Parental love prevails until age 20. This is love's preparatory period. One receives parental love until 20. After that, one leaves the parents' love to establish one's own conjugal love. As conjugal love gets stronger, one's love for one's children gets stronger. That's the way it is.

Loved from birth... Loved by the parents while in the womb. Mother and father love the child. For nine months, touching the baby... Loving when he is born, then until he goes to school... Until college--now, how many years is that? Twenty years. Or is it 22 years? That's the parental sphere of love... Parents always feel, even with all their love for them, that they have not done the best, or not as well as someone else's parents, and feel the pain of inadequacy.

You don't understand it until you have your own children. Parents never sleep comfortably when they are separated from their children. You must realize how great your parents have been, with all the tension and stress they lived with because of you. That's love. So, when you are over 20... It's moving into a different stage of life.

Can we arrive at the place of our heart's desire all at once? Because we cannot do that we must not rush blindly, and we must steadily recover the ground we have lost whenever we backslide. There are no two ways about it. Now, then, what is our fundamental self, fundamental place? We should have been born as God's direct children.

If we had been born as God's direct, uncorrupted children, then our love would have reflected that ancestry. Growing old from childhood through middle age then decline, our whole life....., can we say we have lived within the sphere of God's love? After the fall of man, we cannot say we have been living within the sphere of God's love. It's been within God's power to reject and outside God's domain to protect, not within God's ideal sphere.

You must establish a connection between the church and your children before they turn 20. In other words, you lose them if you do not anchor them while they are still in middle school and high school. That's straight from our church statistics. They will drift into society if you don't anchor them with the church by the age of 17. This is a serious matter.