Remember
your Creator in the Days of your Youth
Ian Faulkner
(Church of the Sovereign God)
October 28, 2015
God is interested in us youth.
He is interested in us from the day that
we take our first breath until we become 18; and until we become old.
And beyond! God is
interested in us all throughout our lives; and He wants us to be with Him no
matter what.
Those of us that are in our youth are
extremely important to God.
God has written verses in the Bible that
are actually addressed to us in our youth.
God is most certainly interested in our
day-to-day lives, and the choices that we make.
God wants us to remember, when we are
young, how we are to live our everyday lives through Him.
Ecclesiastes 12 has some verses that
speak to us who are in our youth; and in many ways these verses are very
encouraging to our youth. We are
told to:
Ecclesiastes 12:1:
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come
not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;
So let me ask you: Why is it good to
remember God in our youth?
Well, for one thing, it sets the whole
tone and direction for the rest of our lives; and it keeps us grounded.
Psalms 71:17:
O God, thou hast taught me from my youth: and hitherto have I declared thy
wondrous works.
There are some things that God wants us
to know from our earliest days; and these are some of the things that are
beneficial to us, the youth of the church.
But also for us as we grow older as well.
I have a couple of points for us to
think about. Let us learn what it
means to be upright, to be moral, and to have principles.
For us to be this way, we must decide to do the right thing, simply
because it is right. God gets to
tell us what is right. Being
upright means not being influenced to do things that are wrong. This could be
things that our friends might do. It
is important for us to make non-emotional decisions.
God wants us to think His way, not our
own way.
There are so many young people in
society today making decisions on their emotions.
We all know somebody like that. We
hear statements like, "If it feels good, then do it!" Or
"Everyone else does it!" Or,
"It is okay to drink, do drugs, smoke, lie, fornicate, and a list of many
other things." Many people in
society do these things because they think that it will make them feel good,
and that it has been normalized.
Maybe for a little while it doesn’t
affect us; but our choices do affect us. In
the short term, we may not see any effect; but in the long term, there is an
effect that takes place in our lives. "Be
sure that your sins will find you out" (Numbers 32:23), and they will
eventually hurt you. Even if
people don’t see it in the short term. People
don’t look at long term.
Moses was a man of integrity.
He was not given to temporary pleasures of sin:
Hebrews 11:25:
Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the
pleasures of sin for a season;
Having integrity means not being
influenced to do wrong because of friends, or peer pressure. We
all want friends. And we all want
to be liked. And we want to be
accepted by people. Friends can be
good influences in our lives; but they can also be bad ones.
They can influence us to do wrong, or they can influence us to do
right. We have to choose our
friends, and choose who we hang out with, because they can make us who we are.
If we choose to remember our Creator in our youth, we can have a
powerful and right influence on our friends for good.
We can also avoid a lot of pain by not allowing them to influence us
for bad. We have to allow them to
influence us to do right. We have
to make the right choice!
I
Corinthians 15:33:
Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.
The second point, that I would like to
give today is for you to listen to your parents and grandparents.
After all, they know what you have been
through. They know where you
sleep!
It is really exciting to be young, to
have energy and to have your whole life ahead of you. You
get to make up your own steps.
As youth in the church, we want to
experience all of the right excitements of life. We
want to take in all of the experiences, to see the sights and to reach our
maximum potential.
Our parents know this feeling because
they were once our age and they once did all of the things that we do.
They probably know what we are thinking.
There are probably desires that you have
had, that I haven’t had yet. This
can be a hard thing to understand until we have experienced it.
Colossians 3:20:
Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well-pleasing unto the
Lord.
God is happy when we listen to and obey
our parents. Our parents and
grandparents know the consequences of good choices and poor choices.
It is very important to consider the consequences of all of our choices
– so we don’t have to feel the pain of a really bad decision.
The Bible shows us that we can learn the
lessons of life just by observing the cause-and-effect of other people’s
lives. We can look at our friends’
lives and the wrong decisions that they have made.
We can learn from them without having to make the mistakes ourselves.
One important reason why God gives us
parents is so that they can tell us what will happen as a result of our
choices.
Proverbs 3:
1: My son, forget not my law; but
let thine heart keep my commandments:
2: For length of days, and long
life, and peace, shall they add to thee.
Our godly parents and grandparents have
understanding that comes from experience, observation and sometimes it has to
come from hard and difficult experiences.
I hope that you and I never have to
experience those. Our parents and
grandparents have seen more of life, and have met more people than we have.
They know more than we do, and we should look up to them and learn from
them.
As we grow older, we learn more and more
about how people think and react to life.
The Bible tells us to keep our parents'
"commandments":
Proverbs 6:20:
My son, keep thy father’s commandment, and forsake not the law of thy
mother:
One more quick point that I hope that we
all think about. That is, to
treasure the moments that we have now. Remember,
we can’t go back. We can’t
un-ring a bell! We cannot go back
in time and we cannot change the past. There are certain points of our lives
where we pass the threshold where we can never go back: getting our first job,
getting married or having a kid. The
friends that we have now will move away. Things
could go wrong. They could die.
But the thing is that we will always have God!
Once our youth is gone, it’s gone.
We can never get it back. We
will never be able to re-do the experiences of being a youth.
In the big scheme of things, our physical life is short.
And our youth is even shorter.
So, let’s do God’s plan!
The good news is that God’s plan for us does not stop with physical
life. He wants us to enjoy life
now and forever!
So, let’s do what the Bible says and
rejoice in our youth, especially remembering that we have a great Creator who
in wonderful, and has plans for us for all of eternity.
Let’s decide to rejoice and make every
moment count.
Let us all remember our Creator in the days of our youth!
IF/pp/jhp