Devotion Talk 7/31/08

As the last of July, I see it fitting to make it the last day I spend in John. It also says so on my devotion reading plan. What a coincidence.

Tonight I read John 20.

The ressurection of Jesus: What a perfect way to end the Month! I think their is one particular verse that really pretains to us teens.

” ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ “

-John 20:21b

Well some people would see this as: Okay… The Lord is sending out all the adults to spread the good news off Jesus’ ressurection. WRONG! Where in the Bible does it say that adolescents are not to be caring about these things and not to be doing things for God. God exhorts the teens as much as he does the adults. Why he even thinks of us as adults. The words “Adolescents” or “teenagers” do not occur in the Bible: Seen here & here.  We are just the same as them except we are shorter, our voices are higher, and we are undergoing tremendous changes, but that does not matter.

1 Corinthians 13:11 reads:

“11When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”

“There is no when I was a teenager I reasoned like a child and looked like a man! We have to be men today and not spend our teen years: the best years of our life goofing off, which has been expected by the world today.”

-Alex and Brett Harris

I’m Back!

Sorry for that really long absence. I really couldn’t concentrate on this for some reason. I need prayer that I will be able to start this up again and not stop. Instead of my devotion, I feel I should renew this website’s ideas. I went to the Rebelution: Do Hard Things Conference this weekend. Alex and Brett Harris were basically my inspiration for starting this blog. I don’t know if my blog will ever get as large as theirs. (That would be nice) Although, I fight for the same purpose as them.  And that is to achieve higher expectations from the adults. One of my favorite things that the twins said was:

“We were searching ‘teens and expectations’ one day on Google one day, just to see what was expected of us. As we typed, we saw in the suggestion box: teens and drugs, teens and texting, teens and videogames, and teens and violence. Even Google has low expectations for teens! Anyway, we continued our search and came up with our results. The first sounded good: ‘Teaching Teens Responsibility by Setting Expectations.’ It sounded good, so we clicked on it. It started out saying how if the expectations for teens were higher, they would act with higher intelligence. Here are the lists of responsibilities:

‘Younger Teens:

• Have useful daily habits like making his/her bed and picking up his/her room.
• Cleaning his/her room – vacuuming, dusting, etc – weekly, with some parental help.
• Take phone messages and putting them where someone will see them.

Older Teens:

• Everything on the preteen list that you have not added before.
• Cleaning his/her room – vacuuming, dusting, etc – weekly.
• Doing a daily household chore, such as cleaning the dinner dishes, straightening the family room, swiping down the bathroom, etc.
• Helping with the weekly household chores.

Please do not feel that your teenager should be doing all of them. Pick and choose a few and add on as your teen is able to handle more responsibilities. Be sure to praise your teenager when he/she accomplishes his/her responsibilities. A simple hug and a “good job” will go a long way.’

Wow! They don’t expect anything of us do they?

The problem with the world today is that we are not expected of as much as the adolescents of the past. At the age of sixteen, George Washington was made a surveyor of the Fronteir: charting out and making plots for property. His equipment consisted of heavy logs and chains. Furthermore, George had to drag these along through a dense forest. He was expected to have a well paying job, not to be goofing off from age 13 to 18.”

The view of the teens’ ability has diminished over the course of two and-a-half centuries. Our mission is not to bring it back up to the standards of 1752, but to raise the standards high above. We are the Outliers and we must fight to be recognized as having greater ability than we are expected to have and to raise the expectations of people today.