Divided Homes

The division we experience in our families is a fully-expected outcome in the mission of Christ. Because the gospel both saves and condemns, it divides.

[00:00:01] 2025 marks the year I sort of turned 20 in the ministry. It’s been 20 years that I’ve been a pastor, and in those 20 years, I can tell you that there is one painful, ongoing burden that I have seen Christians carry that is more difficult than any other. I have watched as believers suffer through disease and the death of loved ones. I’ve been there when young children were told that dad had passed away. I’ve watched and tried to help as people have spouses who divorce and abandon them suddenly. I’ve walked with them while their world was imploding. I’ve listened to spouses confess adultery and helped them see the gospel solution to the living hell that their choices have created. I’ve seen families collapse under the strain of debt and financial ruin. I’ve seen so many faithful Christians suffer well under terrible circumstances. Terrible strain and cling to Christ through all of that, through all the storms of life that toss them in every direction. But of all the painful, weighty burdens I have seen Christians carry, I don’t think I have seen one heavier than the division of the gospel in families. I don’t think there’s a more difficult burden to bear than that. Specifically, it’s the burden of grief and loss that parents feel when their children grow up and reject Christ, and they turn away from the gospel that they were taught. I’ve spoken over the years with so many parents who are watching their children head off into the world and turn away from Christ. Some do it openly. They become mockers of Christianity. They scoff at the ideas of their narrow-minded parents. Others do it more passively, remaining friendly with their families as long as the topic of the gospel doesn’t come up, as long as it’s not discussed, and as long as there’s nothing said about their new identities, their new beliefs and behaviors. I’ve watched parents agonize over the spiritual state of their adult children, just bewildered by their choices. And part of the burden of this is feeling, should we have done more? That’s I get that a lot. Should we have done more? Is this our fault? Did we do this somehow? Where did we go wrong? And so, there’s this added layer of guilt to it. This morning we’re going to look at a passage that explains what’s happening very specifically in those families and I’ll tell you up front that this passage does not tell you how to prevent this from happening. The fact is you can’t prevent this from happening. You can’t do it. The division we experience in our families is a fully expected outcome in the mission of Christ. Because the gospel both saves and condemns, it divides.

[00:03:23] As I mentioned last week, this is one of those passages that I’ve had circled on the calendar for quite some time, because it’s going to be a particularly difficult one to look at and to preach and to consider. And once we look at it, you may wonder why Jesus is sharing this information with us at all. Why tell us this? Why tell us this insight and give us this insight into the dividing work of the gospel if we can’t do anything about it? Well, I believe that you’ll see that having this insight is actually a great help. It helps us to see our pain is expected within God’s plan. It removes the guilt that we are not meant to carry, and it frees us to do our part in God’s work of salvation by simply sharing the gospel and rest in the knowledge that God is accomplishing exactly what he plans to accomplish with his gospel.

[00:04:16] So here’s what we’re going to do this morning. First, we’re going to look and we’re going to listen as Jesus explains the dividing work of his ministry. And then we’ll look at the results in families as Jesus describes them. And then we’re going to end a little bit differently this morning. I want to talk about some of the ways we can address division within our families. And after that we’re going to end the whole service differently church than we normally do. Instead of having a final song and a benediction today, we’re going to turn this room into a prayer meeting space. As we look at the passage today, I would like you to think about family members who aren’t walking with the Lord. Picture them in your minds. There’ll be time to pray for them individually after we’re done. You can stay here and pray in your seats, or you can come up to the front. There will be pastors and prayer teams up here in the front. You can pray with them. If you choose not to stay, we would ask today instead of chatting with one another, which is usually great, we would ask you just to leave the room quietly today. You can chat in the lobby or over in the in the gym, but we just ask you to leave quietly.

[00:05:33] Let’s start with how Jesus’s ministry divides. This is Jesus speaking. I came to cast fire on the earth and would that it was already kindled. I have a baptism to be baptized with and how great is my distress until it is accomplished. Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. So, this is Jesus describing his own ministry. This is something of a mission statement from Jesus, and this is probably a bit of a shock to you if your view of Jesus is that he only came to share peace and love. If you see Jesus as only really asking us to set aside differences and bring people together, then this mission statement from Jesus himself is new for you and it’s probably a little concerning to you, but I’ll go a step further than that. Those of you who follow Jesus, those of you who love Jesus, you’ve walked with him for some time. You know your Bible well. You are probably already thinking of statements about Jesus’s ministry that seem to contradict this. And you don’t even have to leave the Gospel of Luke. Didn’t the angels declare at the birth of Jesus, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased? I mean, he told the prostitute in chapter seven, your faith has saved you, go in peace. He told the bleeding woman in chapter 8, your faith has made you well, go in peace. He told his disciples in chapter 10 when they go out and they’re going to be sharing the gospel from house to house, when they go into a house, the first thing that they should say to that household is, peace be to this house. Peace is clearly been near the very center of Jesus ministry. How can he now say that he is not come to bring peace? And more than that, that he has come to bring division. How is that possible? Well, let’s walk through the imagery here. Jesus says that he came to cast fire on the earth. This is the refining fire of judgment against sin. You’ll remember that John the Baptist, when he was describing Jesus to the people, he said, Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And he said, the winnowing fork is in Jesus hands, and he’s going to separate the wheat from the chaff, and he’s going to gather the wheat up and he’s going to burn the chaff. Jesus is now saying the same thing here. This is Jesus reiterating what John said when his work is accomplished, there will be a division between those he gathers to himself and those who receive the fires of final judgment for their sins. But notice Jesus says that fire is not yet kindled. It’s not yet kindled. He longs for it to be kindled but something has to happen. It hasn’t started yet. Why not? Well, it’s because he has a baptism that he has to experience first and so the imagery here switches. The fire of judgment can’t start until Jesus undergoes a baptism. Now, this is not a baptism like a Christian baptism that we practice today that shows our unity and new life in Jesus. It’s not even John the Baptist’s baptism which symbolized repentance as people prepared their hearts for the coming of Jesus. This is not even an actual water baptism. This is Jesus’s way of describing being deluged with God’s wrath. In the Old Testament, we have pictures, imagery of being forsaken by God as being cast into the deep, to be deluged, washed over with God’s judgment. Jesus is referring here to the cross, that’s the baptism. He’s referring to his death. The baptism symbolizes how Jesus will take the poured-out wrath of God against sin when he dies on the cross, and he’s going to do this for his people, those who trust in him. When you put your faith in Jesus, you are trusting that Jesus took the just wrath of God for your sins onto himself. That’s what it means to believe or to trust in Jesus that he bore that wrath for you so that you can be set free. The cross is where the division begins. Some are going to receive what Jesus has done and they’re going to be set free from their sins. They’re going to be baptized in the Holy Spirit and will be gathered into God’s house. Some will reject what Jesus has done, remain in their sins, even multiply their sins. They’re going to live a worldly life apart from God, and eventually they’ll be burned like chaff in God’s judgment against sin. That’s why Jesus asks, do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No. I came to bring division. The good news of Jesus is the declaration of peace with God. That is the good news. That is the gospel, that you can have peace with God, but because it’s certain that some will receive it and some will reject it, the net result of the gospel is division. And Jesus knew that. He knew that this isn’t a failure on the part of the gospel where Jesus, you know, he intended to save everyone and somehow people thwarted his plans in this, no. God knew prior to enacting his redemption plan by grace through faith in Jesus that it would be the method of salvation for some and the method of condemnation for others. Jesus at this point in his ministry prior to the cross, is now letting his disciples know what the result of the cross will be. It’s going to be a division of people, which was always part of God’s plan, his design.

[00:12:06] All those declarations of peace we noted earlier in Luke are contingent on God’s decision and human faithfulness. Did you note that? The angels did declare peace on earth, but among those with whom God is pleased? See, to have that peace, God has to be pleased with you, which means your sins have to be removed in Christ. It’s the only way to have a relationship with God. You can’t have it any other way. Jesus said to the women, your faith has saved you. Your faith has made you well. Go in peace. You see, it’s trust in the Lord that leaves them with God’s peace. Jesus did tell the disciples that when they show up to a house, they should say, peace be to this house. But in the very next verse he says, and if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest upon him. But if not, it will return to you. Meaning, if someone is there in that home who will respond favorably to God’s peace, well, then he’ll receive it. But if not, then there’s going to be division. They’re going to reject you. They’re going to reject me Jesus says. They’re going to push you away. And this is God’s plan. The peace of God that comes through salvation in Christ is not going to be received by everyone. It’s going to cause division and this is God’s plan. This is one of the most observable aspects of the gospel in the world. You can see it everywhere, without a doubt, the world is divided over Jesus. There’s no question of that. The reason that there are people groups on the planet who have no access to the gospel is because governments of those regions have made laws against sharing the gospel with them in any way. So what they’ve become is thought police. They’re stopping the hearing of the gospel. They want to control the thoughts of their people. They figured out a way to divide themselves from Jesus by not having better arguments, but by using violence to shut down the sharing of the gospel. Take Somalia, for instance. Okay. One author puts it the tiny group of Somali Christians that lead their lives in Christ in Somalia live in what she calls constant fear. Constant fear. If your life is constantly threatened, either with violence or with the shunning of your family and your community, you are incentivized to go along with everybody else. It’s just easier to do that. And they’ve poisoned the medicine of the gospel so that to take it seems foolish. It seems deadly.

[00:12:06] Now, you might be asking, Kyle, why are we suddenly talking about unreached people groups around the world? Why are we onto a missions topic here? Why are we talking about what people on the other side of the world have done with the gospel of Christ? Well, it’s because I believe that there is a connection between what oppressive governments do to the gospel and what is being done today in households where the gospel is dividing family members. And I’m going to make that case here in just a minute. But first, let’s look at what Jesus says the gospel will do in a home. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter in law and daughter in law against mother-in-law. Now, Jesus could have chosen any relationship between Christians and non-Christians here to make his point, but he chose the nuclear family because he wants us to see just how deep this division is going to go. See this division, that the gospel is going to divide the most basic, loving, tight knit group of human beings. The very closest relationships are going to be divided by the gospel. Moms and dads, sons and daughters are going to fall on either side, created by the division of the gospel of Christ. Now, I want you to note here, please note that Jesus is speaking here about dividing over the gospel, not dividing over every disagreement. Okay, so don’t be using this passage to justify every time you don’t see eye to eye with somebody in your family. The Bible says we’re going to fight. No. Okay. That’s not this passage. The Bible shows us how to live at peace with each other in those frustrations by applying gospel shaped forgiveness and love and grace. It tells dads not to frustrate their children by being harsh with them. It tells us to confess our sins to one another and forgive one another. Be reconciled to each other. This this passage here isn’t about all of the disagreements that frustrate us at home. This is about whether or not family members follow Jesus or not. Okay. And Jesus says families will be separated by their embrace or their rejection of the cross. And they’re going to be at odds with each other because of it.

[00:17:20] Notice how Jesus says each phrase one way, and then he reverses the order and he says it back the other way. And so, he says father against son, but then also son against father. That’s to show that the animosity is going to flow both ways. This will not just be a disagreement. This will be a conflict. There will be pain on both sides. There will be a desire to win on both sides. Now, why is that? Why is that? Why didn’t Jesus, for example, say son against father while father accepts son? Why doesn’t it say that? That’s what the Bible would say if it was written with the values of our culture today, wouldn’t it? That’s how it would go today. Son doesn’t like father’s Christian faith and asks for acceptance of his own new beliefs. Father expands his Christianity to embrace the son’s new beliefs. If we were writing a Bible today and we wanted Jesus to say the things that the culture says, that’s how we would write it. That’s what we would say. But here the actual Jesus says the struggle and confrontation is going to flow both ways between family members, and he offers no solution to it. He simply says that that’s the way things are going to be. And the reason for that is due to the nature of the gospel itself. It’s due to the very message of the gospel. The gospel is an exclusive set of claims that are either true and then therefore they matter to everyone, or they are false, and they should matter to no one at all.

[00:19:00] Jesus either died on the cross bearing the sins of all who trust in him or he didn’t and that story has no relevance to anybody at all. And the stakes couldn’t be higher on either side of that divide. Jesus said that in the passage just before this one, that a faithful servant, one who lives in constant expectation of his return and lives out the values of the kingdom of God in his life, that person will be with him in a new earth for eternity. And the one who rejects or ignores the gospel will enter into God’s punishment as an unbeliever. There’s an especially awful eternity to those who have knowledge of the gospel of Jesus, but turn away from it. And this is why the division in families is so painful. It’s so painful, and it feels so urgent because of this. Some of you are younger and you have parents who have no interest in the gospel, no interest at all. They might go to some progressive liberal church thing. They might have some sort of a religious background, but they are like the guy that Jesus described who’s just trying to build bigger barns. Live for today with no interest in eternal matters. I’ve seen this actually quite a lot, younger believers struggling because that’s the way their parents see life. It’s hard to be a son or a daughter who’s trying to be a spiritual guide to the people who are supposed to be your spiritual guide. It’s role reversal for you. You’re looking at your aging parents. You’re wondering what you can possibly do to help them change a false Secular worldview that they have been chasing for their entire lives, and it’s very set in for them. And it hurts because that’s Mom and Dad, still mom and dad. Some of you are older parents and your kids have grown up and they’ve gone off to the world and they’ve become worldly. They just embraced it. They know the gospel, but the knowledge that they were given didn’t become their faith commitment. They decided once they were on their own that the claims of the gospel were too narrow. They were too exclusive. If they’re like most young adults today who reject the gospel, they believe that they are not rejecting Jesus per se. They believe that they are rejecting the narrow-minded view of Jesus taught to them in the church, and perhaps even more narrowly taught to them by you and your judgmental attitude. Parents, I’m not saying you have a judgmental attitude, I’m saying that your adult kids might think so simply because you believe the gospel is true for everyone. And so therefore you’re judgmental. And so the animosity exists in your family. And it’s painful because next to our spouse, there is nobody that we love more than our kids. It’s the way God designed it, that we wouldn’t love anybody more than our kids. This division in families has been true of every generation since humanity’s fall into sin in the Garden of Eden. This has been happening since the dawn of time.

[00:22:20] Jesus himself here is using the words of the prophet Micah in order to describe this situation. This is Micah 7:6, for the son treats the father with contempt. The daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter in law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies are the men of his own house. See? Same pairings. He’s quoting Micah here. It’s every generation. Every generation has been like this. But in every generation, the conversation is different. The resistance to the gospel today, the arguments used against it today, the cultural values that are pressing on the gospel today are different today. And they’re different throughout time. They’re different around the world, in different cultures. So, what I want to do is I want to give you a quick glimpse into how the conflict in families over the gospel today is different now here in American society than it was in the past. Now, that’s not to say that it’s worse today. It is just different and we need to understand that difference. You probably noticed that if you’ve tried to share the gospel with your unbelieving family member, the response is cold because somehow what you are doing is wrong, right? You’ve probably experienced that. You share the gospel, you’re wrong for doing it. The act of evangelism itself is seen as an attack on the other person’s values and identity, and it’s that person who is wrong for doing it. Do you remember how I mentioned the tactic of Somalia and other oppressive countries, that the way that they maintain that worldview, that they want is not to allow the gospel to be heard? They don’t want to give the gospel a voice. They say the gospel is violence against their culture and so they set up laws to control the thoughts of the people. Well, something similar is happening in our society now. But instead of oppressing the gospel with violence, it’s being oppressed with shame, cancellation, cutting off relationships, and humiliating those who would dare to call others to be accountable to God’s Word. If you’ve tried to share the gospel with your adult kids, only to have them treat you like a closed-minded enemy, you have experienced this new kind of oppression. And I don’t have a lot of time to go into why that’s the case this morning, but I’m going to give you just two influences that have changed the way people think, that have helped to shape the modern mind today. So, you can understand where the roots of this thing are coming from. In the 18th century, there was a Genevan philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Rousseau believed that the real you, the real you, your real identity, who you really are, is found in your inner life, and it is expressed through your feelings. Okay, that’s the real you, inside of you. And this is called expressive individualism. The real you needs to emerge from you like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. And what’s holding you back, what’s keeping you inside is culture. It’s the culture around you. The culture around you is keeping you from becoming the person you really are. All external authority is part of a culture that corrupts the individual and prevents the true identity of the individual from emerging. In the 19th century, just 100 years later, Karl Marx gave a structure to Rousseau’s ideas about culture. See, Marx was an atheist, and he said that the material world, the things in the world is all that there is. He said, what the wealthy in the world do is they structure everything in the culture to keep their stuff. So they shape the laws. They shape commerce, religion. You see where this is going? They shape everything. Everything is structured to keep people down. So according to Marx, how does an individual emerge and express himself out of an oppressive culture designed to keep him from being his authentic self? Marx says Revolution. That’s how you do it. Fighting. You’ve got to fight back against the oppressor. You have to fight the oppressive authorities who are trying to keep you down with their ideas and their structures, which are no less than acts of violence against you, he’d say. So moving the identity inward, putting it all inside of you, this expressive individualism and labeling all external authorities as oppressive authorities, God, religion, wealth, laws, everything.

[00:27:10] What that means is that there’s no more objective right and wrong. The only right is expressing the true self, and the only wrong is anything that prohibits that expression. And so now, instead of asking if something is objectively right or wrong, we only ask if something feels hurtful. Does it feel hurtful? Well, then it’s wrong. If something hurts a person’s feelings or doesn’t affirm their individual expression, that’s what we call wrong now. Appealing to an external authority is not just an argument, it’s an attack, it’s violence, it’s oppression. To the modern mind, you can’t address the sins of a person without attacking the person. It’s logically impossible to the modern mind. And this is why, when you share the gospel with a family member who’s using the secular values of American society, you’re not treated as an equal. You’re treated as an oppressor. You’re treated like the enemy. If you’re being treated this way, I tell you what, this morning in church, I feel for you. If this is what you’re experiencing. This is not just a philosophical exercise for me. Rachel and I, in both of our families have, to some degree, been torn apart by the gospel. Rachel’s more than mine, in fact. It’s tough. So the question then just becomes, what do we do about our families? What do we do about our families?

[00:28:45] Before we turn to a time of prayer, I want to offer some guidance on this. That’s implied right in our passage today. It comes right from it. It’s an implication of the passage. It comes right from Jesus words. And it’s four statements. I wrote four statements here that I want to help to guide. Now, I wrote these to parents. Okay. You’re right in my mind here. If you’re thinking of a different family member, you can easily reword these for your family member. But I’m thinking here specifically of parents. The parents of adult children who abandon the gospel make up the largest group here. And my heart is very much with you this morning. The first thing I would ask is that you be sure your conflict is over the gospel. Be sure your conflict is over the gospel. What I mean is, if your real problem with your son or daughter is something other than Christ don’t let that continue. Don’t let that go on. You don’t like who they married. You don’t like the job they took, how far they moved away from you. Maybe they don’t parent the way that you would parent or they don’t visit enough or you don’t like their politics. Now, whatever it is. Okay. Whatever it is, if the problem isn’t over the gospel, work it out. Work it out. Find peace. Apply the gospel. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Don’t let a division that isn’t over Jesus keep you from building a relationship with your kid. The second one is very hard, but it needs to be said. Don’t cling to a childhood prayer as your hope. Don’t cling to a childhood prayer. I get it. I understand this one. Parents want some kind of hope that their adult son or daughter who is entirely worldly and rejects the gospel outright, is still somehow saved because they prayed a sinner’s prayer when they were young. Perhaps you prayed it with them. Jesus said, we will know his people by their fruit. They will have a passion for the Lord that is growing and that is pouring out of them. That’s not just true of other people. That’s true of your family, too. To treat your son or your daughter like a Christian when they clearly have no connection to Christ, robs you of the opportunity to pray for them appropriately, to pray for their salvation, and to share the gospel with them when you have the opportunity. The third thing I would say to you is what’s happening to your kids is up to God. It’s up to God. That’s Jesus point in giving us this information. What’s happening to your family is not strange, and it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. There are too many good parents in the church who raise their children to know Jesus’s gospel, who are mentally beating themselves up as failures because their kids reject Jesus. You don’t control what the gospel does in your child’s mind and heart parents. You never have. It’s true today. So take that guilt off your mind. Take it off your mind. You’re afraid you didn’t do a perfect enough job discipling them at home. Let me assure you, you didn’t. Nobody does. Nobody does a perfect enough job raising their kids in the gospel. No one shares with them as much as they possibly could have. No, there’s no perfect parent. There is a long list of Titans of the Faith, deeply committed followers of Jesus who did extraordinary jobs discipling their families, who have unbelieving sons and daughters. Okay, take it off your mind. Take that off your guilt list. And the last one, I hope will guide you and comfort you. You can control what you say and do, but you can’t bridge the division. You can’t. You couldn’t change their hearts when they were children. And you can’t do it now. What you can do is love them. You can pray for them. You can let them know that you’re ready whenever they are to talk, to guide, to help. In the end, your kids are in God’s hands. We don’t know if our efforts to share Jesus with them will be what God uses to change their hearts. We don’t know that. We’re just called to share the gospel whenever we get the chance and trust that God will do his will, because he always does his will.

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