Love Them To Life is not about “fixing” our kids’ addiction problems, but rather it is about learning to trust Father. We want to help our children do the right things. We want to keep them from overdosing or going to jail. We want to find out the way to make them more responsible or to help them see how they are destroying their lives. We get happiness from “fixing” our children because it shows that we are needed, that we have value, and that we stand in the gap between them and the consequences of their actions. All the while we are helping dig their graves and nailing the lids on their coffins. While those are tough words, they are true. When we don’t allow our kids to experience the consequences of their actions, they have no motivation to change. Fixing is enabling and enabling can lead to death.
Love Them To Life is about finding our identity in the one true Healer, Jesus Christ. It is about falling in love with the One who loves us beyond any love we have ever known before, who weeps with us when we weep over our children’s destruction, and who loves them more than we ever could. It is about our own brokenness and healing. It is about giving up our need to fix and trusting Father with our most precious loved ones, whatever that looks like.
In Genesis 22, God tested Abraham regarding his faith as it related to his son Isaac. In essence, God asked Abraham if he was willing to give up the most prized person in his life and trust God to fulfill the promises He made to Abraham concerning the founding of a great nation. How many of us would have been willing to experience the brokenness that Abraham did? And yet from that act of surrender and trust, the nation of Israel was birthed. The book of Job shows us how Job was tested beyond what any of us can imagine and yet his words were: Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him (Job 13:15a).
Father asks us to trust Him, to take our hands off and allow Him to work, and to find our hope and identity in Him. It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you.; He will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed (Deut. 31:8).