thinking, and instead of teaching our young people to overcome evil we’re teaching them to avoid it. They are not learning how to fight the good fight of faith. We don’t know how ourselves, many of us, so how can we tell them? How can we show them? What are the results of this type of separation? Let me say, I do not speak from hearsay or from mere observation on this matter. I speak from very sad experience. An experience bom of at least 10 years of my Christian life that I consider now almost utterly wasted because I was thinking and acting along these very lines. P ■ '(hese were the results in my own life. I’m con fident, from observation, they’re the results in other Christians’ lives who think in this “ way. ' The first result is, there comes a terrible sense of boredom and frustration in life. Life becomes pale and uninteresting, especially Christian things. You just go through a routine. You go to church and you go through the set formula of things you’re supposed to do, but there’s nothing very gripping, very fasci nating, very illuminating about it. Life becomes very boring. The challenge is gone. Why? Because there’s no sense of danger! There’s nothing to call forth heroics out of a young Christian faced with that kind of thinking. He’s protected. He’s sheltered. His life is arranged in such a way that the temptations are reduced to a minimum and conse quently he becomes bored and frustrated and there’s no challenge. Life becomes very lackluster. We sense this in our Christian lives and often we try to correct it by creating false challenges. You know, “ Let’s win the attendance contest,” and we get all excited about the attendance contest. Or, “ Let’s gain a reputation in our church for having a tremen dous missionary outlook, and let’s parade the figures in front of us all through the years as to how much we’re giving for missions,” and so we create false challenges and false goals along this line. Not that these things are wrong in themselves but the trouble is, the personal challenge in the individual life is gone. You remember what Peter Marshall said so graph ically, “ Today’s Christians are like deep-sea divers incased in suits designed for many fathoms deep, marching bravely forth to pull plugs out of bathtubs.” That’s a pretty graphic way to put it, and it’s true. We’re taught all the resources of the Christian life, for what? Well, to just win attendance contests with! Build buildings with! No real challenge, you see. Life just becomes lacka daisical. I think that’s one of the major, if not the major reason, why our Christian young people today, (and CO N T IN U E D 25
life must be carefully adhered to. I am not saying that there are no such things as standards but I am saying the method by which we determine those standards must be in accordance with the Word of God and not simply by our upbringing. Now then, since all the things that are on your particular list (and on mine) are being done by the unsaved worldly people around about us then there comes a tendency for us to either consciously or un consciously avoid temptation by avoiding worldly people. There is a tendency to withdraw, to seek our own crowd, to create our own little separate world which is a world that is as complete as we can make it with recreation and education and all that we need from the cradle to the grave. We create our own smug little airtight circle in which we live and which we’ve set up to run in competition to the worldly world out side of that life. Now the ultimate result of that kind of thinking produced the monasteries that appeared in the Middle Ages where men, taking these things literally and looking at it from this same standpoint, decided that the way to avoid the temptations of the world was to completely seclude themselves from it. They built high-walled monasteries and lived their lives inside and thus thought to avoid the world. Today we do not build walls of brick and of mortar in order to avoid these things but we still have walls of thought and seclusion that are almost equally ef fective. So we are doing this very same thing. And the worst tragedy of all, in my estimation at least, is that we’re passing all this on to our young people. We’re teaching them these same things be cause they pick up our way of life and our way of
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About the Author
Ray C. Stedman was born on the wind swept plains of North Dakota in 1917. He came to know the Lord in a Methodist camp meeting at 10. After naval service tn Pkdfl Harbor he attended Dallas Theo logical Seminary, graduating in 1950.
Steelman
The following three months he served as secretary-chauffeur- assistant to the late Dr. H. A. Ironside. Stedman and family (three girls) live in Palo Alto, Calif, where he is pastor of the Peninsula Bible Church. H e is book review editor for "Our Hope” and has done occasioned writing for other periodicals.
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