There is Hope for Thankless Boys

I could tell from his posture he was about to say something. Ryan was sitting across from me, the table strewn with the casualties of a successful battle with lunch. Ryan is one of those guys who is pretty open about his faults when he feels safe.

Ryan was now leaning slightly forward as thought furrows began to creep over his forehead. Words were piecing themselves together behind that thick piece of skull bone.

Then, as if he was scolding himself for not having seen it years earlier, the words began to chase each other out of his mouth, “I need to be more thankful … I’m so blessed … but I’m really an ungrateful person…”

He proceeded to rattle off a list of blessings that apparently had been piling up behind a wall of self-centeredness that had until this moment been obscuring them from proper view. 

“… And I love my dad. I REALLY love my dad.” Ryan continued with a voice full of conviction and sorrow for years of wasted selfishness. “I respect him so much. He really does show me an example of what Jesus is like. Every day he goes to work, where they treat him like crap, and yet he still works hard … and he does it because he loves me. I really need to stop complaining.”

Is the Gospel really “the power of God unto salvation” like the Apostle Paul claimed? Well as you can see, 2000 years later the God is still softening and turning the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers just like he promised it would.

Do you have a self-centered and thankless young man taking up room on your couch at home? Do you shake your head in frustration and throw up the hands of your heart in hopelessness? If so, remember that your faith is not in the thankless video game addicted couch potato. Our faith is in the God who raises the dead.

“Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.”1 Corinthians 1:9

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