I recently had the blessing of spending two weeks with teenagers at the Fairfield (SC) and Lake Murray (SC) Salkehatchie camps. I came away, as I always do, mightily impressed with this generation's ability to rise to a challenge.
Salkehatchie is a statewide summer service program that locates in various communities throughout the state of South Carolina for the purpose of improving the material lives of the poorest among us.
But there is also a tremendous spiritual aspect to the mission in that those who participate are there to bring the love of Christ to the home owners in a visible and verbal manner and the program is designed to impress upon the teens what it means to take one's Christianity seriously in becoming a true disciple of Christ.
In the nightly worship service at the Fairfield camp, the talks this year centered around the theme that "Christianity is simple, but is isn't easy" and at the Lake Murray camp, around the theme what it means to love God. Both camps used Mark 12:30, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.", as their primary Scripture.
What troubles me about the next generation is that we are not training them to love God " with all of their mind". In one sense we have reduced Christianity to being just an emotional experience, and I, for one, think so-called contemporary worship has played a large part in this. We are not teaching our children that there is an intellectual base to not only Christianity, but to love.
While there is an emotional base to love, true love cannot be based solely on emotion. If emotion is the only component, then love will ebb and flow and eventually die. We can see this in the high divorce rate within the country as people marry with a false sense of what it is to love someone. True love has to be a commitment of one's will to the true good of another person. One has to be committed regardless of the actions of the one being loved.
It is the same with God. To love God with our minds, we have to be committed in our wills to do so, and take measures to ensure that our love for Him is nurtured. The progression goes like this: What we see and hear, enters our minds. If we entertain what enters our minds and allow it to rest there and grow, it affects our hearts, what we come to love. Once our hearts are affected, then our actions follow, because in matters under our control, we only do that which we love. If we are to love God with all of our minds, we have to be discerning in what we allow into our minds.
That there is a battle for the minds of this next generation should not be in doubt. Teens today are living in a culture that bombards them day and night with a worldview that is decidedly not only non-Christian, but in many cases anti-Christian. The sad part is that many youth in our churches are buying into it without even realizing that they are doing so. The proof that even "churched" teens have bought into the culture is born out in the way they dress, especially the young females, and in the music they listen to.
Nothing touches the soul like music, hence nothing will change one's worldview more than the music we feed our minds. I know this from my own experience as I listen to the lyrics of today's "oldies, but goldies", I can look back at how the songs swayed my worldview to believe that I could find ultimate fulfillment in the right romantic relationship. Only by learning some hard lessons did I find that only Christ can fill that longing for fulfillment that we all have in our hearts.
As to dress, no one is asking today's young females to wear burqas, but they seem to have accepted the idea that they have to dress like their favorite rock or movie star to be cool and accepted. I really don't believe they have any idea of the message they are sending to the males that they hang out with.
Every day, we are faced with a myriad of decisions and we have a choice. Do we honor Christ, or do we honor ourselves above Christ? Our thinking controls our heart which determines which choice we will make and if we are not discerning in our thinking, we will easily succumb to the pressures of the culture around us. Christianity is simple, but it is not easy.
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