Christian parents familiar with the parable of the Prodigal Son still have difficulty dealing with their own prodigals. Dave Harvey and Paul Gilbert are experienced pastors at Four Oaks Community Church in Tallahassee, Fla., and the following chapter from their just-published book, Letting Go: Rugged Love for Wayward Souls (Zondervan), gives good advice on how to overcome the “dread of a loved one leaving you, your anxiety over the unknown, or your unspoken suspicion that this situation indicates you’re one humungous failure.” The key: receiving God’s rugged love, not meeting evil with evil, holding fast to the promises of the gospel, never giving up. —Marvin Olasky

Chapter 5: Love Has Teeth—Part I

If you live with a prodigal, you know what it means to love someone. Love is a means of survival. Love is what gets you up each morning and inspires you to serve someone who acts like they hate you. Loving this way means duty, sacrifice, responsibility, and resilience. Many years back, an R&B icon famously crooned a pseudo-love anthem to the world asking this skeptical question, “What’s love got to do, got to do with it?” If you live with a wayward person, the answer is a no-brainer: everything!

But there is a side of love that’s difficult to face. You’ve had a taste of it already if you are persisting in hope that this person you love might change. In this chapter, we want to invite you to go even deeper and join us on a surprising journey that may stretch your understanding of how to love a sinner who strays.

When people talk about love, they tend to think about feelings of attraction, that joy and excitement of being with someone who makes you feel alive. However, most of us know that this attraction is just scratching the surface. Real love is something deep and powerful, a committed faithfulness that is sacrificial and loyal. Love is keeping your promises, even when it hurts. It is patient and kind, gracious and forgiving, and willing to speak the truth even when doing so is costly (1 Corinthians 13:4–7). We know this love is tough.

For the most part, this tough love gets us through the tough times. Every relationship experiences struggle. Yet when two people are committed, reasonable, and willing to work things out, love finds a way through it all. But loving a prodigal is even tougher. It’s loving a rebel, someone who isn’t trying to work it out and who doesn’t have your interests in mind. It’s loving someone who is enamored with their sin and does not care about the consequences—the pain and hurt it causes others. As we’ve seen, wayward fools see themselves as the victim, and they are hell-bent on finding their freedom on their terms.

Prodigals need more than tough love; they need a rugged love. A love that’s bold yet redemptive, forceful yet forgiving, gallant yet gospel-based. Think of it as love with teeth. For prodigals to change, those who love them must exercise a love that is courageous. They need to have conviction and a clear conscience. To love a wayward rebel, you need a rugged love that is rooted in the hope of God’s promises.

We offer the term rugged love not to pioneer a new way of loving but to bring fresh paint to the portrait of God’s unrelenting love in the Scriptures. Rugged love is the way God engages and reaches sinful people. We are all wayward, dead, and trapped in our sin. So the way we love prodigals must be patterned after the rugged love of God.

What is this rugged love? Love is rugged when it’s

strong enough to face evil; tenacious enough to do good; courageous enough to enforce consequences; sturdy enough to be patient; resilient enough to forgive; trusting enough to pray boldly.

Let’s look at each of these six descriptions separately over the next two chapters.

Strong enough to face evil

Bonnie knows Stan is a serial adulterer, but she looks the other way. Walter believes his daughter is on drugs, but he won’t probe or ask her questions because he fears the truth. Zoe ignores the cruel and demeaning comments her husband makes about her in public and in front of the kids, hoping against hope that things will improve. Though each situation is distinct and complex, they are all connected by a common compromise: Bonnie, Walter, and Zoe are all tolerating evil. If you ask them why, they say they do it all for love.

When someone you love goes wayward, the worst lies are not always the ones you hear from them. They are the ones you whisper to yourself.

Of course, many of these lies stem from not fully grasping the biblical understanding of love. Our own misunderstandings of what love should look like and how to love others affect our well-intentioned responses to sinful behavior. Wayward people tend to pile up collateral damage like a tornado through a traffic jam. And that carnage of hurt feelings, broken trust, and fractured relationships can be so overwhelming that people like Bonnie, Walter, and Zoe just want to close their eyes and wish it away. They tell themselves that time heals all wounds. If they just ignore it and put it out of their minds, then surely things will eventually get back to normal. They hope to outlive the evil. This lie masquerades as hope, and perhaps on some level, it really is a hope that God will do a miracle. But it’s a naïve hope—one that traffics not in reality but denial. And the unwillingness to acknowledge reality only further encourages sinful behavior.

In calling us to biblical love, the apostle Paul says, “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil” (Romans 12:9). True and genuine love abhors evil. This means that we loathe and stand in opposition to it. Abhorrence leaves no room for denial. It means that we have eyes to see evil and the courage to respond to it. Sin and folly are inhabiting the soul of the wayward like unwelcome squatters. If these vices are ever to be expelled, they must be honestly named and exposed, not ignored or hidden.

To abhor evil requires a single-minded devotion to accelerating its downfall. The most diminutive mom will strike with ninja speed and nuclear force if she sees a Nazi-loving skinhead threatening her small child. Her abhorrence in this case isn’t a mental exercise—“I despise when the strong threaten the weak”—it’s abhorrence in action, an unwavering commitment to eliminating the threat without hesitation or indecision.

The gospel does not deny evil. The gospel shows us God’s response to evil—he abhors it! “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). God’s wrath is his settled and determined response to injustice, sin, rebellion, and evil. He cannot tolerate it, and he will not accommodate it in any way. Christ did not come to earth to paper over our offenses against God. He was not here to spring God free from having to deal with the wickedness of the wayward. The gospel reveals the sinfulness of sin and showcases God’s hatred of evil.

God poured out his righteous fury on the only sinless man to walk the earth, who was stapled to a tree on a hill called Golgotha.

And not just any man—his beloved Son, who willingly accepted his role as our substitute to free us from our enslavement to sin and reconcile us to God. Ascribed to Christ was our evil—“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus hung suspended, the sacrificial Lamb tarred by our wicked thoughts and actions, and received in his body the full gale force of God’s wrath.

Make no mistake; the gospel reveals a rugged love. When we look at this love, we see our sin and our hatred of God and are confronted by the truth that Christ suffered what we justly deserve. The nails were meant for us; the hopeless abandonment and spiritual separation from the love of God that Christ experienced was deservedly ours. God’s love, displayed for all to see on the cross, was strong enough not only to face evil, but also to act against it. The cross reveals God’s abhorrence in action.

God’s response to evil is good news because it has a redemptive purpose, but the path to redemption requires that we come face-to-face with our sin and evil. God’s law, given to us in the Old Testament Scriptures, reveals our accountability before God and the rightness of his verdict against Adam and Eve in condemning them to death. Naming our sin and evil is always the first step to experiencing grace and forgiveness. This step cannot be bypassed or skipped. Conviction should lead to repentance, which leads us to forgiveness in Christ.

This gospel is good news because if someone you love is bent on evil, there is help. But repentance is the key that unlocks the power of grace and separates true grace from cheap grace: But true repentance doesn’t come through denial or accommodation. The pretending must end. The delusion that one can indulge evil behavior with no costs must be exposed. Biblical grace is not a license to sin. As the apostle Paul says in Romans 6:1–2, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” It is never loving or gracious to forgive someone simply to accommodate further sin.

Loving like this is not simple or easy. To get here, you need to experience this love yourself, a love so sturdy that it enables you to face your biggest fears—your dread of a loved one leaving you, your anxiety over the unknown, or your unspoken suspicion that this situation indicates you’re one humungous failure. Showing rugged love begins by receiving the rugged love of God and holding fast to the promises of the gospel, knowing that our Lord and Savior will never leave us or abandon us (Hebrews 13:5) and that he is truly with us until the end (Matthew 28:20).

Our love becomes rugged as our motivation moves from “peace for me” to “help for them.” Rugged love faces human messiness head on. Are you facing the evil?

“Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good” (Romans 12:9).

Tenacious enough to do good

Naming the evil is an important step, but only a first step. Love is made rugged by a tenacious commitment to “not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).

There’s an interesting assumption that the apostle Paul makes in this passage. In a cage fight, Paul is saying that good takes evil every time! By doing good—responding with the truth of the rugged love God has shown to us—we overcome the evil that has been done. This point becomes even more important as things deteriorate in our relationship. We need to be ready for the difficult and painful reality that love may require letting a prodigal go. But in letting go, our intent is not to punish the person, to retaliate for the evil they have done to us. Letting go as an act of rugged love is one of the most heartbreaking ways to do good.

There’s a delicate period of time, often an extended period, between the early warning signs of prodigal behavior and the decision to let prodigals go. We see their behavior slowly deteriorating, but we may not yet have enough data to plot a clear course forward. We’ll talk more about what it means to let go in the next chapter. But at this point, we want you to know this: If you are not taking orders from Scripture, then wayward people’s words and actions will set the bar for your response. When they reject you, you will seek to punish them. Their hurtful words will inspire your clever retorts. Everything you do and say will be a tooth for a tooth, and soon teeth will be flying all over the room in an all-out relational brawl.

We must not meet evil with evil. Everyone loses, and you haven’t loved the wayward soul. You’ve merely shown what a more sophisticated drift from God looks like. Doing good requires tenacity because the moments when it’s most necessary are the same moments when it’s most difficult.

But that’s not all that Paul says about this. He tells us that doing good as a response to evil is also an act of subversion. It can have a transformative effect, compelling those who stray to come face-to-face with the truth they have been trying to avoid. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head (Romans 12:20).

The metaphor that Paul quotes from Proverbs 25:21–22 isn’t entirely clear, but we can draw one conclusion from what he says: Doing good to an enemy works good in an enemy. Commentators tell us that the burning coals may signify shame heaped up by a pricked conscience, or they might indicate the enemy’s surprise that you are not returning evil for evil. But one thing is clear: Doing good ignites a burn that supplants the work of an enemy. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”

This was true for Mike.

Mike was a Category 5 hurricane, wreaking havoc and destruction in all his relationships. He was raised in a very loving home by Christian parents, but he chose the path of rebellion. There was no sin he would avoid and no rule he would obey. Mike was a behavioral disaster. He eventually became such a disruptive force in his home that his parents were unable to manage him.

Mike’s parents sought counsel, consulted physicians, and attempted every reasonable strategy they could find. After exhausting several approaches, they were left with the heartbreaking step of enrolling Mike in a school for troubled adolescents.

After Mike arrived at his new school, he assumed his parents would just write him off. He didn’t even blame them. If he’d been in their shoes, he would have walked a long time ago! But something happened that astonished Mike. His parents did not give up. They launched a campaign of unexpected and persistent kindness.

Mike’s parents sent cards, letters, and emails, seizing almost any occasion to mark a moment or remind him of their love. Despite the distance and inconvenience, they never missed a visit and regularly found ways to creatively express their love.

At first Mike thought he was being played. He rejected his parents’ love, thinking that they were trying to manipulate him. But their persistence overcame his suspicion, and eventually Mike’s heart softened. He began to see them and himself with new eyes.

They never spoke about it, but Mike saw that his parents had suffered greatly because of him. Yet they never seemed bitter! As Mike began to see how self-absorbed he’d become, the guilt stabbed at his soul. Mike couldn’t explain it, but even when he was devoted to evil, his parents responded with good. The burn of shame eventually set fire to the rest of his body. The rugged love of his parents was “heaping burning coals upon his head.”

As the months passed, Mike started to slowly move back toward his parents. While there was still much to talk about and many obstacles ahead, Mike became convinced that his parents were “for” him. Instead of seeing them as the enemy, he began to understand that they were committed to his good. This kind of assurance empowered Mike to consider his own failures and sin. Coming clean in this way was hard, but his parents’ kindness pointed the way toward the kindness of God in the gospel, leading Mike to repentance (Romans 2:4). Returning home would take some time, but powerful forces were now turning the tide in the war for Mike’s soul.

When rugged love generates enduring good, it is a subversive and transformative power.

Taken from Letting Go by Dave Harvey and Paul Gilbert (thelettinggobook.com). Copyright © 2016 by Dave Harvey and Paul Gilbert. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com