While I was away for two weeks of holiday many years back, I read a book by David Elkind describing the lurching number of kids who lack the adult steerage and support they have to make a healthy transition into adultness.

His choice of title was acceptable : All Grown Up and No Place to Go.

The book goes to the guts of the issue and addresses the breakdown of parental security and stability. Deluged in the tide of social change and soaked up in their own excursion, looking for self-fulfillment and private discovery mums and dads are usually so overwhelmed that they’ve just minimal energy to speculate in their teen’s struggles.

And when you add the incontrovertible fact that today’s fogeys are caught in the crossfire of social philosophies, moral standards, and contrary price systems, even committed and well-intentioned oldsters ( particularly people who wish to lead with fairness and toleration ) regularly lack the decisiveness youths need and expect. Failing to act, we force our youths to do so, before they’re prepared.

as we are disinclined to take a firm stand, we reject teens the advantage of our parental concern and we impel them into early adulthood.

As a pa who reared 4 kids thru their teen years, I was naturally interested by any trustworthy and judicious endorse to help in making this journey as smart yet pleasing as possible. While I may not applaud everything Elkind recommended, I did find his words provocative. While gnawing on and digesting them, I was struck with a fascinating analogy between today’s kids and teen Christians. By that I mean a follower who is somewhere between youth and maturity. It’s not possible to determine this individual by years—some Christians are in the teens 2 years after conversion, others are not there until they have been in Our Lord God’s family for twenty years or longer.

But it appears that all who press on to maturity must endure such a turbulent passage. It’s tough enough to deal with the changes and handle the peer pressure and make more right calls than wrong ones during those susceptible years. I’m almost certain that it’s the teenaged believer, attempting to reach a measure of religious equilibrium, who becomes the most disillusioned when one of their “spiritual parents” defects or lives hypocritically. And that explains His eloquent caution about hanging a millstone round the necks of adults who cause people who are growing to stumble. I mostly questioned why He spoke those words with such severity. Stumbling, disillusioned followers of the frail teenage years simply lose their way en path to maturity. Perhaps that is the reason why so many in the “family” find themselves all grown up with no place to go. Growing young Christians are watching you. How much stability, integrity, and decisiveness are you demonstrating?

How pleased he’s to see your religion shine as you help folk. Your “service” may be a nice grin, an inspiring word, or a listening ear. In different eventualities, God may ask you to sacrifice your time or give freely of your resources.

The love God gives you for others will prompt you to make some time for them and not count the price. As you pour yourself into loving them, you may discover a feeling of accomplishment and joy. Serving in Jesus’ name also suggests that you are acting in submission to His authority – to explain, doing things in His way and time. To live out your religion is to rely on the Lord God’s power.

Only by yielding to His control can your work yield real non secular fruit. Folks will know your religion is real when your actions exalt God and not yourself. As envoys of Christ, we must serve with excellence so that God receives the glory He merits. Watch for God’s signals and be in a position to act with a zeal to live out your religion.

But He could tell by the blank stares on their faces that they didn’t understand what He had announced. At 1 time, He even overheard them discussing what He meant by “You won’t see me” ( John 16:19 ). These men had been with the Lord for 3 years. They’d giggled with Him, cried with Him, eaten with Him, and were ready to die with Him, or that is what they thought.

They’d just entered the town of Jerusalem. And rather than being met by an irritated legion of guards and protestors, they were met by palm-waving followers screaming : “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” Yet as fast as they’d settled into the higher room, Jesus broached the topic of his upcoming death. Right away , the mood of His supporters went from one of party to scare and sorrow.

The resurrection was some days off but they couldn’t fathom its amazing coming. God always supplies the encouragement we want to stay the course, and Jesus did this for His followers when He told them, “Your sorrow will be turned to joy” ( v. This is also God’s message of hope and love for us today.

Think what it must’ve been like to grasp the man you followed for 3 years, who made a claim to be the Son of God, was dead. He had claimed that nobody could take His life from Him – He could lay it down and pick it up again – and that He could call on a legion of angels. But then a note of hope broke through the followers desolation : “He’s alive. “God brought them from the depths of desperation to the height of jubilation.

The most incredible message the world has ever heard is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is a living Lord. While their supporters can go to a crypt and hark back to dry bones, we will sing joyous praises to our Lord, who hears us.

The Son of God is living inside every one of us, and we will not hold the excitement within. Of all of the faiths in the world, ours is the sole one with the proof and the legal right to praise a living God. Jesus is alive at the right hand of God ( Romans 8:34 ) ; He also lives in the heart of each single follower.

Many of us miss God’s purpose for their life because they are waiting for details about what He has in mind. But nowhere does Scripture say that God is obliged to spell out His plan. If He does have something for us to do, His only duty is to show us how and to enable us to do it. If we don’t know the details, our walk with the Lord can appear bewildering. Abram ( later Abraham ) must have felt that way. When God ordered him to pack up and head to a place he’d never been before, the wannabe patriarch potentially marvelled, Lord, why can’t you simply bless me here in Haran?

But God had something bigger in mind than Abram could envision. Feelings, sight, and human reasoning can be awful enemies to our walk of religion. So we might demonstrate religion and rely on Him, God occasionally calls us to a place where feelings, physical vision, and logic are of no help. The Lord wants us, as followers in Jesus Christ, to lay down our own techniques of figuring things out, and to trust Him instead. Which will sound irrational in human terms, but it is totally reasonable in the infinite mind of complete data and knowledge. If you are almost convinced to favor your own logical solution, remember that God is watching from a view point of omniscience. ( Isaiah 55:8-9 ) Like Abram, select to follow the Lord’s instructions.
( Genesis 12:4 ) A step of obedience may feel just like blind religion, but you can completely trust the person that sees all.

God selected to make you, and He went to extraordinary lengths to protect you from your sins. He asked you to be conformed to the likeness of His Boy and promised to engineer all circumstances to your good. ( Romans 8:28 ) Why would He do so much? The answer’s straightforward. God wishes to have a private relationship with each single one of us. The crisis is that many folks live their entire life never realizing that God truly loves them. In the 13th thru 16th chapters of John, we see many of the Lord’s most personal moments with His disciples.
Christians infrequently think of Jesus only as the Great Intercessor sitting at the right hand of God. But He also wants to be our nearest chum, who inspires and guides us.
God made us for intimacy. He doesn’t need us ; He wants us. Regardless of how many of us in the world love us, we are going to feel unfinished if we don’t recognize God’s love. The single thing that stands between us and God is our sin, from which we are helpless to save ourselves. So our Father made a provision – He sent His Son Jesus, who was completely divine, to take on human form and die on the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. God failed to accept us despite our sin or by ignoring our misdemeanour ; instead, He removed our sin as far as the east is from the west. ( Psalm 103:12 ) Then He went even further and invited us to be His mate. As the hymn writer exclaimed, “Amazing love! How is it able to be!”.

In society today, the push to become more open-minded is forced on us daily.
We are asked to be more open-minded about a number of issues. And when society’s issues don’t line up with God’s Word, Christians grow particularly uncomfortable. So, how does one face up to someone that thinks your religion is narrow-minded? It is not simple, but if you actually stand for what you confess, then the answer’s simply found in the words of Jesus : “Enter through the narrow gate ; for the gate is wide and broad that leads to destruction” ( v. Thirteen ). Opponents of the Christian religion bombard Christians with comments like, “You Christians are so narrow-minded.” Christians know it is not narrow-minded, simply a narrow way.
The eternal hope for deliverance is narrow because Jesus recounted so. Is God narrow-minded? No, the vastness of God is way beyond our understanding. But the way He made for us to be revived unto Him and forgiven of our sins is narrow. What twists thinking by non-believers’ is this : they suspect by being tolerant they are in tune with truth. The reality is narrow and there is no broad-mindedness authorized in it. Jesus asserted there’s only a technique to Heaven, and that comes thru admitting our sins to God and believing Jesus is the Child of God who died to take away the sins of the planet.