I Called It Rebellion In My Head

You have not said it out loud. That is important and I want to give you credit for it.

But you have thought it, more than once now, and it has begun to organize things. Somewhere in the last few months, your son declining to walk to the end of the road stopped being a fifteen year old declining to walk to the end of the road, and became a sign.

Of a heart going somewhere. Of a season. Of something that needs praying about rather than something that needs asking about again on Thursday.

And I want to be careful here, because you are not a man who throws that word around, and the fact that it has never left your mouth says something good about you.

But it has done something anyway, and I think you can feel it, which is why you are reading this.

To his own master he standeth

There is a line in Romans that is one of the most restraining sentences in the letters.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand. (Romans 14:4, King James Version)

To his own master he standeth or falleth.

Read who that is addressed to. Not to the world. To believers, about other believers, in a church where people had strong and sincere opinions about each other's spiritual condition.

And what it says is that the assessment belongs somewhere else. Not that assessment is impossible, but that it is not yours, and that somebody else holds it.

You are not the one holding that assessment, and it was never given to a father to make about his own son. Romans 14:4 puts the standing and falling entirely with the master rather than the observer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as relief rather than as a rebuke.

And notice how it ends, because most people stop reading a sentence too early. He shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand. The verse does not leave the servant in doubt. It closes on a promise about him.

You have a son the verse ends by promising to hold up, and it was never an open question that anybody was being left with. The written word takes the judgment away and then hands back a promise about the same person, and the Spirit of God is what stops a father sitting with a verdict and no hope in it.

What the word did for you

Now let me say the part that will be uncomfortable, and I say it as somebody who understands why it happened.

Calling it rebellion gave you somewhere to put a refusal that hurt.

A boy saying no to a walk with his father is a small and painful thing, and there is nothing to do with it except feel it. But a boy in rebellion is a different object entirely. That can be prayed about. It has a category. It has a shape and a likely course and a set of things a father does about it.

And every single one of those things is easier than standing in a doorway and being turned down again on Thursday. A no about a walk is a no about a walk, and reclassifying it upward is a way of leaving the room without moving.

You are not a man avoiding his son, and it was never cowardice that reached for a category. Romans 14 takes the assessing off the observer and gives it back to the master, which is exactly why the Spirit of God addresses what a father is doing with a word rather than what a boy is doing with a door.

And here is what it costs him, which is the part that will move you. A child who has been reclassified can feel it. Not the word. The distance. He can tell that the man asking him is now asking from slightly further away, with something already concluded, and that changes what a no means for him too.

Ask with nothing spiritual attached

So the practical part, and it is a subtraction.

Ask once, for twenty minutes, with no weight on it of any kind.

You are able to ask a question that has nothing riding on it, and it has never once been unspiritual to keep a walk a walk. The passage removes the judgment from the observer entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man asking about a street and nothing else.

That means: no mention of anything else. No small remark about how he has been lately. No hopeful pause afterward, which is its own kind of weight. No sentence at the end of the walk that turns out to be the reason for the walk.

And let the no stand. Do not take it upstairs and pray over it as a symptom. Pray for your son, certainly, and go on doing that. Just stop taking Thursday's refusal up there as evidence.

You are able to keep praying for him without praying about a verdict, and those two have never once been the same thing. Romans 14:4 ends by saying God is able to make him stand, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a father who has stopped collecting evidence.