I was listening to a sermon that said according to a survey by the age of twenty-three 75% of baptized Seventh Day Adventists' would have left the church. I spoke to my Fit for Life teacher who said that the hardest most difficult thing to do was to reach a college student body where the majority though they knew everything they needed to know about Christ and yet had never experienced Him.
I know for me and many other home-bread Adventists' we have learned from our youth how to look and play the role of an Adventist. Take off your jewelry, pull your skirt down, pretend to care about the needs around you, and never find yourself too close in the presence of alcohol.
I'm twenty-three years old- raised in the church- and I love Jesus. But I think my walk with God would look very different if I didn't spend a year in my life in the mission field of Peru. I think at some time every collegiate or young adult has to unstrip from the motions they've been taught and actually get to the core of Who is Jesus? You have to experience Him and until you've experienced Him personally everything is going to be striving, or a show. And then when you experience Him you may jump back and say Wow this Jesus is alot different than who I thought He was.
I think part of the problem is being taught that following Jesus is easy. You don't hear as many sermons about taking up your cross and truly surrendering everything anymore. I know we say it, but we don't mean it right. Jesus doesn't want us to give up ALL our money, or give up our dream career, to marry someone different than the guy we picked out? No we can just follow Jesus and pursue the typical things of this world as well?
And that is how we get comfortable. Deathly, deathly, comfortable with our Bible friends and Jesus circles. We begin to pursue the same things this world desires: a good family, a strong career, a safety net for cash, and clothes that look flattering. And we justify ourselves, because these are all good things right? We look around and most believers are doing it. We look around and everyone in the world is racing around doing it. And all the while we may be attending Adventist education, Adventist church, and maybe even a lifegroup and we may feel supported and comforted.. but the odds are that we are not experiencing Jesus actively. And at the end of the day, even though we are labeled as a Christian and performing service for the Lord we are lonely, depressed, and wondering where the God of all joy is.
I don't see many Christians in the Bible living comfortable lives, striving for productivity like so many of us are today. Because when we are so very comfortable, so very self-skilled, we don't need Jesus. It's only when we listen to God's call to love when the risks are high, to give when we have no money left, to serve in a way we have no skill and are terrified that God is able to grow our faith. It's these times that we jump off the cliff- when Jesus calls us- and He catches us that create experiences and memories that deepen our experience with God.
And when we experience the loving and powerful hand of God, we won't want to leave Christ, and we will have testimonies.
I've talked to many college students and asked them if they would share their testimony and they told me they were afraid because they didn't have a testimony. And this is shocking, this is pathetic. Because if you are serving the same God I know, the God who shuts lion's mouths, and clears a body of water for His people to walk through, the God who gets down in the dust with prostitutes, and fills up the whole boat with fish, how is it impossible for you to be walking with God and yet not have something to share about your experience with Him. How can we walk with God for twenty to twenty-five years and not have one story to tell about our best friend or Savior? That's something I don't understand- but it demonstrates that maybe, just maybe the problem is that young people are not learning or getting the opportunity to experience God.
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