Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults. 1 Corinthians 14:20 (NIV)
I had a conversation the other day with parents who have a child in their late teens. As with most parents, they were struggling with that fact that this intelligent, capable child regularly makes really stupid choices and foolish decisions. Yep.
I shared with my friends that Wendy and I both observed a major shift in our daughters as they reached their mid-twenties and their brains were fully developed. I learned how much the brain is a part of our maturation process. We don’t control it. It just is.
At the same time, I know fully functioning adults who continue to act like teenagers as if their brains never fully developed. They allow themselves to be led by their self-centered appetites and passions. They repeatedly make foolish life decisions. Their lives are always in chaos. They are perpetually trying to escape the painful consequences of their own childish foolishness.
Paul is dealing with people like this among the Jesus’ followers in Corinth. In today’s chapter, he once again tells the Corinthian believers to “grow up” and stop acting like children.
One of the things I thought as a foolish child was that adults reached a level of complete maturity around the age of 30 and then it was sort of smooth sailing after that. You act like an adult and the rest of life is easy. It was around the age of thirty I started making some of the most foolish and childish life decisions of my entire journey!
As a disciple of Jesus, I’ve had to embrace that the process of growth and maturity never ends. Jesus said He was the Vine and I am a branch of that vine. What healthy plant stops growing, developing new growth, and bearing fruit? So it is with life in the Vine.
In the quiet this morning, I find myself thinking about the many ways I still need to prune, water, feed, and cultivate continued spiritual growth and applied wisdom in my life. I do this so that as my aging body wanes my life continues to grow, flourish, and remain spiritually fruitful until the end.
If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.
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Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, people of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live! Ezekiel 18:31-32 (NIV)
Wendy and I have several good friends who are currently residing in that stretch of life’s journey when one has the responsibility to parent teenagers. No one seems to be having any fun.
The thing about the teen years is that kids begin to get a taste of freedom and of free will, but they’re still about ten years from having fully developed brains. They make really stupid decisions. And, because they are old enough to get into serious trouble, those stupid decisions run the risk of quickly becoming tragic.
As I listen to some of the stories, it brings back memories of both Taylor and Madison. The girls were good kids and I’m happy to say they made far more good decisions that stupid decisions. But make no mistake, they both made stupid decisions. We caught a few of them. Certain stupid decisions are stupid because they’re so stupid that getting found out is a certainty. I’m certain there were stupid decisions that they got away with. Parents are stupid too, to believe that somehow our children won’t make the same stupid decisions we made when we were their age.
Stupid teenager decisions are a great example of what we call sin. We know it’s wrong, but we do it anyway. We do it for any number of reasons.
In the Great Story, sin is the major spiritual problem. It enters the Story in the third chapter of Genesis. Adam knew that he wasn’t supposed to eat the fruit of one tree. But, dang it, it looked so beautiful and juicy and he was really craving a taste of sweet succulent fruit at that moment.
Stupid decision.
Stupid decisions have consequences.
The consequence of Adam and Eve’s stupid decision, God says, is death. Not right away, but eventually. The human body will break down, wear out, and return to the dust of the earth from which it was formed. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
As Paul wrote to Jesus’ followers in Rome:
sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned –
The message God continues to relay to humans throughout the rest of the Great Story is that He is for life. He wants me to be for life. He wants me to experience life.
At the same time, God does not like death any more than the. parent of a teenager likes to get a call from the Police because they have a teenager in custody.
In today’s chapter, Ezekiel relays what, at the heart of it, this very simple message. In fact, it’s as simple as they come. If you make stupid decisions and live a life of selfishness, pride, stealing, cheating others, living in immorality, and never looking out for anyone but numero uno then death is the just consequence for squandering the opportunity life affords.
But that’s not what God wants. He takes no pleasure in it. It’s a tragic consequence of endless stupid decisions.
God wants life, and He even makes a way for it. Ezekiel proclaims it beautifully in today’s chapter:
Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, people of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live!
In other words, turn around. Make different choices. Follow God. He’s offering a new heart and a new spirit. A fresh start.
Paul put it this way to the believers in Rome:
For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
Just as death to all came through one sin, so God would arrange for life for all to come through one death. Life…death…new life.
I will tell you, that the new life began for me when I made one good decision to take the first step:
I admitted I was powerless over my stupid decisions — that my life had become unmanageable.
This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. Deuteronomy 30:19-20 (NIV)
If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.
You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Galatians 5:13-14 (NIV)
Among most of Wendy’s and my circle of close friends we happen to be the furthest down the path of life experience. As we enjoy being grandparents for the first time and watch our adult children embarking on their own adult journeys, most of our friends are somewhere between the stages of young children taxi service and sending children off to college for the first time. Just yesterday I was speaking with my friend who is experiencing the latter.
For young people who have lived in a secure home with engaged parents, going off to college is the first opportunity to experience real freedom. No one is looking over your shoulder. No one is reminding you of what you need to do. Plus, opportunities to experience the appetites of life in all their excesses tend to present themselves in abundance.
For many of us, the years of college and young adulthood are when we learn some crucial lessons on life’s road. Chief among them is answering the simple question: “What am I going to do with my freedom?”
I don’t know a single individual who didn’t, at some point, use freedom to engage and indulge unhealthy appetites in one way or another during these years. Perhaps there are a few true saints out there. Most parents I know, however, like to conveniently white-wash their own young adult excesses as they place all sorts of appetite controls and lofty expectations on their children.
Along the journey I’ve come to the conclusion that each one of us must learn the hard lessons of how we’re going to use our freedom. It’s part of the journey. We all need to have our own wake-up moments like the Prodigal Son finding himself up to his knees in pig slop. We all need our personally induced wake-up calls when we find ourselves saying: “My own choices led me to this awful place. I think I need to make some changes.”
In today’s chapter of his letter to the believers of Galatia, Paul is addressing this same principle. Legalism is great for creating compulsory obedience to a defined set of rules, but it does nothing for helping us learn the crucial, spiritual maturity lessons of appetite control. It’s no coincidence that Paul’s list of behaviors that mark spiritual maturity include “self-control.”
This morning I find myself praying for our own adult children and our grandchild. The truth I’ve discovered is that the lessons of managing our appetites and developing mature self-control are ongoing throughout our life journeys. So, I’m praying for them in their own respective waypoints on this life journey.
I’m also saying prayers for our friends who are in the stages of raising willful children, teenagers testing their boundaries, and young adults experiencing freedom for the first time. I’m praying wisdom for all those parental decisions about rules, consequences, clamping down, and letting go. I’m also praying for the grace and wisdom of the Prodigal’s father, who knew that his Prodigal had to learn his own crucial lessons and experience the awful places we find ourselves when we use our freedom to indulge our appetites. The father didn’t track his son down. He didn’t send a rescue party. He didn’t deny his son life’s required coursework from the school of hard-knocks. The father sat patiently on the front-porch, said his prayers, kept his eye on the road out front, and waited for a much wiser son to come home.
Jesus replied, “The Father alone has the authority to set those dates and times, and they are not for you to know.”Acts 1:7 (NLT)
One of the more difficult aspects of going through a divorce is the struggle to know when to speak, and when to be silent, with your children. This is especially true when they are teenagers. Seven years ago, as I walked that painful stretch of my own journey, I found two easy temptations with regard to talking to my girls.
First, I discovered the temptation to say too much because the breakdown of the marriage is affecting them so acutely and I wanted desperately want to provide some reason, understanding, and context. Second, I recognized the subtle, self-centered temptation within myself to want the girls to take, or at least to understand, my side of the story. What teenagers, in their stalwart belief that they are both fully mature and completely omniscient, fail to understand is that information without context, knowledge, wisdom, and discernment can become both a burden and a curse. It is said that ignorance is bliss, and sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is the very least appropriate for the situation.
As children, we often feel that we have a need to know things. We will even go so far as to think that we have a right to know certain things. We live in a culture steeped in First Amendment rights and the Freedom of Information Act coupled with an almost instantaneous access to any piece of arcane trivial information you could desire. People even publicly post the most mundane and salacious facts about themselves on Facebook and Twitter. Television programming projects an endless hunt for the most juicy, private personal gossip about celebrities 24/7/365. It is no wonder that we feel so entitled to know so much about so many.
I found it interesting in today’s chapter that Jesus deflected some of his followers’ questions. Father God knows things we don’t know. He holds certain things close to the vest, and as His children we are all on a need-to-know basis. For some children, this seems terribly unfair, unjust and spurs fits of childish rage and rebellion. Personally, I find comfort in the fact that He’s got it under control and I can trust Him with that. Someday, when I’m ready and it’s appropriate, He’ll perhaps share some things with me. Perhaps by that time it won’t really matter. Until then, I can let it go and experience the freedom that comes from not having to know certain things.
“This is God’s Message, the God who made earth, made it livable and lasting, known everywhere as God: ‘Call to me and I will answer you. I’ll tell you marvelous and wondrous things that you could never figure out on your own.'”Jeremiah 33:2-3 (MSG)
There comes a point in adolescence when my kids didn’t want my advice. I had plenty of things to say, and I think my experience and insight could have saved them some heartache or helped them succeed at this or that. But, I also know that unasked for parental advice is like an ever dripping faucet. Not only does it drive the hearer crazy, but any benefit goes straight down the drain. Besides, my daughters are quite capable, and I knew that they would do well.
So, I often kept my mouth shut. I tried to be strategic and discerning with when I chose to interject fatherly wisdom. Perhaps I gave too little, or maybe I still gave more than they wanted. You’d have to ask the girls. That’s the thing about parenting; There’s no instruction manual and you’re never going to get it perfect – never.
As they got older and on their own, the advice drought gave way to a gentle sprinkle, then to a steady rain with the occasional flash flood of questions for the ol’ man. I am sought after once more, which is a very cool and satisfying thing.
We often forget that God is not just God, He is our Father. And, unlike our flawed earthly examples, He is the perfect parent. He is not going to offer advice unasked for. He does not run off to a far country looking for the prodigal son to give him a nugget or two of fatherly advice. He watches over. He waits. He patiently stands by waiting for the phone to ring. Because when we call out to Him, He has marvelous things to tell us about things we could never have figured out on our own.
