Do our young people believe in TRUE Christianity?

Honestly, I hadn’t been intending to write about worldview . . . I sort of fell backward into it, almost like you would picture my falling backward into a pool, with the displaced water splashing all over, and, into unexpected places.  The splash made me realize the importance of the discussion.  Add to that, I took Dylan, (my 16-year-old son), out for sushi on Monday night, just ‘to talk’—some of his viewpoints on things caught me totally off guard.  And so, I dug deeper into the book I was reading about this generation’s ‘take’ on faith. 

Some of you may have thought the discussion on worldview totally superfluous, but that would all change if you heard your young person tell you that they weren’t even sure ‘where God fit’ anymore . . . though you had raised him ‘in the church’.  ‘See, you can be sailing along, blissfully unaware that the way your young person is looking at life is radically different from the way you taught him . . . that is until there is some sort of abhorrent behavior, and you begin to probe the thinking that preceded the action.  And as you begin to scrape away the layers of thinking, which unbeknownst to you, changed through the influence of ‘that’ teacher, and the scoffing of that so-called enlightened highly-intellectual professor at the university, the coach who off-handedly said, ‘really, you really think THAT?’ or who knows what other shaping influence of which you were totally unaware?

That’s when you realize that your daughter’s understanding of being a Christian is really all about having had her ‘first communion’ in the Catholic Church, or her ‘confirmation’ in the Lutheran Church . . . all the while somehow losing sight of the fact that Christianity is not a universalist faith, and not all ‘roads up the mountain of faith’ lead home.  It is about an amazing, all-consuming love that ought draw you into the only true peace available; it is the knowledge that before the foundation of the earth, God knew you and formed you even while you were in your mother’s womb. 

Christ said, ‘But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.’ Matthew 7.14.  It is not about being ‘spiritual’, it is not about taking what you want from Christian teaching and leaving the rest; it is about seeking out the revelation of God in the Holy Scriptures.  And what’s more, Christianity rests solely on the historic person of Jesus Christ--his deity, and what he accomplished on the cross for the sake of mankind. 

Christianity is about an authentic relationship with that same Jesus, who is alive, loving us and praying for us, and waiting for the day when he will return and draw us to himself to live with him forever.

And in the mean time, God has created us and uniquely gifted us to live life with purpose, and on purpose, for him.   And while this generation has been shaped to believe that ‘truth’ is somehow relative—you know, truth is what is true for you, though I may know a different truth—that is not so.   That which is TRUE is true whether you believe it or not.  Oh, how truth has been distorted by our popular culture!  Christ and His Word must be restored as the standard for truth.

Do our teen-agers, do our twenty-somethings, do you and me, believe in TRUE Christianity?  Perhaps some thinking is in order.

Christine