And finally I would say, especially when our children are of legal age, out of the home or either simply out of control, that we can still parent through prayer. I am going to tell you a great story. It was the fourth century, and there was a mother named Monica. Now, you will need to remember her name because she is one of the great mothers of Christendom, and she had a very handsome young son. Indeed, he was striking, a boy that she raised in the Christian faith; and yet in his later teen years her son abandoned Christianity altogether, and he lived a very immoral life. But Monica was unrelenting, and she continued to pray, at times, so numb from the hurt in her heart that she did not even feel that she was sincerely interceding. Have you ever been there? Times when she did not even think that she was being authentic before the Lord, praying words but not really even believing them in her heart. And when her boy was only sixteen years old, he took a mistress, and he lived with her for fifteen years. Then, he fell in love with another woman, but because she was underage, he had to wait for her for two years. In the meantime, he could not control his sexual urges, so he took a second mistress. He fathered an illegitimate child, he flitted from one job to another, he was erratic in his beliefs, he scorned the faith of his mother and mocked her and tormented her; and for the first thirty years of his life this young man was a hellion. There is just not other way to describe his life of debauchery and dissipation; and then one day that wayward boy was out in a lovely garden, and he heard a voice. He heard a voice saying, "Take up and read," and he found an open Bible or a Bible, and he opened it, rather, and his eyes fell on these words, "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in clamoring and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lust thereof." And that proved to be the transforming moment, so that all doubt passed away, and of his former life he later wrote, "For all those years in which I wallowed in the mire of that deep pit and the darkness of falsehood, that chaste, Godly, sober widow, my mother, ceased not at all hours of her devotion to be well my care unto the Almighty, and her prayers entered into the Lord's presence." Have you figured out of whom I am speaking? Well, I am referring to Saint Augustine, the noted church theologian and the great Fourth Century Bishop of Hippo.
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Beloved, prayer works when we cannot; and, in the end, Samson again did turn to the God of his parents. Though he had lost his sight, his freedom, and the respect of his nation, the fact is, the old values did reemerge; and though the years that the locusts had eaten were never fully restored, the man died in faith. He died in obedience because he died delivering Israel, the very purpose for which he was elected according to Judges 13:5, for there the angel said at the outset of life, "He is to be set apart from birth, for he will begin the deliverance of Israel from the hands of the Philistines." Manoah has a lot of kin in the body of Christ, and if you are one of his relatives, you take heart and be comforted and pray because God has not changed, not at all. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Let's pray together.
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Ed Bonniwell is pastor of Faith Christian Fellowship Church in Cincinnati, OH.
