Lasting a Lifetime – Day 150

Many young adults no longer attend church once they leave home. They head off to college, and since they saw the church as something that was never really anything more than Bible stories in Sunday school and a dull pastor who did not live as he preached, naturally, they stopped attending.

I recently glanced through Ken Ham's book “Already Gone”, and I perused several of the statistics. To be perfectly honest, I was not surprised by most of the statistics. There is a multitude of different reasons why people leave the church; hypocrisy, boredom, legalism, politics, and so on. They were tired of going to church and were far more concerned with success in college.

In the end, we know that most of these people had already began to withdraw from the life of the church. They had “checked out” long before they actually left the church. I see this phenomenon often today. In the past, social pressures influenced one to be part of the church. One had to be a part of the church to be culturally normative. But in today's culture, one is encouraged to leave the church and “get on with life”. One no longer has to hide the hypocrisy. Perhaps this is good...

One of the problems that I have seen is that parents pay little attention to teaching their children God's Word. They send their kids off to school so that they can play their golf game and take time for themselves. These people have little passion for the church of God. For many of these people, church has become a burden and a responsibility rather than a joy. These people send their kids to Sunday School in order to alleviate their own responsibility to teach their children the Bible. Ironically, those children that did spend time in Sunday School were often more likely to doubt the Bible than those children which did not participate. This is ironic, but it makes sense since these parents have abdicated their responsibility to teach their children God's Word. (Not necessarily true of all parents by any means, but you understand where this attitude of lax behavior can quickly come about if the parents perceive this instruction of children to be done primarily by the church on a Sunday morning for half an hour.)

At the end of the day, people are responsible for their own sins. But it is the parent's God-given duty to train their children in the Word of God (Deut. 6:7).

As a young Christian, you must make the faith your own. If you simply affirm your parent's faith but do not have faith yourself, it is worthless to your salvation and sanctification.

Be devoted to the Word of God and prayer. It is imperative that one spend time rooted in the wisdom of the Scriptures and that one apply these sacred truths to the sins that confront us each day.