Why a Prodigal 4: The Words We Speak, episode 77

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If you love a prodigal, you can discover help and hope for your wilderness journey right here at When You Love a Prodigal,

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and also help and hope for your own life journey.

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Welcome back.

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I hope the past three episodes on some of the reasons a loved one might become a prodigal have been helpful and encouraging,

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and that you have come away with some action points.

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As we considered very different contributors that cause someone to turn from the Lord or reject their family or make dangerous choices,

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a trust you came to some understanding, and perhaps it lifted some of your own feelings of even failure, perhaps,

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because it's not about the things you've done for the most part, it's about all the things going on in our world as in their lives.

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But today we will talk about a very significant contribution we can make to preventing negative choices or restore one who has walked away.

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The words we speak.

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Our son was required to do community service for something he had done at a friend's apartment,

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but he kept skipping it, and I didn't know that.

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He wasn't convinced there would be greater consequences.

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He told me he was going to stay overnight at a friend's, but yes, he would get up in the morning to go do his community service,

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except he got drunk that night and didn't wake up.

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I was frustrated and angry, and I drove over to his friends, who dragged him off the couch and pushed him out to his very unhappy mom.

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He had no remorse and didn't intend to go.

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I lost it.

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I said a few things, and then I said, If you can't make the choices you should, maybe you just shouldn't come.

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And he interrupted me, and he said, Come where?

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I didn't finish the sentence.

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I was going to say, Just don't bother to come home, but I would have regretted it.

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So I'm grateful.

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And here are some of the words that I have heard people, parents, siblings, teachers, coaches, friends, say to those who keep making bad choices.

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You are so stupid.

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You can't do anything right.

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You deserve to spend your life in jail.

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I can never believe you or trust you.

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Don't bother to come home.

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And many more.

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Be assured those words in such an angry or demeaning tone will not bring them back.

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God in his word has a lot to say about how we should talk to people.

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Here are a few of many words from scripture about how we should speak to people.

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Proverbs 16, 24 says, Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.

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Just think of that.

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Sweet to hear, but healing.

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And our prodigals need a lot of healing.

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Deuteronomy 32 tells us, Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rains on tender plants.

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Is that how our words usually are?

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Sometimes, but maybe not all the time.

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Luke 6 says, The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth that which is good.

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And the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth that which is evil.

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For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

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So the words that we speak and the way we speak them reveal what's in our hearts.

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Ephesians remind us that we should speak the truth.

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We need to speak truth, but we need to do it in love.

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And here's a strong one from Proverbs 12.

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There is one who speaks rashly, like the thrusts of a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

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Sometimes our words really are like a sword, aren't they?

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But God says, No, we can use our tongue to bring healing.

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Proverbs 16 says, The wise in heart are called discerning, and gracious words promote instruction.

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So what I want to do is give you five words that instead of inflaming anger or crushing spirits,

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will help you stay calm and contribute to restoring things with a prodigal day by day and as you speak truth.

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The key is in what the words accomplish and how we use them.

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The first word is love.

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Now, probably you say, I love you to your loved one because you do love them.

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But from 1 Corinthians 13, we get a clue about what that love looks like.

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Just quickly, love is patient.

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Love is kind.

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Love does not envy.

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It does not boast.

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It is not proud.

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It does not dishonor others.

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It is not self-seeking.

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It is not easily angered.

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It keeps no record of wrongs.

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Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.

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It always protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres.

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Love never fails.

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We spent quite a bit of time on that in earlier editions of the podcast,

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but it's just our words, because we love these people that are giving us a hard time,

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making bad choices, our words should be flowing from the love that we have for them.

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John 13, this is a hard one, says, this is Jesus speaking,

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you must love one another.

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By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples.

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If you love one another.

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Now, when you love a prodigal, you know something about love.

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You know about all the acts of loves that you do, hoping to woo your wayward one back into the fold,

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that is your arms or the arms of God.

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And you know the sacrifices that you've made, the time, attention stolen from other children,

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the cost of rehab, the never leaving home in order to protect him or your home,

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the waiting for the call from the hospital or from jail, the hours on your knees.

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So you know your love for them because you've done these things.

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And you know the battle in your heart between boundaries and grace, between consequences and mercy.

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How do you do that?

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What do you use?

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You know the pain of angry words thrown in your face of her not wanting to be with you and your family,

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of your love being trampled in the ground.

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You know the despair of love rejected, the fear of losing this treasured one, the ache of loss of hope.

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You may have despaired and given up.

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But perhaps you've persevered and kept going.

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And probably you have also learned the difficult but powerful truth that we learned from our prodigal.

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Unconditional love doesn't require love in return.

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God has loved us with an everlasting love, with kind and tender love,

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with truth and grace, with discipline and with mercy.

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And he calls us to love as he has loved, that is, laying down our lives for these prodigals.

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He knows we can't do it.

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Does that help you to know that he knows it's an impossible thing for us to love as he has loved?

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However, he has promised to do it in us and for us.

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He sent his Spirit to live in us, to fill us up, and to do the impossible through us, to keep loving through it all.

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May the love of God be poured over and in and through you,

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love spoken consistently to your loved ones, to my loved one.

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So love's the foundational word.

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The next word is mercy.

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Because of God's love for us, he sent Jesus to take our sins, and he pours mercy on us and over us and in us.

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He covers us with his mercy.

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His favorite verse is from Lamentations 3.

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The faithful love of the Lord never ends, his mercies never cease.

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Great is his faithfulness, his mercies begin afresh each morning.

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I say to myself, the Lord is my inheritance, therefore I will hope in him.

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Isn't it just encouraging, hopeful, wonderful to think that every morning there's new mercy for the things we will do each day and the things that our loved one will do?

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In Deuteronomy 4 we read,

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But in your great mercy you did not put an end to them, those who had rebelled, or abandon them, for you are a gracious and merciful God.

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Ephesians 2 tells us, All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravens of our flesh, following its desires and thoughts.

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Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath, but because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions.

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It is by grace you have been saved.

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And one of my very favorite verses, James 2-3, tells us that mercy triumphs over judgment, that God's love for us and our prodigals, and that his mercy that just flows out of that love will triumph over the judgment that we deserve.

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And so Hebrews 4 tells us this wonderful thing.

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Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

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Just as we desire and are grateful for God's mercy, may we give mercy to our prodigals, even when they don't deserve it.

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The third word is hope.

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Have you given up on hope yet?

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What do you think about where your prodigal is?

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Do you think they've lost hope that their life will have meaning, that they will make something good out of themselves, that they will ever have good relationships with you again?

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You need hope, and they need hope.

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Romans 15 tells us, May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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Do you see that's one of his names?

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We've talked about that before as well.

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He is the God of hope.

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And when you love a prodigal, hope can be very slim.

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In Hosea 2, we learn that God will turn terrible things into a door of hope.

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This is where we get this message, this name of God.

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When we hope, we acknowledge that we have not seen the answer that we desire yet.

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Often, we don't even know what that answer is.

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So we need hope, and those we love need hope.

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The words we use can crush their hope or give them hope.

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The next word is blessing.

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This is one of the most powerful things we can do to win the hearts of our loved ones, to bless them.

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Jesus made it clear.

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In 1 Peter, we hear, do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult.

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On the contrary, repay evil with blessing so that you may inherit a blessing.

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So as we respond to the negative things that our loved ones do,

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as we give them a blessing instead of a curse, we get a blessing in return.

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God is just so good at giving blessings.

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How do we bless our enemies?

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Because that's what he tells us.

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We are even to bless our enemies.

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And sometimes our loved ones, our prodigals, feel definitely like they are our enemies.

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But God says we're to bless them.

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First of all, we pray for them, asking God to do good things, good to and for them.

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We speak words of encouragement and hope to them.

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We look for ways to express tangible things that say kindness to them.

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I'm going to say that last sentence again.

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We look for tangible ways to express kindness to them.

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Some years ago there was someone in my life I didn't really like in my life.

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This was not my prodigal.

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She knew I didn't like her.

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My feelings were not hidden.

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God said, Judy, I want you to bless her.

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If she is to come to know me, she must see how much I love her through you.

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A little reluctantly, I began a journey of intentionally blessing her.

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I chose to do tangible, helpful things as well as speaking love and grace to her.

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Eventually she began to believe I was sincere.

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She began to trust me.

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And our relationship grew into a real friendship.

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My heart was changed and so was hers because God called on me to bless her.

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And then he gave her a blessing and he gave me a blessing of a relationship that was made good and whole again.

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The final word that I want to give you is grace.

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One of my very favorite verses from 2 Corinthians 9.

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And God is able to make all grace abound to you so that in all things, at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

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That's saying all enough times for you.

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I'm going to read it again.

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God is able to make all grace abound to you so that in all things, the good, the bad, the in-between, the things that seem impossible,

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at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

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So the grace of God is going to make it possible when it's the good works that we need to have with our prodigals.

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It will enable you to speak with love and to speak blessings and to give hope.

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And all this that we've been talking about today already, he says it's because of his grace that it is available to us.

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And we will have it in abundance for every good work God asks us to do.

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His grace has redeemed us and will do the same for our wanderers.

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His grace can be conveyed by the words we speak.

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I've written a little thing called The Voice of Grace, and I've read it to you a long time ago, like a year and a half ago.

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But I'm going to read it to you again because it is how we say our words that will do more than almost anything that we do

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to convince them that we love them, to speak lifting up instead of putting down to them,

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to help them to see that we desire relationship with them,

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and to help them to look beyond their own anger to see that there's love that's available to them.

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The way we speak, the words matter, but the way we say them is probably the biggest key.

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So let me just read The Voice of Grace to you.

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There's ten, ten parts to The Voice of Grace.

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One, wait, count to ten or twenty or thirty before you speak,

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whatever you need to cause you to make sure grace is in your words.

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Moderate. Instead of lifting your voice and being angry or harsh or sarcastic,

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moderate, speak slowly, calmly, gently, but firmly.

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Third, think. Think before you speak.

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Will these words add fuel to the fire?

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Lots of words do. Some words help calm things down. Some words make the fire explode.

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Consider. Would you like someone to speak such words in that tone of voice to you?

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Recognize this is so important.

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The words you speak today may be part of your relationship with your prodigal for all the years to come.

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I think of hearing of children who said,

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my father said that I would never amount to anything, or my father said I was terrible at this,

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or my mother was always putting me down.

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And it only took hearing that one or two or three times maybe,

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that's in their minds. They're stuck and that affects how they see themselves.

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So the words that we speak, if not with grace,

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could be a negative part of our relationship with them going forward.

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But if we speak words with grace, it can build a positive relationship

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for our time with them in the future.

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Realize your tone of voice can turn neutral words into destructive words.

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And remember this. You love this person. You love this person.

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Let grace of God flow through you to them.

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And finally, pray. Stop to pray before you speak.

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Almost always we should do that.

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We would save ourselves a lot of pain and trouble with our loved ones,

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but also with others if we would pray before we speak.

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Doesn't have to be a long prayer.

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Make sure that you're filled with his spirit.

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And we've certainly talked about that before.

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Ask God to govern your tongue,

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to release his love for this one standing in front of you,

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to release his love into your heart so that it can flow through you to them.

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Choose to be an instrument of God's grace.

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So what did we see? We saw love and mercy and hope and blessing and grace

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and holding on to these words will make so much difference

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in our relationship with our loved ones, with our prodigals,

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but also in, well, the peace in us,

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but also the attitudes that they will absorb that will help them

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maybe make better choices, almost surely be willing to come back to relationship with you, with me.

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So remember, love them, give mercy, build up hope,

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bless them, and speak with grace.

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Ask God to reveal which of your words might be more harmful than helpful

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and which words, words of love, mercy, hope, blessing, or grace

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that he would like to help you use more consistently.

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Our God is applying these two, you know, to us,

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and he's not saying you can't ever get it right, you never speak with grace, you don't show love.

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No, he knows when we are failing in these areas.

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We usually know when we are, but he says, I love you.

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I have given mercy over and over to you.

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I am a door of hope for you in this and any other situation.

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I bless you, I bless you, I bless you.

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Over and over in scripture, God chooses to bless,

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and he gives his grace for all that we need.

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So ask him, where does he want you to focus?

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What's one of those that you can seek to let him help you apply?

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God bless you.