Last night, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak to the youth group of the church where I recently finished as interim pastor. (Wallace Baptist Church of Pace, Florida) The youth minister was running a fever and asked me to pinch hit for him at the last minute. I love opportunities like that.
Even though I already knew what I was going to speak on in general (the mission), I still went through he process of thinking about the kids and their situation and their window of life and my own adolescence. Anyway, as I processed through this in my head I began to think about how we too often narrow the topics of choice when we focus on youth: Sex, peer pressure, relationships, decision making, etc.
Well, what about the most important task on earth? (The Mission.) What about our core purpose? (To glorify God in Christ.) What about the most important authority in our lives? (The Word of God.)
I may be overstating this as a problem here. I don’t know what the majority of leaders of youth teach on a regular basis. But I do know what the youth material in the Christian bookstore covers. The curriculum I see rarely focuses on the Mission in a holistic sense (i.e. missions, but not the Mission), rarely expresses God as the should-be center of our lives, and rarely elevates the Word of God as the central, complete, and competent authority in the lives of our young brothers and sisters.
Last night, I did an overview on the One Story of the Bible: that God is blessing His people, ultimately with Jesus, so that they might be a blessing to all the families on earth, by declaring the gospel, resulting in God receiving the glory due His Name by saving some from among every people. Did they get it all in that one setting? Probably not. But they do know (because I said it so many times) that there is one theme to the entire Bible and that it is God’s Glory through God’s Mission. We looked at Genesis 12. Then we looked at the exodus (where God says that He wants all of Egypt to know that He is the real God and then an ethnicly diverse crowd leaves Egypt with the Israelites). Then we skipped all the way to Galatians (where Paul states that God was preaching the gospel beforehand to Abraham) and then onto Revelation 5:9 & 10 (where God fulfills what He spelled out in Genesis 12 & 17).
They listened attentively, because they are good kids and most of them have parents who taught them well. They soaked up much of what I said. It will, nonetheless, take many more sittings with these truths for them to sink in. At least that what it took for me. But my life has never been the same since these truths sunk in to my brain.
This is big stuff. And that is EXACTLY why I want these kids to get it.
Eric King
Shane Tucker
