8/19 Just for Youth

You Are Becoming Who You Will Be, Part 1 of 3
“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth…” Ecclesiastes 12:1

When I was young, I remember going through stages of deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up. I can remember seeing the fire trucks racing by with their whistles blowing. I would see the firemen dressed in uniforms fighting a fire and I would want to be a fireman. I remember seeing the police officers in their uniforms, carrying guns, and I would want to be a police officer. As a young boy and teenager, I wanted to be a baseball player, a carpenter, a computer programmer and a forest ranger. In my mind, it was never something that I needed to concern myself with at the moment, because I would decide when I grew up.

It seems like our mentality is a “when I grow up” mentality. When I grow up, I want to do this. When I grow up, I want to be that. When little Johnny grows up I would like for him to be a good, decent, upstanding citizen with a good paying job. As a Christian, I would love for my boys to be good, clean, young men who will serve the Lord with all their hearts when they are grown men. As a pastor, it would please me to see the young people of our church serve the Lord with all their hearts when they are grown.

My question to all of us is this, “When do we grow up?” Is it at the age of eighteen? Is it when we graduate from high school or college? Is it when we begin our first full-time job? Is it when we get married? Is it when we have children? When is it?

There is no magical age to declare that we have officially “grown up.” There is no diploma that we can receive to certify that we are all “grown up.” There is no job that we can get or responsibility that we can have placed upon us to declare that we have “grown up”; but, rather, we are continually in a process of “growing up.” In other words, we are becoming today who we will be one day.

You will not be one thing for eighteen years of your life and then “grow up” on your eighteenth birthday and become something totally different. There are many students on college campuses who have the “when I grow up” mentality and they still have yet to “grow up.” They are still children doing childish things with no sense of responsibility and no understanding to realize that they are the leaders of the next generation.

Someone once said, “If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” If you do at nineteen what you did at eighteen, you will get at nineteen what you got at eighteen. If you were lazy, unprepared, irresponsible and immature at the age of seventeen, and you have done nothing to change those poor character traits, then you can still expect to be lazy, unprepared, irresponsible and immature at the age of eighteen.