You know just as well as most anyone else around you that today we live in a world of rapid fire, constant social change. Never before has so much happened to so many so fast. You cannot help but get the feeling that this world is headed on a mad dash to certain and absolute destruction.
Changes come so fast that it is almost impossible for even committed Christian parents, as well as their children, to know just what limits and values to enforce and to stand by.
Sad to say, but today the parents of this world are so often too absorbed with their own lives to fully support the needs of a teenage son or daughter. And this lack of support creates a very vulnerable situation for today’s young person.
It is generally agreed today that the primary task of the teenage years is to construct a sense of personal identity. This identity includes various roles. First of all, that of either son or daughter, student, athlete, musician, artist, mechanic, and so forth. It also includes various traits and abilities, and a personal list of what each person likes and dislikes; what his or her political and social attitudes are; what he or she believes with regard to religious and moral decisions, along with much more.
For this period of development called adolescence, teenagers need a clearly defined value system against which to test other values so as to discover their own. But when the important adults in their lives don’t know their own values and are confused about just what is right and wrong, the teenagers’ task becomes even more difficult, if not impossible.
What we are finding today is that teens are called upon to make decisions without having been given the necessary time to think things through. Today’s teenagers are in effect premature adults, and some are not quite ready to handle all the pressure and stress that comes along with adulthood. And statistics that I found dealing with teens bears this out.
Substance abuse is now the leading cause of death among teenagers, with more than 10,000 dying from it each year. Although the use of drugs has leveled off in the past decade, alcohol use is becoming more common and is appearing among younger children.
According to a recent survey of junior high students, 65 percent of the 13 year olds had used alcohol once that year, some 35 percent used it once a month, and 20 percent used it once a week. Thirty-five percent of those asked said it was fun and all right to get drunk.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reports that conservatively 1.3 million teens between the ages of 12 and 17 have serious drinking problems.
Sexual activity, at least among teenage girls, has more than tripled over the last two decades. In the 1960’s about 10 percent of teenage girls were sexually active, while more than 50 percent are sexually active today. By the age of 19, at least 70 percent of young women have had at least one sexual experience.
Besides this, five thousand teens will commit suicide this year; and for each of these suicides, 50 to 100 teens make an unsuccessful attempt.
Crime rates have increased dramatically among juveniles. For many teens, crime is just a way of life. Every month secondary schools experience 2.4 million thefts, almost 300,000 assaults, and over 100,000 robberies. More 17 to 20-year old males are arrested for virtually every kind of crime, including murder, than any other age group.
Now the question that comes immediately to my mind in all of this is just where do we stand in regard to these facts. Does our Christianity make any difference?
Heredity does not equip teenagers with proper attitudes. They will learn what they are taught. There is no substitute for parental modeling of what we wish to teach. Someone once wrote, and all of you who are parents will have to agree, that “the footsteps a child follows are most likely to be the ones the parents thought they covered up”
Our teens are watching us all very carefully, and they instinctively imitate our behavior. And they instantly discern the gap between what we say and what we do.
This is true not only of parents to teenagers, but also minister to teens and elders to teens; in fact, any older person in the Church has a God given responsibility to practice what he preaches, especially to teenagers.
And just how are these principles that we believe in and confess to be the very heart and soul of our Christian life conveyed to the next generation? The answer was provided by Moses as he wrote in the book of Deuteronomy (Chapter 6:7-9): “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.”
In other words, we cannot teach these attitudes during a brief two- minute bedtime prayer or during a formalized catechism class, and say that that is enough. No, we must live them from morning to night. They should be reinforced by everything we do. This teaching task is the most important assignment God has given us to do. And by His grace and helping hand our teens will grow up to be men and women of God who will in turn pass these same attitudes and truths on to their children. We owe them that.