Silas
Beloved of All
Your heart for your daughters is evident and the Lord hears your cry for freedom, protection, restoration and breakthrough. Thank you for bringing this burden before the Lord with such honesty. God sees the chaos, the manipulation, the financial pressure and the isolation your older daughter is experiencing, and He also sees your faithful love as a mother who raised her in the ways of the Lord.
Scripture shows that God’s design for marriage from the beginning is a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman. When that design is set aside, even in the stories where men took more than one wife, the result was always jealousy, rivalry and pain. Living together outside of marriage, having children outside of marriage, and treating a dating or cohabiting arrangement as if it were marriage does not carry God’s blessing. It brings exhaustion, confusion and hardship, just as you have described. A man who is controlling, lazy, dishonest and disrespectful toward your family is not acting as a husband, a provider or a spiritual leader. He is a stumbling block to her walk with God, and it is right to pray that her eyes would be opened to that truth.
The Bible also shows how hard it is to live in the middle of a polluted and corrupt environment and not be touched by it. One man who chose to live in a deeply immoral city was strong enough to survive there himself, yet the corrupt culture cost him the morals and peace of his family. Your daughter is living in a similar kind of spiritual pollution. The constant pressure, the demands to put another family first, the financial exploitation and the isolation from those who truly love her are wearing her down and making her forgetful, withdrawn and chaotic. She is beginning to imitate the very attitudes that are hurting her, speaking coldly and ungratefully to you. That is what happens when someone stays too long under an ungodly influence.
But God is merciful and He leads His people out. When Jacob had been long away from home, living under a difficult and deceptive household, the Lord spoke to him clearly and said return to the land of your fathers and to your family, and I will be with you. That promise is for your daughter as well. She is not homeless and she is not without a family. She has a loving, supportive family that God gave her, and a church community that cares for her. The Lord is calling her to come back to that place of safety, and He promises to be with her as she steps out in obedience. The other woman has no biblical authority to speak into your daughter’s life, to direct her decisions, to demand her loyalty, or to pronounce any curse over you and your household. No weapon formed against you shall prosper when you are covered by the blood of Jesus, and every scheme, word curse and plot to control and divide can be broken in His name.
At the heart of this struggle is your daughter’s relationship with God. The first commandments have to do with our relationship with God, and unless that relationship is right, our relationships with other people cannot be right. We can trace our troubled human relationships back to a troubled relationship with the Lord. God does not want a distant, legal or ritual relationship with your daughter. He wants a close, loving, intimate relationship where she knows Him as Father. Through Jesus Christ she has been adopted into the family of God, born again by the Spirit, and she can call Him Father. He wants to restore her first love, that early excitement for His Word, for fellowship and for walking with Him. When her hunger for righteousness is reignited and her relationship with God is restored, the other relationships will begin to fall into balance. This includes the honoring of parents, which God places as a very high priority in the home.
So we pray with you that the Holy Spirit will soften her heart to receive conviction and give her courage to walk away from this bondage with no regrets. Pray that the Lord will expose every selfish and manipulative motive, frustrate every plan to control, divide and isolate her, and block every attempt to interfere with her work and her promotion. Ask Him to give her wisdom to protect her finances, to stop taking on debt to sustain a lifestyle that is not hers to bear, and to stop taking on responsibilities that belong to someone else. Pray that she will remember she is a child of the Most High God, that she belongs to Him and not to this young man and his family, and that she will no longer defend or admire a relationship that is draining her life.
We also join you in praying for your younger daughter. It is right to ask for divine protection over her as she moves closer to school, that the Lord would keep her on the right path, guard her future courtship, and keep every destructive and jealous influence far from her. And we pray for you, that God would pour out His supernatural love, favor and protection over you and your household, heal the brokenness, restore peace, fellowship, respect and unity, and guard your home when your older daughter visits so that hatred and manipulation have no place there.
Continue to stand firm in prayer, to speak truth in love, and to keep the door of family and church community open with grace. Trust that nothing is impossible for God. He is able to break every chain, bring your daughter out of darkness into His light, fill her again with the Holy Spirit, restore her grateful, gracious and respectful manner, and in His perfect time provide a godly spouse according to His will. May the Lord frustrate every plan that contradicts His Word and draw your daughter back to Himself, to her family, and to the wisdom and safety of His people. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Scripture shows that God’s design for marriage from the beginning is a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman. When that design is set aside, even in the stories where men took more than one wife, the result was always jealousy, rivalry and pain. Living together outside of marriage, having children outside of marriage, and treating a dating or cohabiting arrangement as if it were marriage does not carry God’s blessing. It brings exhaustion, confusion and hardship, just as you have described. A man who is controlling, lazy, dishonest and disrespectful toward your family is not acting as a husband, a provider or a spiritual leader. He is a stumbling block to her walk with God, and it is right to pray that her eyes would be opened to that truth.
The Bible also shows how hard it is to live in the middle of a polluted and corrupt environment and not be touched by it. One man who chose to live in a deeply immoral city was strong enough to survive there himself, yet the corrupt culture cost him the morals and peace of his family. Your daughter is living in a similar kind of spiritual pollution. The constant pressure, the demands to put another family first, the financial exploitation and the isolation from those who truly love her are wearing her down and making her forgetful, withdrawn and chaotic. She is beginning to imitate the very attitudes that are hurting her, speaking coldly and ungratefully to you. That is what happens when someone stays too long under an ungodly influence.
But God is merciful and He leads His people out. When Jacob had been long away from home, living under a difficult and deceptive household, the Lord spoke to him clearly and said return to the land of your fathers and to your family, and I will be with you. That promise is for your daughter as well. She is not homeless and she is not without a family. She has a loving, supportive family that God gave her, and a church community that cares for her. The Lord is calling her to come back to that place of safety, and He promises to be with her as she steps out in obedience. The other woman has no biblical authority to speak into your daughter’s life, to direct her decisions, to demand her loyalty, or to pronounce any curse over you and your household. No weapon formed against you shall prosper when you are covered by the blood of Jesus, and every scheme, word curse and plot to control and divide can be broken in His name.
At the heart of this struggle is your daughter’s relationship with God. The first commandments have to do with our relationship with God, and unless that relationship is right, our relationships with other people cannot be right. We can trace our troubled human relationships back to a troubled relationship with the Lord. God does not want a distant, legal or ritual relationship with your daughter. He wants a close, loving, intimate relationship where she knows Him as Father. Through Jesus Christ she has been adopted into the family of God, born again by the Spirit, and she can call Him Father. He wants to restore her first love, that early excitement for His Word, for fellowship and for walking with Him. When her hunger for righteousness is reignited and her relationship with God is restored, the other relationships will begin to fall into balance. This includes the honoring of parents, which God places as a very high priority in the home.
So we pray with you that the Holy Spirit will soften her heart to receive conviction and give her courage to walk away from this bondage with no regrets. Pray that the Lord will expose every selfish and manipulative motive, frustrate every plan to control, divide and isolate her, and block every attempt to interfere with her work and her promotion. Ask Him to give her wisdom to protect her finances, to stop taking on debt to sustain a lifestyle that is not hers to bear, and to stop taking on responsibilities that belong to someone else. Pray that she will remember she is a child of the Most High God, that she belongs to Him and not to this young man and his family, and that she will no longer defend or admire a relationship that is draining her life.
We also join you in praying for your younger daughter. It is right to ask for divine protection over her as she moves closer to school, that the Lord would keep her on the right path, guard her future courtship, and keep every destructive and jealous influence far from her. And we pray for you, that God would pour out His supernatural love, favor and protection over you and your household, heal the brokenness, restore peace, fellowship, respect and unity, and guard your home when your older daughter visits so that hatred and manipulation have no place there.
Continue to stand firm in prayer, to speak truth in love, and to keep the door of family and church community open with grace. Trust that nothing is impossible for God. He is able to break every chain, bring your daughter out of darkness into His light, fill her again with the Holy Spirit, restore her grateful, gracious and respectful manner, and in His perfect time provide a godly spouse according to His will. May the Lord frustrate every plan that contradicts His Word and draw your daughter back to Himself, to her family, and to the wisdom and safety of His people. In Jesus’ name, amen.
