by J IM RAYBURN
Sweat shirt or petticoat, it's a bubbly, exciting time of life
THE TEENAGER & CHRIST
I ast summer a little guy from Texas came up to our beau tiful Frontier Ranch to help us care for the horses. He was a new Christian, out of one of our Young Life clubs, and when I first saw him I wasn’t much im pressed. But by the time the sum mer was over he turned out to be the best wrangler we had ever seen. He went back to his high school after a summer of growth as a Christian and three weeks after he got home he was flattened with tetanus. Having difficulty diagnos ing his case the doctors put him in the polio ward. Well, he pulled through after many days on the critical list—the first tetanus case to survive in the history of that hospital — but by the time he started to come around he had also contracted polio. The doctors predicted that he wouldn’t be out of his wheel chair until school starts next fall. But he’s already passed that stage, thrown away his crutches, is down to knee length braces, and soon should be rid of them. Through all of this he has never complained. “ The Lord has been mighty good to me” he says, “ and I have a lot to be thankful for.” Tears come to my eyes, frankly, when I think of this great little guy who has found such strength through his simple trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. This young fellow is a real man. I think he’s God’s kind of a man, and I could point you to hundreds of others like him.
Christianity is for Aunt Sadie Glutz f rom my contacts through work ing wi th high school young people, I know of so many virile young Christian men and women that I wonder how this “ Christianity is sissy business” is so popularly believed. And yet I know it is true that in high schools across the land it is thought that if you are going to be a real man you’ve got to be tough and d i r t y - dirty thinking, dirty acting and dirty talking. Christianity, accord ing to this propaganda is for Aunt Sadie Glutz and for people who don’t want to have any fun any way. America’s kids by the thou sands live and act as if you have to leave out Jesus Christ in order to have any real fun. “We’re going to live it up now” they say. “ That religion stuff can wait until we’re 88 years of age, and then there will be plenty of time to get out the Bible and cram for our final exam.” I’ve talked about this to several hundred thousand of America’s kids. Everywhere I go I ask them About the Au thor Jim Rayburn is the kind of young man most teenagers just naturally like. He is director of Young Life, an organization that works with high school young people. The organization has one of the finest dude ranches in the Colorado Rockies and each summer hundreds of teenagers spend their vacations at the Young Life ranch.
if it isn’t so at their high school and not one young person has ever come up to me and said “Jim, you’re wrong. Kids don’t think that way.” And yet this old lie keeps being peddled ■— Christianity is sissy business. Well it isn’t so! If you have ever seen a sissy who was a Christian I can tell you one thing, he certainly didn’t get it from Jesus Christ. He will get only strength and purity and manhood from a personal relationship with the wonderful Saviour of men. Who He Is • would like to analyze this false 1 notion which is so popular with America’s teenagers and suggest some impor tant things that every young person should think about a great deal. Jesus Christ is the greatest Man in the world’s history. He was God come down to earth, I know that, but He was also a true Man. He was the kind of man that all of us fellows would like to be and can’t because we haven’t got what it takes. He was the strongest, the truest, the noblest, the purest Man that this world has ever seen. Every thing that we admire and respect was true of Him. Read the Bible and find, if you can, one trace of weakness or infidelity or besetting sin. He is perfection! He was perfect in understanding, answering with an eternal wisdom and insight the questions that were supposed to up set Him.
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