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Well, Pastor John and I recorded a handful of episodes live and in person in Nashville this summer, and we ended our live recording session with an audience question about parenting non-Christian teenagers. Here's the question and Pastor John's response. We got some really important valuable emails from people in this room who are parenting non-Christian teenagers.

Teenagers who have not made a profession of faith. A number of questions have to do with like enforcing church attendance. We heard from a woman named Angela who grew up going to Roman Catholic Mass every Sunday. Her dad made her go. You have to go. You have to go.

So she started to resent Christianity. She later came to the faith, married a godly man, is now involved in a wonderful church. But she looks back on that and wonders as you're parenting teens, especially in the mid to late teen years, and they have made no profession of faith, they don't have any interest in the gospel or church.

How much do you enforce church attendance? Where do you draw that line between expecting them to attend a church meeting on Sundays and being patient with them and not making Christianity come across as though it's something being enforced upon them? I can't just jump in to a 16 year old, 17 year old behavior without backing up a little bit.

And I know that's not the question being asked, but let me just say we're not God and we do not create our teenagers completely, but partly. Okay. We start rearing teenagers when they're in the womb. How we pray for them in the womb. We affect the behavior of a teenager when they're two years old.

I watch a lot of young parents today. They seem to believe you cannot control the behavior of a child or that it's wrong to. Child's making an absolute mess or chaos of every relationship and every dinner meeting, every grocery store, and the parent seems powerless. That's not helpful for teenagers.

It's coming, you know, 12, 13 years later. So a little child needs to feel profoundly secure, profoundly loved, cherished, enjoyed, and profoundly under authority. And those are not contradictory and every child knows it. Children want boundaries and massive love inside the boundaries. And so there's the setup that I would love to see happen.

So that even when at 14 or 15 or 16 a child starts to question and says finally on one scary awful night, "Daddy, I don't believe this anymore. Don't think I ever did." That the structure of parenting at that point is such that they may not be a wild-eyed rebel against the family, but almost a broken-hearted rebel against the family.

Maybe. I mean it's all a continuum, right? We got kids who are just viciously opposed to mom and dad for whatever and others who are compliant, but unbelieving. Yeah. And what you do on that continuum in the middle is really difficult. I would say if you have a child who after a very serious...

I mean you've got to avoid rage here because I'll tell you everything in you will just collapse at that news, right? My child that I've invested in for 15 years has told me that the most precious thing in my life is not precious to him. That's just about as bad as it gets, right?

That's worse than death. It's worse than death. So they tell you and you've got to avoid rage and dig in and try to draw out and listen with everything you're worth because stuff is going on you don't know. You do not know what's going on in this kid. You don't know what he heard at church.

You don't know what he heard at school. You don't know what his friends are treating him. You don't know anything because he hasn't come forth and you you got to patiently dig in and and then affirm, "I'm gonna love you no matter what. You're my son. You're my daughter.

I'm gonna love you no matter what." Then you say, "This is a Christian home. Mom and dad set the tone here. Mom and dad are the authority here and this is a Christian home. We have Christian standards. We have Christian practices. While you're part of this house, we don't expect you to be fake.

We're not saying that the behavior we expect is a covering, a hypocritical covering for faith so that you can look good to the world and make us look better. We want nothing to do with that kind of hypocrisy. We just want you to comply with these standards while you're here.

If by the time you're ready to go, they're not yours. Gonna love you. You'll go. You'll set your own pattern and see what you can get. I mean a kid who's big, I'm thinking boys now because I had four boys and then a girl, a kid who's big and is strong cannot go if he doesn't want to go.

Just get in the car and drive away or he'll leave. You can't make kids do if they're that rebellious. You can't make them. But I think you should try and you do it in a real honest face-to-face, give meaning to it. Here's what going to church would mean for you as an unbeliever with us on Sunday morning at age 15.

Here's what it would mean. It would mean I respect my mom and dad. They brought me into this world. They invested in me for 15 years. They're paying me for my food and lodging. They're probably gonna help me go to college. I owe them some respect. They want me to go to church.

I'm gonna go and sit there and they know it doesn't mean anything to me and I know it doesn't mean anything and so does the pastor. And I'm there and the hope for my parents is that I'll hear something that would lead me to Christ. My hope is that I can survive and get out of there as soon as possible.

So that's the kind of negotiation you would do. But I will admit that there are going to be situations where you say to a 16, 17, 18 year old son, daughter, we do not have boyfriends over to sleep here in this house or girlfriends. We don't do that. If you insist on that, you can't live here.

So you will draw a line eventually, but one of my pastoral strategies and I found it so helpful is that people would come to me at the end of services with the most mind-boggling situations in life that I'd never even thought of and I would generally see them conceiving of them in realities.

This horrible thing or this glorious thing is going to happen. Help me decide how to navigate this. And I would say God is God and he's never shut into those two things. There's always a third option and I would say let's pray to see if something you've never even imagined could happen right here could happen.

We just pray for it because I don't have an answer for them, but God has an answer. That's really good. We should do this again. This is great. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Thanks for sending in your questions. Pastor John has to get back to Minneapolis. Got to catch a flight.

Thank you Pastor John. Appreciate it. So good. What a great memory. Thinking back to that session and that was the end of our first live recording together. Pastor John and I this summer in Nashville and it seemed to go so well. We're planning to do it again in April at Together for the Gospel in Louisville.

Check the T4G schedule for that session and I'm sure we'll see many of you there. Looking forward to that. Next up, will God give my future spouse a similar calling to the calling he's given me? How much should we expect marriage to be a matching of vocational callings? It's a great question from a single woman on Friday.

And until then, if you're willing to help us out, fill out our online survey. And several of you already have. Thank you. If you want to join them and help us out, go to DesiringGod.org/survey. That's DesiringGod.org/survey. Thanks. You you