At this stage of life, you will increasingly interact with more people outside your familiar circle of family and church. The contemporaries you interact with won’t have a true north. They are a motley congregation of individuals who live as if the world owes them something; as if they should get something for nothing; as if they deserve certain comforts and luxuries whether they have earned them or not. They demand a ransom from the cosmos because this is how they have been catechized. The cultural ethos, in its multifarious manifestations, pander to the lust of youth. It’s a pandering found in video shorts, music, fast food, urban planning, advertising, education, and religion. Some peers won’t understand when you scoff at the echoing collusion of perpetual indulgence. They will want you to play video games for hours and pamper every primal appetite as quickly as possible.

When you see this for what it is, namely, a pointless life that involves no sacrifice, no discipline, and no courage, your peers may demur. If you’ve read the Proverbs and imbibed what Solomon says, then you aspire to be full of good thoughts, good words, and good actions. The young heart has a wild yearning for nobility that is dulled by entitlement. It is when you fail that you will be tempted to give in to the minimalistic moral expectations put upon college students. When you are sad, lonely, or wounded, you will be tempted to listen with new attention to the pandering prophets. Don’t forget Christ. He is with you. Just because you feel weak doesn’t mean you should surrender. Wherever you go, take the Church’s ancestral consensus with you. That is, take the inherited intuition of your family, your church, and the Christian frame of reference.

What does it look like to surrender to the panderers? It means to forget your parents and forget the forefathers of your Christian inheritance. It means that instead of imposing duties on yourself, you impose them on others. It means fulfilling every opportunity for personal gratification and forgetting those who went before and those who will come after. It means thinking of the church as a lesser country and forgetting to eat and drink with those who are bound to Christ.

Many people today surrender to the panderers and you will be tempted as well. This temptation increases when your fellowship with the saints is faint. When you are separate from Christ’s body, you will seldom think of sacrificing yourself for another. The notion of devoted service to another person seems increasingly quaint the further you get from Christ. The worship of God with God’s people is the only activity capable of broadening your mind, imagination, and will beyond the narcissistic default common to man. Sacrifice is the roaring nucleus of worship (Rom. 12:1-2). Sacrifice is when you voluntarily give yourself to help another person, at a cost to yourself. It is serving another person freely, without compulsion or calculation. If you are unclear about what this looks like, study the life and death of the man from Nazareth. This broadening is painful and pleasurable at the same time. The result is something more than heady contemplation. It is adventure. It is blood, sweat, and tears.

On the college campus, “Christian” or otherwise, you will hear people talk about “my truth.” They will want to know about “your truth.” At first, they will say the various truths are equal. The Orwellian script in Animal Farm will come to your mind when you discover that some truths are more equal than others, that is, all truths are preferred except Christ. They will get uncomfortable when you begin talking about THE truth. But that’s okay. Press on. Apathy is not an option.

The way to spurn entitlement is to shoulder your share of responsibility. Thrust yourself into the intellectual fracas, the moral melee, and the spiritual skirmish. Christ was a joyful warrior (Heb. 12:2) and you can be too. The ethic of responsibility is always accompanied by the ethic of conviction. The one does not exist without the other. The reason many teenagers don’t take responsibility is because they lack conviction. The biblical convictions you have, lead to decisions that please the Lord. If convictions lead elsewhere, they are fraudulent.

The most common conviction of the twenty-first century is “you do you,” which means that truth is not out there to be discovered but is something waiting to be constructed in my image. Since there isn’t anything universally true (they think), each person is free to create their unique meaning in a world devoid of universal meaning. This is why truth is equated with authenticity, which is defined as fulfilling your lusts without external constraint. Consumerism and therapy affirm the authentic self. If this purchase or this action makes me feel pleasure, then it is authentic. The same is true for religion. People today aren’t as nonreligious as you’d think. Theirs is a mix-and-match religion of what “speaks to me.” Religion remix (we might call it) is designed to find peace, hope, and purpose and escape that which is hideous, insignificant, and lugubrious. Their chimerical religion won’t give them what they seek. But Christ will.

Some will reject the mumbo jumbo of personal autonomy and try to solve the mysteries of the universe through science and reason. It won’t take long for most to realize this is an overreach. Science, or scientism, suppresses all the probing questions of the soul in a way that derides credulity. But that doesn’t mean they will convert to Christ at the snap of your apologetic fingers. Seeking soul satisfaction can be traumatic. They won’t be as concerned with the historical veracity of the resurrection as you are. Many of them have decided they don’t want the Christian God at all, no matter how logical your arguments are. They don’t want an all-knowing God. They don’t want a God that says some people go here and some people go there. They don’t have faith in Christ because they do not like him or want him. They glisten with the need for stability, wisdom, and rest, just not the God of the Bible.

You have to show them that Christ brings permanent stability. This requires resocializing them into mother church, and preferably not one that patterns its worship after the world. They will be surprised to learn that powerful symbolic gestures are necessary to shape and create community.

You have to show them that Christ brings divine wisdom. This requires introducing them to Solomon’s Proverbs and keeping them away from the kind of “wisdom” sported by Creflo Dollar. They may discover, as did Augustine, that wisdom and healing are, together, found in Jesus Christ.[1] 

You have to show them that Christ brings transcendent rest. This requires introducing them to God’s narrative of peace. They will be surprised that the principle of plenitude is not expressed in individualistic grasping for personal authenticity.

This is the new apologetics and you can’t use it with others until you use it for yourself. It’s not just “them” who will be seeking, but you may be as well. Perhaps it is you who will skeptically struggle and search. Your faith won’t always be assured; your thoughts won’t always be clear; your vision won’t always be visible; your devotion won’t always be whole-souled. God may not always feel near. You may wonder if he hears you because his presence feels distant. That’s okay. Offer your concerns to God, as did Job (Job 17), as did the Psalmists (Ps. 88), as did Moses (Ex. 3:7-22), as did Jesus (Mark 14:32-42). God’s grace is large enough to remedy your doubt (John 20:24-29). Your questions do not change God’s truth. Your tremors do not unseat his promises. Your dubieties cannot undo his love. Faith in the living God is the medicine of the soul by which doubts are transformed into genuine love. Proof of God’s existence has never been the necessary foundation of faith (Heb. 11:3, 6). We reason, it is true, but we do so with faith. Not all knowledge belongs to us as it belongs to God (Dt. 29:29; Ps. 131). That is why life contains mystery. In this life, we trust God’s Word as the revelation of the wisdom of God and we look forward to the final resolution in eternal dwelling with the Heavenly Father.

Check out these other articles

https://trinityreformedkirk.com/2023/02/13/an-open-letter-to-the-trc-teenagers

https://trinityreformedkirk.com/2023/05/08/a-word-for-the-high-school-graduates-of-trc

[1] Augustine, Confessions, 3.4.8; 5.14.25.