Addiction blinds people to the truth. Our culture can do the same. Addiction robs people of hope. And what does our culture promise as the path to hope?
At Teen Challenge we pride ourselves in preaching and teaching the truth. But how effectively are we preparing our students to follow God’s truth?
We live in a day when truth has fallen in the streets (Isaiah 59:14). Isaiah also described those who have a deluded heart that misleads them to the point that they are not able to realize that what they are holding in their right hand is a lie. (Isaiah 44:20) What was true in his day over 2,500 years ago is very much our reality today.
We face a huge challenge in helping those in our ministry to develop a lifestyle that is based on God’s truth. We must do more than preach and teach what we believe is true. We need to teach our students to be experts at distinguishing between the truth and a lie—based on God’s definition of what is truth and a lie.
How can our students achieve real success in this? First, we must be mature in our walk with the Lord. One characteristic of a mature person is described by the writer of Hebrews—those who through constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil (Hebrews 5:11-14). If the staff who teach and preach have not developed these life skills, how can they pass them on to the students?
Our approach to teaching them to be disciples needs to focus on helping them train themselves to distinguish good from evil, the truth from a lie. We must give them opportunities to develop these life skills through the decisions they make each day (not the decisions we make for them each day).
We may be very eloquent in telling our students what they need to do, but that does not equip them to train themselves to distinguish right from wrong. We need to intentionally give them opportunities to discover which of God’s truths can help them face the challenges and problems they face each day.
Giving answers may be easy, but it short-circuits them learning to teach themselves. We need to focus on asking questions that will lead them to understand how God’s truth can help them, and then encourage them to apply these truths on a daily basis.
