing with that level of disappointment or pain or heartache because your child has come
out or you're starting to see signs that maybe they're having issues in this area i just want
to extend my my deepest sympathy with you and my heart goes out to you because i know
that has to be just one of the most difficult things that a christian parent could deal with
so in this video i just want to give you five things five considerations that i believe
we can walk through to hopefully help us know how to process and how to respond to our children when
they come out with something as devastating and as disappointing as the fact that they are struggling
with same-sex attraction number one is kind of a precursor and that is to pay attention to the
early warning signs in a really good article on focus on the family they do a really good job of
helping parents try to figure out some of the early signs that you should be paying attention to
in your child's life so that you can have the early conversations with them instead of leaving
them on an island by themselves to process the things that they're dealing with all alone one
of the signs that they talk about is a recurring desire to be the opposite sex or an insistence
that they are the opposite sex sign number two is an affinity to cross dress number three a strong
and persistent preference for cross sexual roles in make-believe play persistent fantasies of being
the opposite sex number four an intense desire to participate in stereotypical games and hobbies
of the opposite sex and then finally number five a strong preference for friends of the opposite sex
so once again if you see some of these things kind of developing in your children
at an early early age do everything that you can as a parent not to just brush it off
but to truly pay attention to these things and start having those conversations those
corrective conversations to try to steer them in the right path before it gets to a place
where they are convinced that they are much different than how god had designed them
number two seek to understand first rather than judge now this is going to be very difficult
for christian parents because the very thought of our children or anyone for that matter acting
out on a same-sex relationship can be devastating and it can be something that is totally disgusting
to you in your mind and so the reaction whenever your children bring something like this to you
is to immediately judge or to make a face or to respond in such a way that communicates
an extreme disapproval to your children but i really want to encourage you to really try to
drill down and understand exactly where or where on the journey or where on the spectrum if you
will your child is are they simply experiencing same-sex attraction or are they actually acting
out on this behavior or are they just simply trying to identify as gay so you want to ask
those types of questions whenever you are talking with your child in another article published
by focused on the family they mention several different questions that you can ask your child
to hopefully aid the conversation so that you can really better understand exactly what your
son or daughter may actually be thinking and how they're processing the feelings that they are
having one of the questions is what led you to believe that you might be gay another question is
have you ever experienced feelings of attraction to the opposite sex when did you first become
aware of your attraction to others of the same sex what was your initial reaction to those feelings
how constant are those attractions and then lastly have you talked to anyone about them so you don't
have to use these exact questions but you really need to try to figure out how you can engage a
healthy conversation with your child so that they feel comfortable talking to you about the
things that they are experiencing now tips number three four and five are going to be probably the
most difficult of this list and number three is to love your child now already i can hear some
uh liberals and some progressive christians saying amen brother that's exactly right that's what
i've been trying to say they need to love they need to love us they need to accept us no no no
be careful okay because we have to be careful how we define this word
love love does not mean acceptance so when i say love your child that does not mean that i'm saying
i'm saying that you have to accept your child the way they are and accept everything that they are
doing any more than if they were a child and they did something wrong and you just accepted it and
you never told them about it and you never said anything about it and you never corrected them
you never disciplined them that would not be love you told your children that what they were doing
is wrong when they were wrong as children because you love them enough to say i don't want you going
out into the world and doing this and thinking that it's right because i as a parent who knows
better than you knows that if you do these things it's only going to lead to your pain and your
disaster we need to love our children enough to speak the truth in love and communicate to them
as best we can as parents why what they're feeling and what they might be acting out on is against
god's will it is up to us as christian parents to sit down with our kids and clearly communicate
god's designed purpose for our sexuality and why god designed it in that way now does this mean
that it's going to solve all of your children's problems once they understand that god designed
for a man to be with a woman and woman to be with a man no but what you're doing is you're planting
a seed in that child's mind so that they clearly understand from this point forward hey i may go
out and do this and act on this but at least i know for sure what god's purpose or god's
intended will is in this particular situation in other words you don't want to be guilty of shying
away from sharing the truth because you're afraid of hurting your child you have to do what god has
put on your heart to tell your children about what god says and then leave everything else in
the hands of god now along those same lines as we're talking about love there's another
side of this coin and that is the fact that one thing that you do want to affirm to your child
is that no matter what they do no matter who they are your love for them will always remain
even though you may disagree with their lifestyle you need to make sure that they
understand that you love them unconditionally and they will always be their your child
and there is nothing that they can do to escape your love now number four is going to be more than
likely the most difficult step as a parent that you may more than likely have to take and that is
and it's going to be hard but you have to decide who your greatest allegiance is to at some point
as a parent you're going to have to decide am i more loyal to my child because i don't want to
ruffle the feathers of that relationship i want to keep the peace and so therefore i'm just going to
be accepting i'm just going to um you know ignore what it is that they're trying to bring into my
home i'm going to attend their gay wedding i'm going to do all these things so i can maintain the
relationship and the love and the peace between myself and my child you have to as a christian
you are under obligation to say you know what i love my child but i love my savior more i love
my son but i love my jesus more i love my daughter but i love the lord who gave his life for me more
you see the bible says this in matthew chapter 10 it says don't imagine that i came to bring peace
to the earth i came not to bring peace but a sword see jesus says my main focus when i came
to the earth was not just to bring peace he says i know that when i'm coming to the earth
it's going to create friction my presence is going to create tension it's going to cause
war it's going to cause people to have to pull up their sword and want to go at war with each other
because what i'm bringing in the principles of the kingdom are going to go diametrically opposed to
what people ultimately want to do in their flesh and as a result sometimes this is going to pit
even the closest relationships against one another and jesus goes on to say this he says i have
come to set a man against his father a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against
her mother-in-law your enemies will be right in your own household and then jesus says this
and this is the clincher of this entire passage he says if you love your father or mother
more than you love me you are not worthy of being mine or if you love your son or daughter
more than me you are not worthy of being mine that my friend hurts because you love your child
as i mentioned earlier this is the same child that you held in your arms and had all these hopes
and dreams for every part of your body every part of every fiber of your being is going to want to
to just do whatever you got to do to maintain this feeling of love and peace and joy with your child
but at some point as a christian you have got to take this verse you've got to come grip to grips
with this verse and say you know what this verse clearly says that if i love my children more than
i love god i'm not worthy to be a disciple and then number five i want to encourage you to be
careful about internalizing any sort of guilt that you might experience from your children's
poor decisions you know it's easy for us as parents particularly as christian parents to
look at proverbs 22 6 which says train up a child in the way that he should go and when he's old he
will not depart from it and a lot of times we as christian parents when our children are going in
a direction that we don't want them to go we blame ourselves immediately say well wow maybe i didn't
train them up well enough because the bible says if i would have trained my children up in the way
that they should go when they all they would not depart from it we have to understand that this
is a proverb it's a precept it's not a promise you can be the best christian parent possible you can
give your children all of the the the um the blessings of of of a christian household you
can send them to private schools you can put them in youth groups you can
shelter them as much as you possibly can from any and all negative environments and stimulus
right but that does not guarantee that your children one day are going to not make decisions
that are against what you believe they should make as a christian so we have to guard ourselves
against spending the rest of our lives asking the question what could i have possibly done
different as a parent to have kept my child from going down this path so my friends i would love to
hear your thoughts that's all i've got it's just five simple not really simple but five very clear
things that i would encourage you to really consider if really if your child is really
acting out in any way at all whether it's they feel that they're uh lgbtq or they're just going
in a direction maybe on drugs or whatever they're just going in a direction that you just don't
uh have in your mind you never thought that they would go down i believe the five things i shared
in this video are going to really help you to give you a framework for how you can respond
to your children in that situation so i love to hear your thoughts what do you think do you have
anything else you want to add to this conversation let me know in the comment section below if you
personally experienced that let me know in the comment section below so i and others can pray
for you as well if you found this video helpful in any way feel free to share it with a friend
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other videos on this channel thank you so much for watching i'll see you next time on the beat