More than "Surviving Adolescence"

It's natural for anyone who has ever been a student to wonder "What are this teacher's expectations of me?"

The developmental period from 13 to 19 has been called "adolescence" and "sturm und drang" or "storm and stress." I wouldn't make light of it; some of life's most important decisions are made during this time. The character of the person is mostly set during this time. For the most part, if he or she is going to be a friend of Jesus Christ, that decision is made before the person reaches the age of 30. There are baptisms after 30, but not many. Wayward Christians are restored, but the ones that are restored mostly were already Christians before 25 or 30. Your choice to follow Jesus needs to happen early. As the wisest man who ever lived said, "Remember also thy Creator in the days of thy youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them." Ecclesiastes 12: 1.

We of the Dover church of Christ expect you to do more than just survive adolescence. We expect you to go off to college, trade school, a job, or a marriage sometime after 18 with a strong faith in God, a pattern of steady church attendance, a habit of daily Bible reading and prayer, with your sexual purity intact, an unblemished legal record, and a strong mind in a healthy body. We expect you to have obeyed the Gospel of Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 15: 3,4) as soon as you became aware that you had sin in your life and that you needed Jesus to take away that sin through your obedience in hearing, believing, repenting, confessing Jesus as Lord, and being baptized. (Romans 10:17, Acts 2:37-47, Acts 8: 26-40)

Far from just surviving adolescence, we think you will make the best of adolescence by setting your goals much higher than those of just "staying out of trouble." You will best survive adolescence if you plan to come out on the other side of adolesence as leaders in the Lord's church. Aim high.

Think about it in the light of what we know about other forms of warfare, for life is a spiritual battle between Satan and Jesus, who both want to rule our lives (Ephesians 6: 10-17). In most of the wars the United States has ever fought, most of the casualties happened not in the heat of battle, but behind the lines. Three-fourths of the men and women who died in the Revolutionary War died of infection or food poisoning back in the camp--they weren't shot or sabered. Some of them died of typhoid fever or smallpox or pneumonia, never firing a shot at the enemy. In the same way, the safest place to be in the spiritual battle between Jesus and Satan is right on the front lines.

I join with your Christian family at Dover in thinking that reasonable spiritual maturity goals at the end of adolescence for those of both genders would appear to be: