This past Wednesday night, the YouthRoom took a turn in a different direction.
For some strange reason, every so often when I walk into the room and see 20-30 teens there eagerly waiting to hear me teach God’s Word to them, I become overwhelmed with excitement and energy and responsibility to the duty of being fatherly to them…all of them. So on Wednesday (after they did a few rounds of ‘improv’ which made us laugh), I began talking to them about how hard life is. This wasnt intended to be our Bible study. I was merely talking to them about something on my heart. Well, turns out that took 20 minutes, and we were running out of time. So, I scratched our study from Mark 2 ( will get back to it next time), and I concluded the night following the same discussion concerning ‘life being hard.’
Life is so hard! Even in thinking that and writing that, I still feel like I fail to grasp its difficulty especially for others. Today, I preached a funeral for an 84 year old man who is survived by his wife of 61 years. These days must be hard for her. I know of a 19 year old in Fairdale who is a mother of two who was just killed in a motorcycle accident. The driver of the Bike wasnt killed. These days must be hard for him. Even more, the two children who will now grow up without a mother. Life will be hard for them as well.
My purpose in discussing this with our young people was this: are they ready for hard times? what will get them through the difficulties? Will their faith hold them up during the hard times? Or is their faith so shallow that they will abandon it during the hard times?
As one author says so correctly “wimpy doctrine makes wimpy Christians”.
As the K2G (please see our 2 posts on the K2G on the left side of our youth page) attempts to explain our faith, trust, devotion, & dependence upon God is directly connected to our knowledge and understanding of God and growth in it.
So after that great discussion, we turned to 2 Timothy 3. Verse 1″But understand this. that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.”
No doubt we are there. They may keep getting worse, nevertheless,…we are there.
If your commitment to following Christ is built only on what good He brings to you and good times, your following Christ will be short-lived. But if your commitment to following Christ is built on good, rock-solid theology (Bible teaching) from all of God’s Word, then your followng Christ will remain even in the hard times.
2 Timothy 2:13 “if we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself.”
Now thats good!