Hey Teen, get Ready for the Real World

There used to be a time when teenagers didn’t exist.

Children went from boyhood to manhood with no teenhood dividing the two.

If you are over sixty years old, you may remember the days when there were no teenagers.

If you are between forty and sixty perhaps your parents or grandparents told you what life was like when teenagers did not exist.

My grandmother most certainly told me.

She was perplexed and saddened when I became part of this new and growing demographic called teenagers.

She was not sad because she missed out on something special. She was sad because I was missing out on something special. She was gathering the eggs and milking the cows before school and then went into the fields after she came home from school and worked until dark.

She did not know there were teen years until I came along. We were on the cutting edge of this new demographic. We had movies and video games. We also invented rock and roll. Pot, now called weed, was soon to follow and fornication (premarital sex) was the right-of-passage that validated manhood.

Most teenagers are unaware how they became a self-absorbed demographic.^[1] They are not familiar with their short-lived heritage. Most of them believe how they live is how things have always been and should be.

Teen, if this is how you think, then I’ve got some bad news for you. Your life was never meant to be the way I’ve described. If it is, then get ready. You’re in for the challenge of a lifetime. If you haven’t discerned this by now, be prepared. Shortly after your high school graduation, you will be introduced to what you should have been introduced to years earlier.^[2]

Last week I wrote the first part of this series, which I titled What to do after your parents blow it – 1.0. This week I want to finish that article, hopefully giving a biblical perspective on how the new teen demo should see and respond to life.

In both articles I’m interacting with Charles J. Sykes, and his rules for life. Based on how Sykes wrote his rules, it appears he did not have Christ or the Bible in mind. So I’m going to take what he said and tweak it a bit to fit a Biblio-centric framework–though what he said is tweetable.

I hope my interaction will provide a modicum of biblical wisdom and motivation for teenagers. Here are his first five rules, which I covered in the aforementioned article:   Continue at Rick Thomas

The Myth of Mutual Submission

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph 5:21).

This 11-page chapter (available for free as a PDF) concisely and convincingly explains why the phrase “mutual submission” is unhelpful at best:

Wayne Grudem, “The Myth of Mutual Submission as an Interpretation of Ephesians 5:21,” in Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood  (ed. Wayne Grudem; Foundations for the Family Series; Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), 221–31.

Outline:

1. Background
2. An Acceptable Sense of Mutual Submission
3. Objections to the Egalitarian Sense of Mutual Submission
1. The following context specifies the kind of submission Paul has in mind.
2. The absence of any command for husbands to submit to wives
3. The meaning of “be subject to” (hypotassō)
4. The lack of evidence for the egalitarian meaning of hypotassō
5. The meaning of “one another”
6. The meaning of Colossians 3:18, Titus 2:5, and 1 Peter 3:1
4. Practical Application

(The entire book is available for free as a PDF.)

HT: Andy Nasseli

Praying for Your pastor

About nine years ago I developed the following list of prayer requests that I gave to every willing hand. I haven't passed them out in at least four years, but I decided to resurrect them. Why? I need prayer...badly! And so does your pastor. As leaders in the church we have unique and often more intense temptations ("Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter"). So will you consider praying for your pastor the way I ask my people to pray for me?  

1. That the gospel would be the focal point of my life and identity - not manhood, not being a husband, not being a father, not being a pastor, but who I am in Christ.

2. That I would not fear man by desiring the admiration of people; that the Lord's "Well done" would be ever before my eyes.   Keep Reading...

Masculinity in a Can, Fight Club at Church, and the Crisis of Manhood

You do not have to look far to find evidence of the fact that males are in trouble in these confused and confusing times. On the university campuses, women undergraduate students outnumber young men by a clear margin -- 60% to 40%. A frightening percentage of young males are or have been behind bars, and the vast majority of young men are delaying their assumption of adult roles and responsibilities until well into their twenties or early thirties.

A crisis of fatherlessness marks the lives of millions of boys and young men, with boys growing up without fathers in the home now comprising a majority within some ethic groups and urban populations. At almost every grade level, boys are performing below girls, and are often left behind as girls go on to more advanced levels of learning. Then, adding insult to injury, reports from scientists indicate that both sperm counts and testosterone levels are falling among some boys and men -- blamed on anything from hormone supplements in the food chain to chemical contamination of ground water. Read the rest HERE

An Astonishing Convergence: Biblical Womanhood and Hip-hop