Continuing from Dr. John & Bonnie Lund, A Common Excuse for Giving Criticism, From the book “Take Your Love to Your Family and Your Frustrations to the Lord”:
You parents of the Willful and the Wayward! Don’t give them up. Don’t cast them off. They are not utterly lost. The Shepard will find his sheep. They were his long before they were yours—long before he entrusted them to your care; and you cannot begin to love them as he loves them. They have but strayed in ignorance from the right Path of Right, and God is merciful to ignorance. Only the fulness of knowledge brings the fulness of accountability. Our Heavenly Father is far more merciful, infinitely more charitable, than even the best of his servants and the Everlasting Gospel is mightier in power to save than our narrow, finite minds can comprehend.
The Prophet Joseph declared—and he never taught a more comforting doctrine—that the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service made in the cause of truth, would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity. . . .
Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the live to come, they will return. They will have to pay their debt to justice; they will suffer for their sins; and may tread a thorny path; but if it leads them at last, like a penitent Prodigal, to a loving and forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not have been in vain. Pray for your careless and disobedient children; hold on to them with your faith. Hope on; trust on, till you see the salvation of God. Who are these staying sheep—these wayward sons and daughters? They are the children of the Covenant, heirs to promises, and have received, if baptized, the gift of the Holy Ghost, which makes manifest the things of God. Could all that go for naught?3
The “tentacles of Divine Providence” include the very principles of “divine intervention” we will be discussing. Notice that Apostle Whitney encouraged parents to, in essence, take their frustrations about their wayward children to the Lord in prayer and to hope and trust in Christ Atonement. There were promises made by the Lord in our premortal existence, hence the phrase, “heirs to the promises.” Parents are equally heirs to a promise conditioner on the parent’s willingness to be humble, diligent, and prayerful.
Brigham Young made the following statements to parents of wayward children: Let the father and mother, who are members of this Church and Kingdom, take a righteous course and strive with all their might never to do wrong, but to do good all their lives; if they have one child or many children, if they conduct themselves towards them as they should, binding them to the Lord by their faith and prayers, I care not where those children go, they are bound up to their parents by an everlasting tie, and no power of earth or hell can separate them from their parents in eternity; they will return again to the fountain from whence they sprang.4
President Lorenzo Snow challenged parents to consider that their faithfulness would empower them to be saviors on mount Zion for their children: “If you succeed in passing through these trials and afflictions and receive a resurrection, you will, by the power of the Priesthood, work and labor, as the Son of God has, until you get all your sons and daughters in the path of exaltation and glory. This is just as sure as that the sun rose this morning over yonder mountains. Therefore, mourn not because all your sons and daughters to not follow in the path that you marked out for them, or give heed to your counsels. Inasmuch as we succeed in obtaining eternal glory, and stand as saviors, and as kings and priests to our God, we will save our posterity.5 ~~~Dr. John & Bonnie Lund, Take Your Love to Your Family and Your Frustrations to the Lord (American Fork, Utah, Covenant Communications, 2020), p. 16-18 (continued. . .)
3. Conference Report, April 1929, 110.. . . . 4. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 11:215.
