NOTE: You may notice that this and the last post do not involve the "Real man" and "Real Woman" pages. I did this intentionally as I have chosen not to continue posts in a series such as this. While I wholeheartedly support the ideas these pages introduce, I will be choosing topics of my own to post about that are important to me. These topics (as my last post shows) will many times be similar to what the Real Man and Real Woman pages point out, but I feel that allowing God to guide what I post can (and has already) change courses that I, in my feeble mind, have set. You can still find the Real Men and Real Women pages on a separate page on this blog that I will be adding soon, and if there are any points or other topics that you would like me to write about, feel free to write a comment letting me know! Now, back to the post...
As the subtitle of this blog states, I want to encourage teens to step above our culture's definition of a teenager and to reach God's calling to live faithfully for Christ; to be a Christian! Now you may be thinking, I'm already a Christian. What more is there to step up to? Well, simply being a Christian isn't exactly what I'm talking about. While becoming a Christian is the most important decision you can ever make, too many times our generation just stops here. I want my generation to not just accept the label of Christianity but to live it out in their lives!
So how does this start? What's the first step from being a nominal (by name only) Christian to becoming a true Christian, living solely for Christ? Surprisingly enough, I believe one of the first steps is simply stop thinking of "real life" as being separate from our lives as Christians. When we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, the life of a Christian becomes our real life! They can't be separate. It doesn't matter if you're around your friends, at church, youth group, at school, or anywhere - you are a display of Christianity for the whole world to see. Realizing that the world is watching us is one of the first steps toward becoming a true Christian.
Not only is the world watching our behavior, but so are our fellow Christians. How do we portray our belief in Christ to the Christians around us? This part, interestingly enough, is also quite simple. I believe that one of the most important things we Christians (and especially Christian teens) miss is fellowship. Having serious conversations about biblical things is something that, for some reason, we choose to ignore. Listen to a conversation between a group of friends and how often will you hear Christ or a biblical principle emerge? Not very often at all. Why not? Why don't we want to have a serious conversation as fellow Christians? The answer is because it feels weird. Our hearts, being desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9), don't feel comfortable mentioning Christ! Think about that. The souls of God's creation don't want to mention the Creator! Yet like many hard things, we must deny our hearts' evil desires in order to have fellowship with other believers. To some, this may seem like an odd concept of fellowship. Usually "fellowship" involves simply a bunch of Christians getting together, eating some food, and having a good time. This can very well be fellowship, but if Christ is not in the midst of the conversation, no real fellowship is taking place.
Do you want to have more fellowship with others? Do you want to break the long-ingrained line between everyday life and Christianity? Do you want to live for Christ? If you want to be mentioned in the Book of Life, you should be mentioning the Writer of the Book in your life.
(Thanks to my friends Jared and Matthew, whose joking inspired the topic of this post.)