Answers · Marriage & Family
What do I do when my teenager doubts — or walks away?
The Bible does not answer this fear with a technique. It answers it with a father. In Jesus' parable the son took his inheritance, wasted it in a far country, and at last came to himself; what he met on the road home was not a lecture but a welcome that had been watching for him:
"And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him."
— Luke 15:20 (KJV)
Notice the order of it. The father saw him "yet a great way off" — he had been looking. His compassion ran ahead of the son's rehearsed confession. What the parable gives parents is not control of the outcome but a posture: the door open, the love unfeigned, the readiness to receive without first settling accounts.
Doubt, while a son or daughter is still within reach, calls for Jude's word instead — compassion, "making a difference." Some are to be met with mercy rather than argument; fear and pressure rarely argue a teenager back to faith.
"And of some have compassion, making a difference:"
— Jude 22 (KJV)
And what was planted is not so easily lost. Paul reminded Timothy — who had known the holy scriptures from a child, at his mother's and grandmother's knees (2 Timothy 1:5) — to continue in the things he had learned. The teaching a child has known remains in him, able in God's time to make him wise unto salvation:
"But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus."
— 2 Timothy 3:14–15 (KJV)