It would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify the alarming statistics floating around about how very soon only 4% of Christian teens will become Bible-believing Christians, but while the claims certainly have an alarmist ring to them, the findings should not be all that surprising to those who are watching for the Lord's return. The Bible speaks of the pervading wickedness of the Last Days, and of the Great Apostasy of the Church shortly before the Rapture and the End; we should have seen this coming, right?
Wrong.
The reason this has crept upon us so suddenly is that in fact, it has not. We as a nation have, quite simply, failed our youth. We have failed to raise them by the absolute teachings of the Bible which we claim to believe so strongly, and so they have been exposed to far too much of the world to come away unscathed, purity and innocence lost as we have thrown them to the dogs. Instead of living up to our responsibility as parents to protect them from the attacks of the enemy and train them up in the ways of the Lord, we have opted to act as "peerents," attempting to be their friends. Assuming that we have no say in where they go, what they do, and who they do it with, the media they are exposed to, and the things they are able to get away with, we think that perhaps by not passing judgment or punishing them, they won't rebel later, and will develop a closer relationship with us because of our trust in them. Sadly, this hands-off approach to parenting is what the Bible calls "hatred" of our children. They desperately need strong leadership and mentorship, and yes, discipline and boundaries, most especially during their turbulent teen years. Without it, they feel lost and abandoned and are left to their own inexperienced and naive devices, as vulnerable to the deceptions of Satan as they could possibly be. As a result, they rebel even more radically, resenting their parents for their apathetic lack of guidance and real love.
We have failed them in our education system, teaching them that they are nothing but accidental animals in an accidental world, and so they act on what they have been led to believe. We dump them into a corrupt and failing public school system that not only fails to teach them academically, but fills their minds with political propaganda telling them that being a Christian is stupid, childish, narrow-minded, hypocritical, and ignorant of the truth, and teaching them instead that our country was founded on principles of "taxation without representation" when it was founded on freedom to practice their Christian faith; that the universe is the result of the explosion of literally nothing and that they evolved from sludge and are no better, only a little stronger, than animals, when the Bible tells us that we were created by the hand of God in the very image of God; that since they were bound to have sex anyway, they may as well know how to use a condom; that it's their right (nay, responsibility to society) that they get abortions to murder their babies without their parents' consent, thus perpetuating moral decline and horrific patterns of sexual abuse, usually by older men...
We have failed them even in the Church, coddling them with a watered-down, cheap grace version of the Scriptures, never challenging them to grow up and mature in their faith and responsibility in accordance with what should by this time be their extensive knowledge of the Word, mirroring the secular world in nearly every way.
If only 4% of our Christian youth remain safe in the Lord, it is our own fault, and only we can turn the tide.
If indeed it is not already too late.
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