Video Transcript: Issues to Consider

All right, lecture 10 is issues to consider, issues to consider. All right. I suppose I could have said problems to consider.

I don't know if all of them are problems. I got to lead, I had the opportunity to lead a youth group while I was in seminary. I spent a year in the Philippines teaching youth in a way at a Bible college.

My first church, I not only was the lead pastor, but I was in charge of the youth group or at least the spiritual part of it. So I know from experience that things come up and some of the things that come up in youth, among youth, you can't predict. It's just, you know, that's the way life is.

So I tried to pick out sort of some major things that I think it would be helpful if you're a leader, that you think about these things ahead of time before they come up so that you're not, you know, taken totally off guard. And so you have maybe a little bit of an idea of what you might do. So let's just dive in here.

Mental health issues. Okay. Many young people struggle with mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, the pressures of academics, social expectations, social media, the transitions in life.

All these can contribute to challenges. And it's not that, you know, we all go through these things. It doesn't matter what age you are.

Everyone goes through some of these things. But I think in that window of youth, they become amplified. Again, it's that time where kids are trying to figure out who they are.

They're not children anymore. They're not adults. You know, they have no idea who they are.

They're in the land of who knows what's going to happen. They're in the land of all things are possible. And young people don't have the experience to know that things happen and then they don't happen.

Things come and they go. You can have no friends and then you can have many friends. You can have many friends and go to no friends.

You can think something is extremely important and then the next moment it isn't. I just had my 50 year class reunion, high school class reunion. And my senior year, I was the drum major, you know, of the band.

And, you know, at the beginning of the marching band program, they would call my name and I would march through the, you know, kind of prance through all the other band members. And then I came out to the 50 yard line and I had to jump in the air and come on the ground. Well, it was raining one time and the band director came to me and said, you know, you got to be careful because it's wet.

And I thought, yeah, I'll be careful. When I come down, I'll be careful when I land, you know. So I come out there and then, you know, there's a symbol crashing, you know, when I jump in the air and land on the ground.

And what I didn't realize is that, you know, I was prepared to be careful about the landing. The grass is wet. Be careful with the landing.

But I didn't realize that to get up in the air, you have to press your foot down on the ground to get up in the air. And when I pressed my foot down on the ground, I slid right into the 50 yard line in front of everybody. I thought that was, you know, that that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me in my life, in front of everybody.

In fact, you know, the second half we had to start our program and we started the same way. Usually people went to get coffee and a donut. They stayed because they wanted to see if I would fall again.

People in my yearbook wrote in the yearbook, you know, too bad you fell or they made some kind of comment about that. In my 50 year reunion, not one person mentioned it. Not one person mentioned it.

You know, when you're young, you think everything is about you and everything is the best or the worst. And kids just don't know that life is filled with a lot of ups and downs. You're just experiencing it now.

But they don't know that. And so everything is incredibly important. Everything is, you know, it's not just a disaster.

It's a complete disaster. It's crushing. So I think the extremes that happen in youth, you'll experience that.

So you have to be that calming experience. You have to walk with them. You have to, you know, give them a place to talk about these things.

And, you know, they're just learning that negative things happen in life, but it's going to be okay. That's part of the Christian walk. Life, you know, with God, God has a plan and he will use even the bad things that happen in our lives.

The key, each youth must see that they are love gifted child of God for whom there is an eternal purpose. Okay. That's the bottom line that regardless of what happens to you in your life, God will use the good and the bad to create the kind of person that he has in mind because of some plan that he has for your life.

And that's the message that you're constantly preaching to young people with examples, with testimonies, with your own life, to show them that that's true. Substance abuse. Substance abuse, including alcohol, drug use, continues to be a concern among the youth.

Peer influence, experimentation, seeking relief from stress or emotional difficulties can contribute to substance use and addiction. Why? Why do kids abuse substances? Well, it's readily available. It's like candy.

People are offering it. So some will do it just to try. Others will do it because everyone else is doing it.

Maybe not the first time. They had resistance at first, but when you see something over and over and you see that everybody's doing it, you know, it wears you down. Broken homes.

You know, 40, 50 percent, at least in the United States, marriages are broken homes. People are, you know, they got two families that they're, you know, contending between the two. Two totally different discipline forms and systems of, you know, who am I, how do I fit in? And so the insecurity that kids have, you know, things that shouldn't fall apart, fall apart.

That's what they see. You know, parents will say, you know, just because mom and dad are divorcing doesn't mean we don't love you. Well, you pledged love to each other and that broke.

So how do I trust these words that you're saying to me? Three, lack of purpose. Okay, I think we're living, you know, our culture over the last 100, 150, 200 years has become more and more secular. You know, Darwin, Darwinism and science and more and more people are sort of squeezing God out of the equation.

Atheists are on the rise. Church and Christianity is, you know, is being pushed as, you know, outdated and more and more. I'm not saying it's totally there, but more and more people are accepting these ideas.

And where does that leave a young person? You know, if I'm just the end of a long evolutionary process and, you know, eventually the sun burns out or explodes or whatever, and all of life comes to an end and the universe is forever expanding or whatever it's doing, but there's nothing personal there, then what does it all mean? And why should I do the things that I'm doing? And why should I struggle with something? Or what am I fighting for? What am I, what's the goal of this whole thing of life? So it's easy to get discouraged as a young person and just say, what's the point of this? You know, suicide, things like that are on the rise. Uncertain future, you know, where's it going? I mean, politically, economically, nationally, countries, it's like we have no idea what's going to happen. Change happens so fast now.

I mean, the last hundred years, it's been unbelievable. And it's only accelerating. Where's all of this going to go? And how does my little, how do I fit into this? You know, we used to grow up in a little town and you were somebody or you knew your place in this little town.

Now you compete with the whole world, you know? Technology. All right, technology over the last hundred years, television, okay, shows, series. People can spend four or five hours every single day watching made-up lives, basically.

You can go off and be and do anything. Computers have expanded horizons. The internet, you can go anywhere in the world.

You can read anything. You can watch anything. You can go back in history.

It's, you know, you can go to YouTube and spend all day just surfing YouTube. One interesting thing to the next thing. But when you're done with the day, you have no idea what you watched.

It's like, you know, I connected in a thousand different ways today. And then I do it again the next day, the next day, the next day. And what does that do to a young person? How do they concentrate on anything? And there's something moving, something talking, there's some noise, there's some picture happening every second, every waking moment.

There's never a time to just reflect on who am I? What am I doing? Where is this going? Phones. You're able to do that everywhere. There's never a boring moment.

You can always go do something. But what does that do? That just makes everything boring. Because we can, you know, every second we can be listening to something, going something.

I'm not interested. Go to the next thing. Go to the next thing.

We're like people surfing on the internet, never happy, never satisfied, never arriving, never going anywhere. It's just random everythingness. And what is that doing to our kids? The studies suggest that all these mental illnesses among kids is higher than it's ever been.

People's self-esteem is lower than it's ever been. How do I compare with anything and everything? I post my picture and I got five likes. And next week I post another picture, I got two likes.

Does that mean, you know, my popularity is going down? In other words, everything is like, our self-esteem is on the line with everything that we do. And everything that we do is being judged. Before you just didn't know.

Am I popular? Am I not? I don't know. It's better to not know. Now you get so much feedback that you can never be happy about who you are.

I got 10 likes this week. If I don't get at least 12, then I'm going downhill. And then 20, and then 30.

And then it keeps escalating. I can't keep up with that. And then you see what other people are doing.

Everyone else is succeeding. Everyone else is having fun and I'm not. That's what it looks like, right? So how are young people to handle all of this? Games, you know? I remember watching some person talking about his son.

And his son, he said, you know, here's the problem for my son. He can either be a guy who serves coffee at the local coffee shop, or he can be the Starfleet captain of his own spaceship in my basement. Which one is he going to choose? Right? I mean, the games are so realistic and you can get lost in a whole pretend world where you become something.

You get skills and abilities and people like you and you're a part of something. And it's all made up. And you can't get along, you know, anywhere else.

And you have no desire to. You need a couch and a television and a computer and an internet. That's it.

AI, okay, that we're just at the beginning of that. Okay, AI, what's that going to do? Why should a kid study? Just make AI do everything. Are we going to know anything? Where's the future of work? And what will I do? So it's a very confusing world kids are growing up into.

Number four, sexuality is, it's like, that part of a person is just being woken up. And sadly, it's getting, you know, it's being pushed down to the younger and younger, younger group. And it's a beautiful gift that God has given to us.

But it also is an, it's an opportunity to experience a lot of brokenness and pain. Genesis 2.18, the Lord said, it is not good for the man to be alone. Okay? That's true.

A man alone usually doesn't succeed well. I will make a helper suitable for him. Okay? First Corinthians 6.12, do you not know that he unites himself with a prostitute, is one with her in body, for it is said the two will become one flesh? Now, I put those pretty strange verses to put together.

But God gave us this powerful gift that can be used for bad and good. It can be used for bad and good. And He, but He gave us a safeguard.

The safeguard is marriage. Okay? Now, First Corinthians 6.12, do you not know, here's Paul talking, do you not know that He unites himself with a prostitute, is one with her in body, for it is said the two will become one? I remember, I had a couple that was living together, coming to church, living together. They wanted to get married like six months from then or something.

So I met with them. And, you know, well, what do I do with that? The church frowns on young people living together before they're married. And I had them read First Corinthians 6.12. I said, here, let's read this.

Do you know that he unites himself with a prostitute, is one with her in body, for it is said the two will become flesh? And I said, so I said to him, what do you think that means? Does this, how does this relate to you or not relate to you? And then the girl couldn't figure it out, but the guy figured it out right away. He looked at me and said, well, according to this verse, we're married already. I said, yeah.

Because the act of uniting yourself with the opposite sex, the act itself is marriage. And so you can do that with the person you love, or you can do that with the person you don't love. So it used to be that that act was a thing that made marriage possible.

That act is a thing that made families possible. And now we, we, stop, you know, we can have the act without the pregnancy. You can, you can be on the pill or some other form of contraception.

So all of a sudden, the act that related to a commitment to another person and the beginning of a growing family is now just relegated to recreation. It's just something that we do for fun. It's just another thing that, you know, we play sports and we do this, but this hurts people left, right, and center.

It's like playing with fire. It's not just another sport. So, so the challenge with youth is to help them understand that the Bible has these restrictions.

Now I know even in the church, a lot of young people are thinking, you know, this whole business of not having sex before your marriage, that's so old fashioned. No one in secular society even believes anyone believes that anymore. And so kids in the church are like, I don't know, you know, all the shows that they watch, the movies that they watch.

That's just not, you know, that's not the principle that people follow anymore. It's just old fashioned. So, but people are being hurt.

Is this view helping? Marriages are falling apart. Families are falling apart at record numbers. Is, you know, at some point you have to ask, or even a secular culture has to ask, is what we're doing working? It's clearly not working.

And so your job as the youth leader is to help them see that the Bible is not just some outdated old fashioned thing that wants to spoil your fun. There's actually a reason behind all of this. Studies have shown that if you live with someone before you get married, the chances of divorce after you marry them are greater than if you don't.

So, you know, the challenge is now to show that God is not just arbitrarily giving, spoiling our fun. God is like saying, I give you this gift, but I give you the context within which you should use it. And it's for your best.

It's for your happiness. It's for joy. It's for connection.

It's for meaningful relationships that can last a lifetime. It's for purpose and meaning. And if you ignore it, you're just bringing brokenness, disconnection, and meaninglessness to your life.

So you have to, but you have to, it's not like, well, we should just do this because this is what the Bible says. No. There's a reason God says these things.

Genesis 2, but for Adam, no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While he was sleeping, he took one of the ribs, man's ribs, and then closed up the place with flesh.

Then the Lord God made a woman. He had taken from the rib and taken out a man. And he brought her to the man.

And the man said, this is now born of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman. For she was taken out of a man.

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife. And they become one flesh. Adam and Eve, Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.

That oneness, the whole marriage thing is so profound. In Genesis 1, we hear about the three in one. Let us make man in our image.

The three in one, the plural God that is so close that he's one, three in one, is now reflected in this thing called marriage. The two in one. We reflect the essence of God in marriage.

It's not just a recreational sport. It's the essence of God himself. And that's why when we break that, when we disregard that, when we disrespect that, the things don't go well.

If we're going to ignore the essence of God and go in a different direction, why are we surprised when it doesn't work out well? Gender. Okay. So, you know, when I was doing youth group, this was not a thing.

You know, there were two genders. There's male and female. Genesis 1.27. So God created mankind in his own image.

In the image of God, he created the male and female. He created them. But now gender has become a social construct.

You can be biologically one way or the other. Biologically, there's only two. I think everyone agrees on that.

Biologically speaking, there's only two. There's male and female, and that's it. Gender has now become how you think about yourself.

And that has led to all kinds of craziness and brokenness. And we don't have time to get, I think Henry and I have a course on all of those social things that are happening in our day. But you're going to have to face them.

It's going to come up. And so having some sense of where you're at on these things, you know, people can think a lot about who they are and they can say a lot of things. But there's some things that don't change because of that.

And I think because we're letting people figure out they could be anything, then it leads to a lot of confusion on people who wouldn't be confused otherwise. I mean, I grew up, I didn't have to think about am I a man or am I not a man? But if in the brokenness of your life you're trying to figure out who you are, and now you have to add that into the equation, it's just another issue you have to deal with. And I'm not saying that some people aren't born, you know, some men are born more effeminate and some women are born more masculine.

I understand that. And whether someone likes sports or they don't like sports, you know, or if someone likes sewing like my brother-in-law likes to sew, okay, good, why not? You know, there aren't necessarily these cut and dried roles that men and women have in terms of interests that they may have. The basics, the physical basics are just there.

You know, but I think there's room enough for us to be interested in other things. So I think you're going to have to walk with people because kids are being influenced by the kids around them, by the social things around them. I think you keep coming back to the Bible and going, well, I don't know, what do you think this means for you? What does this mean? So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created the male and female, he created them.

Mission trips, okay, that's like, okay, we go from sexuality to mission trips. Mission trips, there's at least in the United States, a lot of young people want to go to a third world country and it's great. The pros are, you know, kids get an experience, they see another culture, they see that not everyone has the same things and opportunities that they do, they have.

They become maybe more grateful, more thankful. They realize that not everyone has it good and so young people come back and maybe they're more appreciative, more gracious. The cons are that young people, because it's a short term thing and it's such a high for young people to go and do, they maybe overestimate what they've actually accomplished.

They went over there and they sang some songs with some kids and the kids loved them and wanted to hold their hand and they think that they changed these kids' lives. When we know that changing someone's life requires a lot more effort. I mean, if you think about people that adopt someone, it takes 18 years to mold and shape them.

It's not that easy. And I think too, sometimes we go over there and we think we're the missionaries. I think, I personally think mission trips, at least from the United States to other countries, poorer countries, they shouldn't be called mission trips.

They should be called Christian cultural exchange trips. We're going over there and maybe getting more than we're giving. You know, I don't know maybe what we're giving.

We're bringing, you know, maybe we helped build a building or paint something or we sang a few songs. We, you know, we shared our testimony or something that we did, you know. I'm not saying we didn't do anything, but it's not, it's not like we changed the world here.

We went over there and shared a little bit and then they shared with us. Right? I mean, they're the ones who gave us the sense of how blessed we are. They're the ones who, you know, showed us that God is working, not just with people that look like us and talk like us and act like us.

It's a mutual thing. We're trying to do something for you. And you're trying to do something for me.

I'm not condescending. See, what's bad about mission trips is when kids start thinking, they're condescending. They come from a, we have it, you don't mentality.

And we're going to come and share with you, poor people, you people who don't know Christ. We, we have everything and we're here to show you. No, we're here to share Christ together.

Number seven, youth who need more than the youth group can provide. And a lot of these areas that I talked about, that might be the case. The brokenness, addiction, depression, anxiety, and any number of serious issues that some youth are dealing with can totally consume a youth group.

The group cannot manage that. Some youth need help beyond the group. Find resources to whom you can refer these youth.

So don't, don't think that you have to do it all alone. Well, these are just some of the issues. There are many more.

And I didn't go in depth. We didn't have time to go into depth. You know, rely on your pastor, rely on others to get some of the answers, rely on the denomination in the church, your stance on some of these positions.

Don't go it alone. I guess that's the point. All right.

Well, thank you. We'll see you next time.