The "Promise" of a Proverb

Dear Friends,

She was born into a Christian family. Her mother was a believer and her father had come from a Gospel singing family of Pentecostals. She was christened “Destiny Hope” and was brought up in church. She was baptized in the Southern Baptist Church at age 12 and described her church as her extended family. As a young teenager, she wore a purity ring for all to see that she was deeply committed to a lifestyle of sexual purity and abstinence until marriage. She read her Bible daily and had publicly described herself and her family as “hard-core Christians.” She said, “Jesus is who saved me. He’s what keeps me full and whole.. Hopefully I can influence people and help them follow the same path I am on.”

Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.” We can only image how proud Destiny Hope’s parents were at this point in her life. Their daughter’s strong faith, her love of God, her commitment to follow Jesus and her desire to be a light in the darkness for others to follow, was evidence that they had indeed done a wonderful job in training her up. They may have even read that verse as a promise that she would not depart from all they had taught her. But what happened? At what point in this child’s life did the purity ring fall off her finger?

Changing her name from Destiny Hope Cyrus to Miley Ray Cyrus, she posed nude for a magazine cover when she was 15. When she was 17, her party-lifestyle was being written about in articles that questioned if she was still a Christian believer. At the Teen Choice awards, she danced with a pole like a stripper and outraged the parents of her young fans. She begin to mock her Christian fans who spoke out against her raunchy behavior. Last year she tweeted a quote to all her followers that said, “You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all those things that matter for evolution) weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in stars. So forget Jesus. Stars died for you to live.” That quote was a blasphemous denial of God – of her faith.

Most of you know that during a recent music awards show, this former Disney child-star styled her hair to resemble the horns of the devil and was so inappropriate and borderline pornographic that even the jaded Hollywood types were shaking their heads in disgust. She has 28 million followers on social media, most of whom are teenage girls. Last week she released her new soft-porn music video of her dancing naked while perversely licking a sledge hammer. “Hopefully I can influence people and help them follow the same path I am on.”

All of America is now watching the moral self-destruction of this once strong Christian. For some it’s “schadenfreude” and for others it’s just very sad. And for those of us who have had children and grand-children that walked away from their faith and into a troubled lifestyle, we know only too well the shame and pain that her parents must be feeling today.

Raising our children in the church, teaching them to love and follow Jesus, demonstrating Christian beliefs and values in our home, does indeed set our children on the right path. But many churches teach that Proverbs 22:6 is an ironclad guarantee. Do a good job as a Christian parent and your child will keep the faith forever. But that could only be guaranteed if his/her freewill were taken away. And, God has given every person the choice to follow Him or not. So our job is to do the absolute best we can as a Christian parent and then hope and pray that our children will continue to make the choice to follow God into adulthood.

Despite the Christian values taught by her parents, her church, and her pastors, Destiny Hope has now chosen to follow the lust of the world. (See 1 John 2:15-17) If your heart breaks for a lost child or grandchild right now, please know that God has not abandoned them any more than He’s abandoned Destiny Hope. And don’t let the devil instill any guilt over your children. After all, he was the one who lured them away. An editor of a Christian magazine recently wrote: Did Miley Cyrus sell her soul to the devil? We don’t know. But we do know this. That the devil can never take our children to a place where God can’t reach them.  Amen?