Your Children's Friendships

Series: Parenting Against the Flow: A Conversation with Joshua Harris

Leslie Basham: Joshua Harris looks back on his life and realizes his parents made decisions that would affect his spiritual health for years to come.

Joshua Harris: They had a long-term view, because they weren’t just looking at the desires of a thirteen-year-old and how we can make life easy for us. They were thinking of a twenty-one-year-old and a twenty-eight-year-old now, and because of that, well, I’m the beneficiary.

Leslie: It’s Monday, July 23, and this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss.

Joshua Harris has helped so many people with strategies for sexual purity. He writes about those in his book, Not Even a Hint. We’ll send you that book when you make a donation of any amount to Revive Our Hearts. Just visit ReviveOurHearts.com.

Over the next few days, Josh will help us to choose wise media and entertainment. Here’s Nancy to get us started.

Nancy: I’m delighted to welcome to Revive Our Hearts today a special guest. His name is Joshua Harris, and I know that many of our listeners will have seen that name before.

Josh is an author. He’s written a best-selling book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. If you’re not familiar with that book or have not read it, whether you’re a young person or a parent of a young person, that’s a book you need to be familiar with.

It has just some really rich and biblical insights about the whole area of dating and courtship. And then the sequel to that book is Boy Meets Girl. Josh has written a more recent book called Not Even a Hint: Guarding Your Heart Against Lust.

And Josh, thank you for being our guest on Revive Our Hearts. We don’t often get to have men on the program, but we welcome them when we do and really appreciate the opportunity as women to hear from men of God who are men of the Word and can help train and teach us in the ways of God. So thank you for being a part of our ministry through this means.

Joshua: Thank you so much for having me, Nancy. It’s a real honor.

Nancy: And Josh, I think I’m old enough now that I can say it’s been a neat thing to watch you grow up. I don’t mean that in any disparaging way at all, but it’s been a blessing to see how you grew up in a godly home.

We’re going to talk about that on this broadcast, and then to see when you first began to emerge during your late teenage years, speaking and writing, and see the groundedness of your ministry.

But then to see that you weren’t just a flash in the pan, but have continued to deepen your roots and your understanding of the Word and the ways of God. Then to see as God led you into marriage and now starting your own family—you have two little children—to see you standing by the convictions God gave you as a young man. You are also growing and maturing in those convictions and then reproducing in the body of Christ the things that God has been doing in your life. I just thank the Lord for you, for the family God’s given you, and for the ministry He’s given you to His body.

Joshua: Thank you. That is so encouraging. I look back on my life and realize the kindness of God in placing people in my life, starting with my mom and dad, who have been a means of guidance and wisdom. I’m just grateful.

Nancy: I think one of the things I really appreciate about your life is that you’re part of a family line of godliness. God intended that truth, His truth, should be passed on from one generation to the next, that we should not stand alone.

We should pass on to the next generation the baton of faith and hand it on intact with the prayer that that generation would pass it on to the next.

So often, we see the baton being dropped. We see kids growing up in Christian homes, Christian school, even home schooling movements, and then growing up and not having a heart for the Lord, not going on in their faith.

Your life is such an example, I think, as is mine, of the benefit and the blessing of a godly legacy. It is a privilege and the responsibility to pass that legacy on to the next generation.

So I want to talk some this week about your family, your parents, what they did right. I’ve not met your parents, but I know that you’re the firstborn of seven children.

Joshua: That’s right.

Nancy: Six of them still at home! And you actually have a little brother or sister . . .

Joshua: Little brother

Nancy: Little brother who’s actually younger than one of your own children.

Joshua: Exactly. Uncle James is ten days younger than my daughter Emma, which is a strange thing, but wonderful. They have a good time together.

Nancy: So your parents are still very much parenting.

Joshua: They are!

Nancy: And you’ve had the privilege as the firstborn, as I am the firstborn of seven also, of growing up in a home where Christ was really honored.

What are some of your first memories of your parents’ faith, and how and when did that first begin to really affect your own life?

Joshua: Well, I was born practically in the church. My parents lived across the street from the church that they had met each other in. They were both saved out of the Jesus movement. These two young people’s hearts were captured by Jesus Christ, and they wanted to live for Him and serve Him.

Their zeal, I think, really has marked my life. I’ve seen that up close and personal. I remember when my dad was initially pastoring as a young pastor, just seeing their faith in God to provide when there wasn’t much money.

There wasn’t hardly food on the table. There wasn’t even a table! We actually had a cooler. I remember my dad was ministering down in Texas, and just seeing God provide.

I realize that the stories they would tell me of how God had provided for them and what He had done really shaped my view of life. That’s guided me as I now have a family.

So many people know my father for the way in which God used him in the home schooling community. But even apart from home schooling, the real key is that my parents wanted to train me and my brothers and my sister in the fear and admonition of the Lord. They sought to do that in everything they did.

Nancy: And it sounds like they must have been very intentional. They weren’t going to let these kids just grow up. They were going to raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

Joshua: That’s true, and I think home schooling was an expression of that, the decision to not send me to school, which nowadays, home schooling is really pretty common.

I mean, you tell someone that you home school, and you don’t get much of a reaction from them.

Nancy: In those days though, they were kind of cross-current.

Joshua: Exactly. It was very radical, it was very unheard of, but it was motivated by looking into Scripture and saying, “The companions of fools suffer harm.” If we want our children to be wise, we want to make sure that we’re the primary influence.

We want to make sure that we’re discipling them. We want to make sure that we’re not handing that responsibility over to someone else (not that it’s wrong to attend public school or private school).

They had an awareness that they were responsible, that they needed to train their children, and they took what was a very different approach by home schooling.

Their example of really being willing to go against the grain of culture is something that has really influenced me as well. I think I’ve grown up with the awareness that following God’s plan often times, most of the time, means you’re going to look strange to other people.

You’re going to be literally going against the stream, against the flow, if you will. And that has influenced even the things I’ve written about dating and courtship and those kinds of things.

I realize that their willingness to be in the world but not of the world is very important for me.

Nancy: Now the things that you’ve written about, dating and courtship and moral purity, etcetera, are these things that your parents taught you, and if so, how did you come to have ownership of those yourself?

Joshua: Right. You know, it’s funny because I joke sometimes about the fact that I was the guinea pig of the family. Now all of these younger siblings are so much more godly, so much more wise, all these things.

My parents are very humble, and they would be the first to say, “Here are areas we feel like we made mistakes with Josh or could have provided more leadership,” and so on.

The area of relationships was one that I think in a lot of ways was sort of sprung on them. I came home from youth group and said, “Hey, here’s my girlfriend.”

They were trying to write a policy and get press release together and get some sort of statement on “here’s what we believe about dating.” And so they really sought to walk through that and did things differently with my younger brothers.

They’re walking them through that process in a very different way. But to be honest, I had no desire to follow the wisdom they were communicating to me. I had the girlfriend. I was pursuing that whole dating mentality. Anyone who’s looked at I Kissed Dating Goodbye knows my starting point was a very common mindset towards relationships.

But what I appreciate is they were engaging with me. They were giving me books like Passion and Purity by Elisabeth Elliot. I didn’t like it the first time I read it, but they would dialogue with me about those things.

When the relationship I was in came to a conclusion (and they were helping to provide parameters for that, but it became clear that we needed to end that relationship), they were there to encourage me.

They were there to walk through that with me. And I think my life in that particular area is evidence of the truth of God’s Word that, "If you train up in a child in the way he should go, that when he’s old, he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6, paraphrased).

There will be that return to what I was taught was true. The fact that Elisabeth Elliot asked me to write a forward for her book when they re-released Passion and Purity, I’m just amazed by that, because that’s all of grace.

I think back to when my mom first handed me that book and my attitude toward it. It was the faithfulness of my parents to diligently confront me with God’s Word that eventually changed my perspective. Those convictions became my own.

Nancy: How about the whole area of passion for Christ? You saw that in your parents. Is that something that you just always had? How did you cultivate that?

Joshua: I would want to encourage parents who maybe feel discouraged because they don’t see that in their young person. First of all, start young. Don’t assume that your teenager has to rebel.

Don’t expect that. Don’t back off from that, but my life is an example of having grown up with all of those foundations, but then making decisions related to the companions I had.

I was very involved in the gymnastics team. Even though I was home schooled, I had this area where I was really being influenced. I don’t think my parents were as aware of the great influence that was, those hours during the week when I was doing the sport.

There was a season where I was really running away from God in the sense of there was not a desire to please the Lord. I never took drugs or did all the things, the catalog of rebellion—but in my own life, I was pursuing ungodliness. And they really held the line in saying, “You know what? We’re not going to let you take this as far as you would like to.” For me, that was, “I want to go to school.” It had nothing to do with education. It was the girls, it was all these other things.

They were willing to have me be very unhappy with them for a certain season because they said, “We are not going to let you pursue the foolishness right now. One day we believe you will be grateful for this, but we’re not just going to try to make peace and make things comfortable. We’re going to do what we believe is right.”

It was just a few years later where I was able to thank them for that decision. I feel that so much of my spiritual life for the Lord is a result of them being a roadblock to my pursuit of sin and having kept me from things that if they had not, I believe I would have been led astray.

Nancy: I think parents often are afraid of their children, afraid of their children’s displeasure, afraid their children may not like them. You’re saying that you’re thankful now that your parents really did draw some lines and say, “Whether you like it or not, this is the way it will be in this family.”

Joshua: They had a long-term view, because they weren’t just looking at the desires of a thirteen-year-old and how we can make life easy for us. They were thinking of a twenty-one-year-old and a twenty-eight-year-old now, and because of that, well, I’m the beneficiary.

Nancy: How did the Lord really capture your heart?

Joshua: Well, that was a work of His grace. It’s a reminder for me, too, as I just have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and I want to be faithful.

But it’s also good for me to remember I can do all the right things, but only God can give new life to my daughter and my son. I can be a means of His grace coming to them, but for me, it was different moments.

Whether it was times on church retreats or times of teaching and so on, where God really just began to win my heart to Him. To be honest, I have real trouble locating my moment of conversion.

I don’t know if that was when I was a young boy, whether I was just rebelling in my teen years, or whether I got saved when I was around 14 years old, but He pursued me. I like to say He saved me out of a Christian family.

Nancy: And isn’t that what needs to happen with so many of our young people?

Joshua: It is. It really is. It’s so easy to live a life of hypocrisy when you grow up in a Christian home. You know all the right answers, and you can say all the right things when you’re around those people or that circle of friends.

God mercifully gave me a desire to follow Him and love Him, and that had nothing to do with being my dad’s son or something I had done. It was all of His sovereign grace, His choosing of me, which I did not deserve.

Nancy: So minister some words of encouragement or grace to a parent who says, “I’ve really tried to protect my children from ungodly or worldly influences. We’re trying to follow Christ, but we now have this teenage son or daughter who doesn’t have a heart for the things of God, who’s pushing back against our leadership.”

How do you encourage that parent to stay the course and what steps can they be taking now to influence their children toward surrender to Christ?

Joshua: Well, I would just say don’t cease to pray and have faith that God can change your son or daughter. The fact that He changed you is a miracle, so that can give you faith for His ability to rescue your son or daughter.

I would also say, please don’t back off at this time. I don’t see any warrant for this in Scripture. It’s not wise in any way to have the mindset of “Well, they just need to learn themselves. This is a time for me to give them room and space to figure these things out.”

You are called to be their mother, their father. You are called to, if necessary, throw your body in the path as they pursue sin or pursue rebellion.

It doesn’t mean you can save them, but you are uniquely called, especially if they’re still under your authority, if they’re still your child and under your authority in your home, to do all you can to keep them from the full expression of their sin.

I think we can all say there are certain times where if it weren’t for this restraint, even just the law of the United States of America, that I would have pursued sin further. In a similar way, God has placed you as a parent in that young person’s life to be a restraint on that sin.

Don’t be afraid to do that—engage them, talk with them, keep the conversation open, get resources that you can go through together, pursue godly families that you can interact with, and really make a priority of making your son or daughter have godly companions.

We cannot underestimate the influence of companions. In our own church, we have a wonderful youth pastor, Grant Layman, who has led in having parents very involved in the youth ministry.

They are really the ones driving things because he believes they need to be the primary form of discipleship, a means of discipleship. He will often talk to me about the fact that parents will be baffled at the lack of spiritual passion, at the rebellion in their students’ lives. He sits down with them and starts to talk about their parenting and just their young person’s life.

What will often emerge is that ungodly boy’s/girl’s companion. He has to show them, “This relationship is one that you need to, if necessary, be willing to cut off, because the companion of fools will suffer harm” (see Proverbs 13:20). That’s a promise.

Nancy: So, in your case, did it ever come down to your parents saying, “You cannot have these friends. You cannot be around these people”? I mean, how strong did they have to get?

Joshua: I think that’s an area that they would be stronger now in if they could go back. They made assumptions about “Christian” friends that they wouldn’t make now.

Without being judgmental, parents need to be realistic about the reality of indwelling sin in your son or daughter and in the children around your child. Recognize these are not just innocent little kids, and I can’t just assume that they’re doing good things and talking about good things in these settings.

I have to ask questions. I need to do research. I need to be very up front with my kids and say, “I have questions about the influences of this person. What influence do you see in your life? What are the things that you talk about? Do you love God more as a result of this friendship?” And if necessary, be willing to cut those friendships off. It’s very difficult, but it can be life-saving.

Nancy: I think so many parents today are not even thinking about the influence of those friendships, not just afraid to say something.

Joshua: It’s not even something they consider.

Nancy: It’s not even on their radar screen. I remember talking with a friend not too long ago who was telling me that her daughter, who is a senior in high school, was dating a young man.

She said, “We really like this young man.” Of course, my first question was, “Is he a believer?” She said, “Well, you know, we’re really not sure,” and just kind of hem-hawed around about it.

I just had this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach; you know that this is not wise. This is not best. I didn’t know her daughter. I didn’t know the young man, but it wasn’t months later I was back with this friend, and she’s telling me that now her daughter is expecting, had to get married.

They’re going to try and build their life, but it’s not a Christian marriage, and I’m thinking, you know, the foolishness. The lack of wisdom of parents and committed Christian parents not saying to their children, “You can’t date a lost person.”

I know in our family this was not even negotiable. I don’t think it was something we battled about. I don’t recall that we did.

Joshua: It’s not negotiable in God’s Word.

Nancy: It wasn’t even, and because it wasn’t negotiable in God’s Word, this was just an assumption. It was a given. There were just so many warnings that my dad, in particular, would give us about the friends that you choose, the people you date, the people that you have close relationships with.

If they are not godly people, they will draw you away from the Lord. And now, as you are, I’m so thankful that my parents had the courage to say, “This cannot be.” That doesn’t mean we always made right choices, but you know, by and large, we did.

Joshua: That’s good.

Nancy: God, of course, had to deal with our hearts, and only God could give us the passion to love Christ and to build our lives on His Word. But I think the protection of those early boundaries and parameters that so many parents today are afraid to do or just not realizing how important they are.

I think both our lives are a picture, a tribute, of the wisdom of parents saying, “This is my responsibility as long as you’re in this home to shape and influence your life in this way.”

Leslie: Nancy Leigh DeMoss has been talking with Joshua Harris. Parenting is a huge rewarding privilege, and it’s a huge challenging responsibility. But God gives grace for parents.

He did it for the parents of Nancy Leigh DeMoss and Joshua Harris, who we just heard, and God will give you grace to engage in the lives of your children.

In a busy home, how can you carve out time with your kids? Well, a lot of parents have found it helpful to turn off the TV. August is "turn off the TV month." If this greedy appliance has been using up a lot of your family time, why not unplug and reconnect with each other? Discover activities for your family at ReviveOurHearts.com.

We’ll help you make this TV-fast a worthwhile investment of your time. Again, get all kinds of ideas at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Also, Nancy’s cousin, Bob DeMoss, writes about the value of taking a break from the television in his book TV: The Great Escape. It will help you understand why it’s helpful to fast from TV and give you some ideas about using the time wisely.

We’ll send you a copy of TV: The Great Escape when you make a donation of any size to Revive Our Hearts. Plus, we’ll send you a couple of TV clings. These are easy-to-peel decals to put on your screen during the fast, and don’t worry, they easily come right back off.

You can see a picture of the TV clings at ReviveOurHearts.com, and that’s also where you can donate any amount and receive a copy of Bob DeMoss’ book and the TV clings.

You can also call 1-800-569-5959. If you’re about to spend less time with the TV guide finding out what’s on television, why not invest more time finding out what’s on the radio?

Sign up for the Revive Our Hearts Daily Connection. It’s a daily email that gives you key quotes from Nancy. These are highlights from each day’s programs. Quick links in the program will let you explore each day’s topic further, and they’ll bring up the transcript or online audio for that day.

Other quick links will take you to our podcast or let you take advantage of special offers we mention on the program. Sign up for the Revive Our Hearts Daily Connection when you visit our website.

If your kids take a break from TV, they could spend their time creating stories for other people to enjoy. Find out why that kind of activity was so good for Joshua Harris. He’ll return and tell us about it tomorrow. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

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