Adutlolescents By John Piper

In addition to the Grace Gems email that I receive every morning, once a week I get an email from Desiring God, the ministry of John Piper. And since I have been experiencing some writers block over the past week or so I thought I would share this week's devotional with you.

A Church-Based Hope for 'Adultolescents'

John Piper

Christian Smith, professor of sociology at Notre Dame, wrote in the most recent Books and Culture a review of six books that deal with the new phenomenon of "adultolescence"--that is, the postponement of adulthood into the thirties. I want to relate this phenomenon to the church. But first here is a summary from Smith's article of what it is and how it came about.

What is Adultolescence?

Smith writes,

"Teenager" and "adolescence" as representing a distinct stage of life were very much 20th-century inventions, brought into being by changes in mass education, child labor laws, urbanization and suburbanization, mass consumerism, and the media. Similarly, a new, distinct, and important stage in life, situated between the teenage years and full-fledged adulthood, has emerged in our culture in recent decades--reshaping the meaning of self, youth, relationships, and life commitments as well as a variety of behaviors and dispositions among the young.

What has emerged from this new situation has been variously labeled "extended adolescence," "youthhood," "adultolescence," "young adulthood," the "twenty-somethings," and "emerging adulthood."

One way of describing this group is to highlight the tendency to delay adulthood or stay in the youth mindset longer than we used to. Smith suggests the following causes for this delay in arriving at mature, responsible adulthood.

First is the growth of higher education. The GI Bill, changes in the American economy, and government subsidizing of community colleges and state universities led in the second half of the last century to a dramatic rise in the number of high school graduates going on to college and university. More recently, many feel pressured--in pursuit of the American dream--to add years of graduate school education on top of their bachelor's degree. As a result, a huge proportion of American youth are no longer stopping school and beginning stable careers at age 18 but are extending their formal schooling well into their twenties. And those who are aiming to join America's professional and knowledge classes--those who most powerfully shape our culture and society--are continuing in graduate and professional school programs often up until their thirties.

A second and related social change crucial to the rise of emerging adulthood is the delay of marriage by American youth over the last decades. Between 1950 and 2000, the median age of first marriage for women rose from 20 to 25 years old. For men during that same time the median age rose from 22 to 27 years old. The sharpest increase for both took place after 1970. Half a century ago, many young people were anxious to get out of high school, marry, settle down, have children, and start a long-term career. But many youth today, especially but not exclusively men, face almost a decade between high school graduation and marriage to spend exploring life's many options in unprecedented freedom.

A third major social transformation contributing to the rise of emerging adulthood as a distinct life phase concerns changes in the American and global economy that undermine stable, lifelong careers and replace them instead with careers of lower security, more frequent job changes, and an ongoing need for new training and education. Most young people today know they need to approach their careers with a variety of skills, maximal flexibility, and readiness to re tool as needed. That itself pushes youth toward extended schooling, delay of marriage, and, arguably, a general psychological orientation of maximizing options and postponing commitments.

Finally, and in part as a response to all of the above, parents of today's youth, aware of the resources often required to succeed, seem increasingly willing to extend financial and other support to their children, well into their twenties and even into their early thirties.

The characteristics of the 18-30 year-olds that these four factors produce include:

(1) identity exploration, (2) instability, (3) focus on self, (4) feeling in limbo, in transition, in-between, and (5) sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope. These, of course, are also often accompanied by big doses of transience, confusion, anxiety, self-obsession, melodrama, conflict, and disappointment.

How Should the Church Respond?

How might the church respond to this phenomenon in our culture? Here are my suggestions.

1. The church will encourage maturity, not the opposite. "Do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature" (1 Corinthians 14:20).

2. The church will press the fact that maturity is not a function of being out of school but is possible to develop while in school.

3. While celebrating the call to life long singleness, the church will not encourage those who don't have the cal to wait till late in their twenties or thirties to marry, even if it means marrying while in school.

4. The church will foster flexibility in life through living by faith and resist the notion that learning to be professionally flexible must happen through a decade of experimentation.

5. The church will help parents prepare their youth for independent financial living by age 22 or sooner, where disabilities do not prevent.

6. The church will provide a stability and steadiness in life for young adults who find a significant identity there.

7. The church will provide inspiring, worldview-forming teaching week in and week out that will deepen the mature mind.

8. The church will provide a web of serious, maturing relationships.

9. The church will be a corporate communion of believers with God in his word and his ordinances that provide a regular experience of universal significance.

10. The church will be a beacon of truth that helps young adults keep their bearings in the uncertainties of cultural fog and riptides.

11. The church will regularly sound the trumpet for young adults that Christ is Lord of their lives and that they are not dependent on mom and dad for ultimate guidance.

12. The church will provide leadership and service roles that call for the responsibility of maturity in the young adults who fill them.

13. The church will continually clarify and encourage a God-centered perspective on college and grad school and career development.

14. The church will lift up the incentives and values of chaste and holy singleness, as well as faithful and holy marriage.

15. The church will relentlessly extol the maturing and strengthening effects of the only infallible life charter for young adults, the Bible.

In these ways, I pray that the Lord Jesus, through his church, will nurture a provocative and compelling cultural alternative among our "emerging adults." This counter-cultural band will have more stability, clearer identity, deeper wisdom, Christ-dependent flexibility, an orientation on the good of others not just themselves, a readiness to bear responsibility and not just demand rights, an expectation that they will suffer without returning evil for evil, an awareness that life is short and after that comes judgment, and a bent to defer gratification till heaven if necessary so as to do maximum good and not forfeit final joy in God.

Seeking to serve the next generation,

Pastor John

I am spending some time in prayer and Bible study to see where God is leading me and I hope to be back "on schedule" soon. I will post the message to the church at Philadelphia within the next day or two, and hopefully have an idea of what God wants me to be writing by the weekend. If you have a few minutes please pray that God would guide me to where He wants my time with Him to go, and He would then use that time to draw me closer to Him and that I could then in turn share it here to glorify Him.

Ezekiel, Judgment, and the Coming Economic Crisis

I have been reading from the book of Ezekiel over the past few days, and have been struck with how many parallels there are between us today and those who were living in Jerusalem just prior to the exile into Babylon. What we see in Ezekiel is the judgment of God on a nation because they have turned their backs on Him, set up idols, and worshiped them instead of worshiping the One true God.

The nation of Israel had turned away from God and He tells them over and over again ,through the prophet Ezekiel, that judgment is coming. But He also tells them that the ultimate result of the judgment will be that all the people will know that He is the Lord.

And this got me thinking, what if the things that are currently happening, in the world in general and the United States in particular, are being orchestrated by God so that we will come to know that He is the Lord?

Am I saying here that the current economic crisis was caused by God as a judgment on America? No. It could be but, I will not presume to speak for God and what He is doing in this situation. And yes you did read that correctly - I do believe that what is happening in our economy is God's doing, I am just not going to say why He is doing it.

Could God be judging America for our turning our backs on Him, for removing Him from every area of our society, and for setting up the dollar as our object of worship? Absolutely. But He may have a completely different reason for allowing this economic collapse to happen, and I am not going to try and say that I know what it is.

This is what I do know: God is still sovereign; God is still trustworthy; God is still worthy of our worship and praise; God promised that He will never leave His children; and God promised that everything that we face as His child He will use for His glory and our good.

Now, with that said I still think we can draw some parallels from this current situation andwhat was happening in ancient Israel.

The first parallel I see is that of idolatry. I already touched on this above; no one can deny that we have allowed materialism, commercialism, greed, and selfishness to become idols in our land. Most Americans are for more interested in the house we live in or the car we drive than we are with making sure our families, friends, and neighbors know and understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are more concerned with our own comfort than we are with the eternal destination of those that we cross paths with on a daily basis. In short, we have become the object of our worship.

The second parallel I see is a rebellion against what God has clearly taught in His word. We live in a society that has rejected the clear teachings of the Bible on many issues - divorce, abortion, same sex marriage just to name a few - and as we look at the professing church we don't see much of a difference from the world around us.

Getting back to Ezekiel; in chapter nine we read that God is sending his executioners to carry out His judgment against Jerusalem. We also read that before He permits them to begin He has someone go throughout the city and put a seal on the foreheads of all of these who belong to Him; these are identified as those "who sigh and groan over the abominations committed" in Jerusalem (Ezekiel 9:4). Then in the next two verses God tells the executioners:

“Pass through the city after him, and strike. Your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity. Kill old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one on whom is the mark. And begin at my sanctuary.”

Ezekiel 9:5-6

Did you catch that last part? The judgment was to begin in the house of God; they were not to start out in the street, and they were not to start with those who had rejected God outright, they were not to touch anyone who had the mark of God on their forehead. Those who belong to God should take great comfort in that - when He pours out His wrath His children are protected (1 Thessalonians 5:9). And while we can be assured that we, as His children, will never experience His wrath, please note that even though the ones who were sealed were protected from the slaughter they still had to endure the consequences of the judgment on their nation; They lived through the siege of the Babylonian army, they lived through the famine and disease, and ultimately they were carried away as slaves into Babylon.

I think the same thing will be true when God judges our nation for turning our back on Him. Those who belong to Him will not experience His wrath, but we will still have to live through the consequences of judgment. And as I look around at the collapse of our economy I can't help but wonder if that judgment has begun.

So what are we as Christians supposed to do? In chapter 14 we read:

Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: Repent and turn away from your idols, and turn away your faces from all your abominations.

Ezekiel 14:6

Each of us must stop and honestly ask ourselves if there is anything that we need to repent of - if we have set up any idols in our hearts - because in verse 8 God tells us that He will set His face against the man who has taken his idols to his heart and separated himself from God. And that is exactly what we are doing when we set up an idol - we are separating ourselves from God. So ask the Holy Spirit to search your heart and reveal anything that shouldn't be there (Psalm 139:23-24) and then repent of anything that He shows you.

And whether this economic crisis we are in is God's judgment or not we are all in for a difficult time ahead. And I am not saying that you should "get right with God" because of what is on the horizon - you should get right with God because He is God, and even if he takes away everything we have He is still worthy of our worship and praise!

Pray For This Family

Here is a story that I found on Jihad Watch. These little girls were kidnapped from their family on June 26, 2008 and have reportedly converted from Christianity to Islam so a judge in Pakistan has ruled that they cannot be returned to their Christian Family but must remain with the men who kidnapped them. WE MUST PRAY FOR THIS FAMILY!!!!

The district of Muzaffargarh rules in favour of the Muslims, rejecting the request from the family that wants to bring home the two sisters - 13 and 10 years old - kidnapped last June 26. Christian associations charge that they could end up as prostitutes.

Islamabad (AsiaNews) - District judge Mian Muhammad Naeem, of the section of Muzaffargarh, has ruled that the two Christian sisters "have converted in a legitimate manner to Islam", and for this reason they cannot be "restored to their family of origin". Setting aside the request from their father to regain custody of his daughters, the judge also admitted the "validity" of the marriage of the girls to two Muslims.

Saba Younas, aged 13, and her sister Anila [aged 10] were kidnapped last June 26 in the village of Chowk Munda, in the province of Punjab, where they had gone to visit their uncle, Khalid Raheel. This is the same uncle who in recent days reported their kidnapping, asking for help from news organisations and human rights groups. According to Raheel's account, a Muslim fruit vendor named Muhammad Arif Bajwa kidnapped the girls, and then handed them over to a friend, Falak Sher Gill, who then organised the marriage between his own son and the older of the Christian sisters, Saba. In court, moreover, father and son both stressed the "complete willingness of the girl to contract marriage".

The girls' uncle does not conceal his preoccupation, and denounces to AsiaNews that the Muslims involved in the kidnapping are acting as a "gang", recruiting the girls in order to "make them work in a bordello". This alarm has also been heard by the Catholic commission for justice and peace (NCJP) in the country, which confirms the words of Khalid Raheel: the kidnappers are believed to be human traffickers linked to prostitution, known to the police and under the protection of some local politicians. "For these unscrupulous people", charges Naeem Asghar, local coordinator of the NCJP, marriage is a pretence in order to control the girls, run their lives and exploit them for their own business purposes".

And while you are at it, pray for all of our pursicuted brothers and sisters around the world.

As In The Days Of Noah

Yesterday I received an email from a friend which contained an article written by Janet Folger, which I have posted below. While I don't necessarily agree with everything that is in this article, I do think that what she has written here is worth taking some time to think about and discuss. The Bible clearly condemns homosexuality and as a society we have called good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20).

Does the move made by the California court point to the end of the world? Maybe; we just don't know. But what we do know is that we are closer to the return of Christ today than we were yesterday.

Here is the article:

How same-sex marriage points to end of the world

---

Posted: May 20, 2008
1:00 am Eastern

© 2008

What do May 17, 2004, and May 15, 2008, have in common? One judge and a redefinition of marriage against the will of the people.

Both the Massachusetts Superior Court and the California Supreme Court by a one-judge margin redefined what marriage has always been in every culture and every religion for more than 5,000 years of recorded history.

Why does this matter?

As I wrote about in my book, "The Criminalization of Christianity," Jeffrey Satinover, who holds an M.D. from Princeton and doctorates from Yale, MIT and Harvard, was on my radio program one day and I asked him about where we are in history. He explained that according to the "Babylonian Talmud" – the book of rabbis' interpretation of the scriptures 1,000 years before Christ, there was only one time in history that reflects where we are right now. There was only one time in history, according to these writings, where men were given in marriage to men, and women given in marriage to women.

Want to venture a guess as to when? No, it wasn't in Sodom and Gomorrah, although that was my guess. Homosexuality was rampant there, of course, but according to the Talmud, not homosexual "marriage." What about ancient Greece? Rome? No. Babylon? No again. The one time in history when homosexual "marriage" was practiced was … during the days of Noah. And according to Satinover, that's what the "Babylonian Talmud" attributes as the final straw that led to the Flood.

On my Faith2Action radio program on Thursday, Rabbi Aryeh Spero verified this to be true.

Rabbi Spero spoke of God's compassion before the Flood, in hopes people would repent and turn back to His ways. He showed patience for hundreds of years.

But, he said, the Talmud's writings reveal that "before the Flood people started to write marriage contracts between men, in other words, homosexual 'marriage,' which is more than homosexual activity – it's giving an official state stamp of approval, a sanctification … of homosexual partnership."

In fact, he said, "the writings indicated that it wasn't even so much the 'straw that broke the camel's back,' but that the sin in and of itself is so contrary to why God created the world, so contrary to the order of God's nature, that God said then and there 'I have to start all over … to annihilate the world and start from the beginning. …'"

Rabbi Spero went on to say, "Even in ancient Greece they did not write marriage contracts between men. There was homosexuality, and it was wrong, but there was not an official 'blessed' policy. … Marriage is 'sanctification' (not simply a partnership)." He said to confer the title of sanctification and holiness upon this behavior is "probably one of the greatest sins of all that one does against God's plan for this world."

The one time it happened was: "During the days of Noah." When I first heard this, my mind immediately went to a verse I've heard many times but never with such relevance. The verse is found in Matthew 24:37. It reads:

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. – Mathew 24:37 (NIV)

I used to read this verse and think: It was bad at lots of points in history; it doesn't necessarily mean now, but if these Jewish writings are true, we are uniquely like the "days of Noah" right now – and only right now.

But it can't be yet, you say. You have a lot going on in your life? You're getting married? Here's how the New Living Translation describes that very sentiment in Luke:

When the Son of Man returns, the world will be like the people were in Noah's day. In those days before the Flood, the people enjoyed banquets and parties and weddings right up to the time Noah entered his boat, and the flood came to destroy them all. – Luke 17:26-27

Happily going about as if everything was fine was what they did, too.

You don't like this possibility? Don't even believe in the Flood? Doesn't matter. Some things are true whether you believe them or not. How can you be sure? There's a way. Did you know that about one-fourth of the Bible is prophecy? A quarter of the Bible is a lot – it's a big book. And did you know God's standard? Perfection. That means that if even one of those prophecies is wrong, you can discount the whole thing. Kind of like a prophet who makes a false prediction – that made him a false prophet and a candidate for stoning. Did you know that 4,000 prophecies in that Bible have already come true down to the last detail? That leaves about 1,000 left to be fulfilled – those are the ones regarding the last days before the return of Christ, which are being checked off the list right now.

If 4,000 out of 5,000 prophecies have already occurred exactly as the Bible predicted they would, you might want to pay attention to the rest.

The good news is that 1.1 million people across California have signed a petition to bring marriage to a vote of the people through a state constitutional amendment (just like 27 other states have done). And guess what? An amendment to a state constitution trumps even the most out-of-control state judiciary. We'll likely know if these signatures are validated before this tyrannical ruling goes into effect, and I predict they will be since they gathered 400,000 more signatures more than they needed to qualify. Besides, they already voted – eight years ago where more than 61 percent of Californians declared marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Now they just need to turn that same language into a constitutional amendment.

I don't live in California, so why am I sounding the alarm? Here's why:

But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at the watchman's hand. – Ezekiel 33:6

I'm praying and working to protect marriage in California (and the rest of the country) not only because I care about marriage, but because I care about civilization. And, if we obey God, he just may spare us from the judgment we deserve.