Our Young People Need Jesus

About ten years ago, I was asked to take the chapel service for a Christian high school in the South. As I stood before that group of teenagers, I knew I had my work cut out for me. I felt resistance from the start.

Very few of those kids were paying any attention to me. Half of them were texting on their phones. The other half looked as bored as if they were sitting in a math class.

A couple of girls on the front row were making fun of me. While I preached, I tried to reach those kids with stories of vital Christianity. I told them about the underground church in China, but they looked at me like I was just out of my mind.

No matter how hard I preached God's word to them, or pressed stories of God's work among His people in revival to them, they were completely disinterested, and I finally realized I couldn't move that bunch of teenagers with a steamroller. Finally, I came to the end of my message, and as I stepped down from the podium, the old pastor of the church came over to me, and he apologized to me. He said, I don't know how to reach these kids these days.

I'm sorry they were impolite to you. What really tears me up inside is I feel sorry for these teenagers because they don't know what it's like to experience the power of God in a meeting. I remember a time in the early 1970s when God was at work in revival in some of the churches in the land, and I know what it's like to feel the power of God in a meeting, and I feel bad for these kids who never have had that experience.

Well, I knew what the old boy was talking about, for I also had experienced times of the power of God in a meeting. I knew what it was like to feel the awful presence of a holy God in the midst of His people, to be alarmed by the disturbing presence of Christ in conviction of sin, but this generation knows nothing of that. I don't blame the White House for our problems today.

I don't blame the courthouse for our sad situation either, but I do blame the church house for dropping the ball during the last 30 or 40 years. The church made the mistake of trying to reach the world by letting the world into the church, and in the process, we escorted God's Spirit right out the back door. We thought that to reach the teenagers of the church, we needed to change our music, so we replaced the old Christ-centered hymns about the blood with man-centered, upbeat lyrics and rock music.

We got rid of the weekly prayer meeting and replaced it with pizza and movie nights for the youth group. We spoiled those kids rotten, giving in to their demands, and rather than giving them what they needed, we just gave them what they wanted, and that's why we're in the sad shape we're in today. We stopped using the old reliable King James Version and updated it with newer, modern translations in an effort to reach the unchurched.

We even took an axe to our pulpits and replaced them with less intimidating plexiglass, and we quit being preachers, and we all became teachers who just told relatable stories to our congregations in an effort to keep them coming each Sunday, and some even became entertainers and CEOs. We stopped preaching against sin. We never mentioned man's duty of repentance.

We threw a big rug over the bottomless pit so no one could see it. We decided not to warn folks about a future judgment that awaits all mankind where a wrathful God will punish sin. We just spoke of God like he was nothing more than a big, jolly Santa Claus who only exists to bless his little darlings.

And modern evangelists broadened the way of salvation in ways Jesus never did. We made it awful easy to walk an aisle to accept our little, impotent Jesus, who stood helplessly knocking at the door of your heart like an insurance salesman with his hat in his hand. Won't you please let him in? Ministers shrunk God down to man's size so we could relate to a being who was now more tolerant towards sin, and we snatched salvation out of the hands of God and placed it squarely in the hands of men.

You save yourself today by just a decision, and you can make that decision anytime you are good and ready. So the bottom line, friends, is we stopped preaching about a bloody cross with a bloodstained Christ nailed there for sin. We got out our mop buckets and cleaned up all the blood and gore around Calvary and made it so pristine you could sit and eat your lunch there.

And our denominations decided we could get a lot more religious activity in our churches by relying on money and manpower. But in former days, the church only operated on prayer and holy ghost power. That's why we're in the sad spiritual declension in our churches today, where 90% of our congregations are nothing more than baptized, unconverted worldlings.

Only a heaven-sent revival can alter our deplorable, sad situation and keep us from utter ruin and destruction as the Jews of old had become a formality of religious exercise, and all their hope was tied to their temple and its traditions. And when they crucified the Son of God and the Romans came and tore down the temple, throwing down one stone upon the other while the besieged citizens were shut up in a famine and ended up eating their own children to survive, only to face ultimate and utter destruction. So, too, the modern church sits on a precarious preface of her own making, while God's justice hangs in the air like a sword of Damocles ready to descend at any moment.

If the sleeping church could only awaken from her spiritual stupor to see the danger that is all around her, maybe, just maybe, it would drive a few of us to our knees in desperation and brokenness before God with sincere repentance in our hearts and to cry out against the sins of society and ask God to have mercy in sending a heaven-sent revival. Then the church would regain her voice of authority and begin to proclaim again the great doctrines of the gospel, which are ruin, redemption, repentance, and regeneration, endued in the power of the Holy Ghost. Maybe, just maybe, there'd be some hope for this younger generation of lost young people who desperately need Jesus.