We hugged, said our goodbyes and “I love you.” He walked with us to the car, turned, and walked away. And as we sat there looking at his back, I cried my heart out. Our firstborn child was launched, and I felt like my insides were being ripped out.

Two years later, we had a repeat. Once again, after goodbyes, “We love you,” and hugs, another son walked us to the car. Watching him as he turned and walked away, those same deep heart cries rose up in me.

One last time, a few years later, goodbyes and “I love you” were said, and hugs were given. We went to the car and watched as our youngest son turned and walked away into his new life. And yes, we sat there looking at his back and I cried my heart out.

Not that I would never see our sons again, of course. But when our kids left home, I was keenly aware that my life would dramatically change. For years I had anticipated this day and often thought I couldn’t survive the emotion of it all, but I did. It’s been many years now since those goodbyes. And today I am so grateful to God for his sustaining grace, and for the surprisingly sweet joys he’s given in each season of life since.

New Strength After Kids

I had been a “full-time” mom, and so obviously when our sons left home, the whole structure of my life altered. No more hurried breakfasts to get out the door in the mornings. No games to go to late in the day. No large meals to prepare that would satisfy teenage boys. No kids hanging out at the house or event-planning with other parents. Oh, yes, life was going to be different, and I wasn’t at all sure I was going to like that!

Early on after the kids left, I found myself on my knees before God with a kind of blank, empty feeling, when I found these words:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being. (Ephesians 3:14–16)

That good word assured me that God would fill me with his strength for the new season ahead.

Six Lessons for Empty Nests

We moms want to be good mothers, and we give everything we have to our children. As Christian moms, we feel a special calling to raise our children to love Jesus and follow him, which can seem especially weighty. And on top of it all, our identity can get so wrapped up in our children that we forget who we are. So when it comes time for the kids to leave home, it’s hard! And it’s sad. But we need not stay stuck in sadness. We can move forward into adult relationships with our children which have a sweetness all their own.

“Our identity can get so wrapped up in our children that we forget who we are.”

If you are in the transition years, anticipating the day when your kids leave home, or are already adjusting to an empty nest, here are some practical steps that have been a great help to me.

1. Pray fervently.

No doubt you have prayed for your children since before they were born. Keep praying! As you pray for your child who is no longer under your daily care, you will discover your prayers will become deeper and your relationship with both God and your child will be enriched. Remember, you can cast your anxieties on God, because he cares about you — and your child (1 Peter 5:7).

2. Place your child in the arms of God.

I never understood what it meant to “let go” of my children. Then someone suggested, rather than letting go of my children to float out into some kind of never-never land, I can deliberately place them into the strong and loving arms of God where they are protected and cared for. “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27). This has been a great comfort.

3. Perspective helps.

The aim of parenting is to raise little humans to become productive adults. Throughout the child-raising years, we want to create a nurturing environment so our children will develop and mature. We want our children to be adults. In a sense, we raise them to leave.

4. Prioritize your husband.

While our kids are home, they often require the biggest chunk of our time and energy, but the priority still should be our husband. Make time for him when the kids are home, so you’ll know each other when they leave. Have fun together now, so that you will enjoy each other later.

5. Personal development is essential.

Take care of yourself — physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Develop an interest or involvement while your kids are home that will carry over into the empty-nest years. One way to do this is to cultivate friendships and fellowship with other women in your church.

6. Plant yourself by streams of water.

“A tree planted by streams of water yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (Psalm 1:3). Get rooted, and stay rooted, in God’s word, take delight in God’s Son, maintain fellowship with God’s people. When you do this over the years, you will be fruitful in every season of your life.

Enjoy Being a Child Again

Most Christian moms, like me, focus on God’s love for our children. We remind ourselves that God loves our kids more than we do — and he does. We help our children understand and accept God’s love for them. But I discovered, when my boys left home, I’d nearly forgotten that God loves me, too. He cares about me. He knows my needs. He wants to bless me because I am his child.

“I discovered, when my boys left home, I’d nearly forgotten that God loves me, too.”

Mom, if your kids have just left home — or are soon to leave — you are about to enter a new season with great potential for fruitfulness. As young women we bore the fruit of the womb. Then the childrearing years were full of great blessing, energy, and vitality. These years were times of hope, of spring and the warm summer sunshine. But, surprisingly, the empty-nest years can be a very productive and fruit-filled season, too.

When kids leave home, parenting takes on new and rewarding dimensions. Daily life is different, for sure, but you are still, and always will be, your kids’ mom. In fact, you no doubt will discover as I have, that as the years move on and you and your kids grow older, your relationships will deepen and enrich on many levels. At the same time, fruit that you bear in this new season of life can have an even wider impact now as you stay connected to your local church. Look for ways to be involved with the younger women in your church. You are a seasoned woman who can nourish the upcoming generation of women.

Be encouraged, dear mom. God is with you and loves you through every season of life. He will not forsake you. He wants to bless you and make you a blessing!

O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come. (Psalm 71:17–18)

Audio Transcript

Happy Monday! We launch a new week and close in on 1,700 episodes in the podcast. Thank you for all the support and prayers and encouragements over the years. And as we march forward, I’m also investing some time curating the archives to notice where some of our content gaps remain. And while doing so, Pastor John, I found one of those gaps. We have several episodes on fasting. What is fasting? What does it mean? What does it accomplish? How do we do it? And so on. But by contrast, we have relatively little on feasting. And yet feasting is a major category in Scripture — far more prevalent in the Bible than fasting is, actually. So on this Monday, Pastor John, can you give us a little theology of feasting in ten minutes, as you understand it?

A little theology of feasting in ten minutes? Maybe the way to think about this episode on feasting is that the biblical points that I will make are the raw materials of a theology of feasting. That would make me feel a little bit better.

Commemorate God’s Mercy

First, we need a definition. I’m going to start with a popular definition — namely, feasting is the enjoyment of abundance. That’s my short-term definition. I’m not even going to say that it is limited to the enjoyment of food, because you could feast your eyes on scenery, you could feast your ears on music, you could feast your nose on sweet aromas, you could feast your taste buds on honey, feast your skin and body on sexual pleasures.

So when you turn to the Bible, you find that the word feast does not always have this connotation even of abundance in view. If you do a word search on the word feast in the Old Testament, it’s just full of “prescribed feasts,” as they’re called in English. And they include Passover, Feast of Firstfruits, Feast of Weeks, Feast of Pentecost, Feast of Trumpets, Feast of Booths.

And you can see these spelled out. They take their beginning in Leviticus 23, and then they’re unpacked all over the place. They don’t all imply abundance, but rather — and here would be a modification of the definition biblically — a communal sharing of a celebrated meal with a focus on some remembrance and thankfulness of some event of God’s mercy (something like that). And it might be very simple. I mean, unleavened bread is not what you think about when you think about a big Thanksgiving dinner.

So, we need to be careful and be sure that when we see the word feast in the Bible, we determine from the context whether it implies the enjoyment of abundance, or something more simple — some celebration of some remembered event in a focused and communal and simple way.

Four Biblical Truths About Feasting

But I’m going to focus on what we ordinarily mean by feasting. That’s what I think you’re really asking, over against fasting — namely, a joyful shared experience of some abundance, usually food and drink. And so I have four observations as I look at the Bible about such feasting — the raw material, maybe, of a little theology of feasting.

1. Feasting can be good — and bad.

First, the Bible is clear that feasting in and of itself may be a very good thing or a bad thing, depending on other factors.

“Mere abundance of food and drink does not make for a happy family or happy community. There must be more to it.”

For example, Proverbs 17:1 says, “Better is a dry morsel with quiet than a house full of feasting with strife.” In other words, mere abundance of food and drink does not make for a happy family or happy community. There must be more to it.

Another example would be Ecclesiastes 10:16–17: “Woe to you, O land, when your . . . princes feast in the morning! Happy are you, O land, when your . . . princes feast at the proper time, for strength, and not for drunkenness!” In other words, there’s a time for work and a time for feasting, and there are good purposes for feasting, and there are fleshly, worldly, sinful reasons for feasting. Feasting in and of itself may or may not be good.

Another example: Ecclesiastes 7:2 says, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.” In other words, the good and rightful pleasures of feasting cannot teach you the deepest things about life and death. I have never heard anybody say they went deepest with God, learned most of God, on easy days or at feasting.

One more example: God says to Israel in Amos 5:21, 24, “I hate, I despise your feasts. . . . Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” In other words, if our feasting is a cloak of pleasure covering lives of lovelessness and injustice, the feast has become a stench in God’s nose.

So, those are examples of what I mean when I say feasting in and of itself may be a very good thing or a bad thing, depending on other factors.

2. Feasting rejoices in God’s kindness.

God intends that the abundance he provides for our physical enjoyment, the enjoyment of our senses, should echo in our hearts with thanksgiving to God and be made holy by the word and prayer. I’m simply echoing 1 Timothy 6:17, where Paul says we should set our hope on God, “who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.” In other words, the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touch of good things that God has made are not mainly tests to see if we will make them our god and become idolaters, but rather, they are mainly pleasures to send our hearts joyful and thankful back to God. That’s their main purpose for existence.

“The difference between unholy and holy feasting is not what’s on the table, but what’s in the mind and in the heart.”

Paul puts it like this in 1 Timothy 4:4–5: “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” So, the difference between unholy feasting and holy feasting is not what’s on the table, but what’s in the mind and in the heart. Is the mind grasping the God-centered meaning of these things from the word of God, and is the heart sending up joyful prayers of thanksgiving as we taste more of the goodness of God in the very things we’re eating?

3. Feasting is our destiny.

One of the beautiful ways God describes the destiny of those who will accept salvation, his invitation, is a final feast with him in the age to come. Isaiah 25:6: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine. . . . He will swallow up death forever.” That’s a magnificent picture of our hope beyond this age, beyond the grave.

Jesus says in Matthew 22:2–10, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son.” The king sent out the invitation to the world: “Come to the wedding feast!” That’s what world missions is. I mean, my book is called Let The Nations Be Glad. It could be called Let The Nations Come to a Feast.

And to his disciples at the Last Supper, just before he gave his life for our sins, Jesus said in Luke 22:29–30, “I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom.”

And the book of Revelation tops it off with the angel crying, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9). To which I respond, “Blessed indeed to be a part of the bride of Christ on that day.”

4. Feasting shows off Christ’s supreme value.

In some measure now, and then perfectly at the last day, God himself will be our feast. Psalm 36:7–8: “How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind . . . feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.”

I think if we meditate on those four observations about feasting from Scripture, in the context of the whole Bible, we will be able to move wisely between fasting and feasting, between the joy of self-denial and the joy of abundance, in a way that shows the supreme value of Christ in our lives.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back. On Monday we took a question from Rose, a woman who has emailed us several times over the years. She emailed us the same brief question: “How do I pray for my husband to be saved?” It’s a question from desperation, and maybe from weariness too. So how does a woman like Rose not lose heart in praying for her husband over years — maybe even over decades? Pastor John ended his answer with a brief mention of Luke 18:1–8 — a great parable for those who need motivation to endure in prayer. But it is also a very odd parable. It has sometimes been called “The Parable of the Unjust Judge,” which is where one of the problems rests. How and why is God likened to a godless, unjust judge? Because of this, we often just prefer to call it “The Parable of the Persistent Widow.” That’s cleaner. But no matter what we call it, this remains perhaps the oddest parable Jesus ever told. Odd because of how many false correlations we need to untangle to understand it. That’s what we do today, in a clip from a sermon preached on January 9, at the end of the first week of 1983. Here’s a very young Pastor John, preaching during a pretty intense season of focused prayer for himself and for his church. Here’s what he said.

It’s one of the few parables to be interpreted right at the outset, lest we miss the point. Verse 1 of chapter 18 of Luke is the interpretation of the parable. “He told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” Jesus’s answer to the question “How can you endure to the end and be saved?” is “Pray, pray, pray, and don’t lose heart in your praying.”

Peculiar Parable

The parable goes like this:

In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, “Give me justice against my adversary.” For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, “Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.” (Luke 18:2–5)

Now, don’t be offended that Jesus compares God the Father to an unjust judge. That happens several times in the Bible. For example, the most familiar one is that Jesus’s coming is called the coming of a what in the night? Thief, which is not very complimentary to Jesus. But clearly, when the New Testament talks like that, it doesn’t mean Jesus is the thief. It means that the point of comparison is suddenness, unexpectedness. So here, the point of comparison is not that God is unjust, but that he gives in to prevailing prayer.

Verse 7 draws out the lesson very clearly, which was stated in verse 1. “And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night?” The answer, of course, is obviously God will vindicate his elect who cry to him day and night — that is, who always pray. Therefore, the point of the parable is cry to God day and night. Show yourself to be the elect by acting the way the elect always act — cry to God day and night. Or to use the words of verse 1, pray always and don’t lose heart. And if you do that, you will not become like Lot’s wife — in love with the world — and turn back into a pillar of salt. You will not be left in judgment as one is snatched away from your home. You will endure in faith and love, and God will vindicate you when the Son of Man flashes from one horizon to the other. So, always pray and don’t lose heart.

Pray, Pray, Pray

Now, what’s driving me this morning in this sermon is that this is the last day of a week of concerted prayer. So, we’re at the end of prayer week. That’s a dangerous place to be, according to this parable. “Don’t end” is what this parable is saying. If we end praying, we’re in trouble — deep trouble. Some of us this week have had a great time. I’ve prayed more hours in the first week of 1983 than any week in my life. And many of you have too. Now what? The word of Jesus to us this morning is, “Don’t stop praying. Don’t peter out. Don’t be fickle. Always, always, always pray. Cry to God day and night.”

“Jesus’s answer to the question ‘How can you endure to the end and be saved?’ is ‘Pray, pray, pray.’”

Here’s the way Peter put it in his first letter: “The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers” (1 Peter 4:7). The closer the end draws near, the more threat against the warmth of the faith of the church and the greater the need for persevering prayer. The pressures of worldliness will be so great as the end draws near that only a few will make it. After all, Jesus said, “The love of many will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12). I hope we’re among the number.

Now, how does this parable help us and encourage us to pray continually? The widow comes to an unjust judge, and she pleads for help. Evidently, she’s being oppressed by some rascal, and she’s helpless. And she asks the judge, “Vindicate me. Help me. Tell him to stop that.” And that’s us, right? The widow — weak, poor, no husband to stand up for her. Her only recourse is the judge, even though he is unjust, and our only recourse is God.

Not Like That Judge

Now, the argument of the parable is not, “Well, if you can get on the case of the judge long enough, he’ll try to get you off his back by vindicating you. Therefore, if you get on God’s case long enough, then to get you off his back, he will vindicate you.” You could interpret the parable that way, but there are two reasons why you shouldn’t.

The first is that that would contradict clearly Luke 12:32, where it says, “It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” He’s not reneging on any promises. He’s eager to give you the kingdom. But the main reason why we shouldn’t construe the parable that way is that there are two clues right here in the parable for the fact that God isn’t like that judge.

Notice in verse 2 that this judge neither feared God nor regarded man. And those two things are repeated in verse 4. “Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet . . . I will give her justice.” Now when it says, “Yet I will give her justice,” that must mean that not fearing God and not regarding men are big obstacles to helping the widow, right? If you don’t fear God, it’s an obstacle to get over to help her. He gets over it by ulterior motives. But notice first, he doesn’t fear God. And if fearing God is an obstacle to helping the widow, then presumably, if you did fear God, you would incline naturally to help the widow, right?

That must mean that God isn’t at all like this judge because, if he inclines the people who fear him to give to the widow liberally and quickly, he must be that kind of God. And so, by saying that this judge doesn’t fear God and, therefore, doesn’t answer her readily, he shows that God isn’t at all like the unjust judge. And so, the argument of the parable is an argument from lesser to greater. If, by knocking on the door of the judge who doesn’t have an ounce of justice in his body, you can still get your answer, how much more, by knocking on God’s door continually, will you most certainly be answered, because he’s not like that judge at all?

Voices God Knows

The second thing it says about the judge is that he has no regard for man. Now we need to ask, Since he doesn’t know this widow and, therefore, doesn’t care about her at all — has no regard to her — is God like that when we approach him and pray to him? Verse 7 makes it very, very clear that that’s not the case, because it says, “And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night?”

“In Jesus’s mind, prayer and faith stand and fall together.”

See that word elect? That’s a dynamite word. That means, when we come to God and pray to him, we’re not coming like a stranger, a widow whom he doesn’t know or care about. He has chosen us, elected us, set his favor upon us, adopted us into his family, made us his children. When we knock on the door and say, “It’s me,” it’s very different than when a strange widow knocks on an unjust judge’s door and says, “It’s me” — and he answered, “Who?”

God knows our voice. We’re his children. We’re the chosen. We’re the elect. And therefore, Jesus argues from lesser to greater: if an unjust judge who has a stranger, whom he doesn’t care about at all, knocking on his door will give in to her, how much more will God, who not only knows us but chose us, loves us, adopts us, readily and lovingly answer our request?

So, the parable is intended to encourage us to get on with the business of praying because we have such a hopeful prospect of being answered. When Jesus asks at the end of the parable in verse 8, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” that could be also phrased like this: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find that we have kept praying, or not?” Evidently, in Jesus’s mind, prayer and faith stand and fall together.