WHERE ARE THE SOLDIERS?

Yesterday, I was thinking about the old hymn, “Who Is on the Lord’s Side?” Maybe it came to mind because of the heaviness in my heart for the type of teen that is coming off our Christendom production line these days. 

Lately, and slowly, a realization has been coming clearer in my heart. We are not producing soldiers anymore. Instead, we are turning out models and football players and computer geniuses and cheerleaders and debaters Christian rock stars and yea, even Bible quizzers and Sunday School teachers…all unready to step into the fray, all with knowledge perhaps, but without wisdom.

When I saw the photo of a young Christian girl who has been involved in a heartbreaking story that recently hit the news, I was overcome with sadness and self-chastisement. There, big as life on my computer screen was a picture of a beautiful 15-year-old girl, with all the trappings of a model, impressively good looking, smiling back at me with that provocative expression abundant in magazines, movies and television.

Can I point a finger? No. A lot of personal soul searching took place as I recalled that in some ways I was easy on my own children, allowing some attitudes that I should not have, and not sitting down to lay out a clear strategy to kick soldiers out of my nest rather than nice Christians.

My awareness of this failure was accentuated when I spoke with a young man during this past week that shared his story of how, though raised in a Christian home, he took a 180 degree turn away from what he had learned as he got close to the time to leave home to go out on his own. He was nearly mortally wounded by his venture into drugs. A couple of weeks ago, he got a call with the terrible news that one of his lifelong friends had indeed overdosed and was gone.

As he was telling me his story, I kept thinking, “We have got to get tougher because the issues have gotten tougher!” I think we need to go back to teaching the Bible in depth, the Old Testament as well as the New. We need to teach our teens to go back and forth between the pages of the quick and powerful Word of God, becoming deeply familiar with who our Great God really is, how He worked in the days of the Bible and how that applies to our trek through life now. We need to require memorization on a much broader basis. The Word of God is what is promised to touch us and change us, not our programs or our parties or our bands or our comedians.

I remember my youth pastor saying that if you have a youth group and they are not sitting around the table with their Bibles open, searching the Word and learning the Word, you are failing them. Every person that I have kept in touch with from my youth group is still walking with the Lord, still married after many years, serving on the church board, missionaries in many areas of the world. I can hardly express the depth of Bible study to which I was introduced as a teen.

I wonder, too, if our kids are missing out by never singing hymns like the one I mentioned at the beginning. And what about, “I Surrender All,” and “So Send I You,” and “Soldiers of Christ Arise,” and “A Mighty Fortress Is our God.” We knew these songs and we knew all the verses. And there are a thousand more.

One of the verses I learned in my youth was, “Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be soldier.” Do our kids even know about God’s expectation and plan for us to be soldiers? Are they even aware of how deadly the battle is?