A group of more than 50 graduates of an Orthodox orphanage in Kenya gathered this past weekend for a seminar. Some will be starting at colleges and universities. Some will be starting jobs. I was asked by the director to speak to them on issues they will face as they make the transition from having grown up in an orphanage to now entering the challenging world of life in today's Kenya. This is what I talked about.
‘Building on Rock or Some Challenges You Are Going to Face’ July 4, 2021
Jesus tells this story:
‘Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who ears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall.’ Matthew 7:24-27
You have no idea what you are about to face. You are leaving what is familiar and walking into what is unfamiliar. You are leaving old friends behind and getting to know an entirely different set of people. You are leaving behind a school experience that will seem increasingly easy, and you are about to engage with serious learning, and you are about to discover that all your ways of studying and doing assignments will no longer carry you in the new place. And you will increasingly be in a place where other people are not making decisions on your behalf, you are making decisions. And these decisions will have consequences, for good and for bad.
And you are going into all this with all the over-confidence of youth. The word is ‘hubris’ and it means excessive pride or self-confidence that leads inevitably to a fall or disappointment. I see examples of hubris every day. Young men on boda bodas think that they will live forever. They think that they can handle whatever comes their way. They think that the rules don’t apply to them. They think… until suddenly a truck pulls out right in front of them and it’s too late and that’s the end of the story. That’s hubris, and ultimately it makes you a poster child of what it means to be a fool. Young people tend to think that looking cool is the most important thing. But nobody is going to care about how cool you are when you are lying in the morgue waiting for your relatives to identify what’s left of you. Believe it or not, there are some things that are more important than being cool, than fitting in with the crowd. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.
They say that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Maybe you think you are something, or a somebody. Maybe you are popular in your circle of friends. We think we know something, but that just closes our minds to knowing anything
But the biggest issue you are going to face, and in fact you are facing it right now, is how serious are you about your faith? How serious are you about being a Christian? How serious are you about Jesus? How you decided to answer these questions will not only decide who you are and where you are going this coming year. It will decide the rest of your life.
Or we can put it the way Jesus puts it. You have a choice to make. You can build your life on something solid like the rock. Or you can build your life on shifting sand. But the way you build your house is what should surprise us. Just like the kind and quality of house you are building is going to be determined by whether or not you build on the right foundation, so your life and the kind and purpose of your life is going to be determined on whether or not you take Jesus seriously. But it’s not just Jesus, it’s what Jesus teaches. And it’s not just what Jesus teaches, but what he tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7.
If you have spent some of your childhood in an orphanage, then you know something about what the storms of life can do to someone. Have you ever thought about what carried you through those dark and hard days? If you have tried to forget and put all that behind you, you need to realize that given the world that you and I live it, and the way it is trouble by everybody’s selfishness and sin, the way it is troubled by sickness and death, they way it is troubled by doubts and fears and brokenness and despair – you need to realize that the storms have only just begun and will keep coming.
My father has bought a house in South Carolina on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. It is a beautiful house, and it is surrounded by beautiful houses, expensive houses, full of luxury and all the things that people think life is about. But in that part of the country, enormous storms develop out in the ocean, and the winds can be 100, 150 even 200 miles an hour. You know what these storms are called in that part of the world? Hurricanes. And when they slam into the coast. A certain number of these storms develop every year. Some are weak. Others are monsters. And they strike the islands and coastlines of the Caribbean and Mexico and the US on a regular basis. And they can cause catastrophic damage. If one of these hurricanes came ashore where my father’s house is, do you know what would happen? If it was a big one, the winds and the tidal surge would overwhelm the dunes and the land and engulf the houses and everything and wash It all away. And in a big storm like that, there is no place to go. You would be lost as well.
So what are some of the challenges you are going to face? These are all things that have the potential to really mess up your life. And it is good to get these issues on the table.
Young men, you are going to have friends who will want you to go drinking with them. And they may even laugh at you if you hesitate. This is called peer pressure, and it is one of the most powerful forces you will ever face. American teenagers are a lot like Kenyans, they drink to get drunk. There is little or no concern for moderation. But let me be clear, alcohol is an addictive substance. People who start to drink discover that the need to drink. And then they can’t stop even if they want to. Drinking too much at once will kill you. But drinking a lot over time will destroy your body and you will rob yourself of 10, 20, 30 years of your life. And when drunk people get into a car and drive away, they are like giving a loaded gun to a small child. This will not end well, we say. My brother in law was a nice guy. But he drank. And he got to the place where he was never seen without a drink, or a beer or a bottle of whiskey at hand. And because of his addiction, he became violent. And he destroyed his family and abandoned his wife and four children. And all that drinking destroyed him. He suffered a collapse and was in hospital for three weeks and then he died. He was 46. This happens all the time. And it will happen to you if you choose to go down that road. The best thing for you to do is today, make a commitment to say no to drinking. Don’t think you can manage it. It is a dragon, a monster who will manage you and then eat you for dinner.
Young ladies, you are beautiful and your bodies are a beautiful gift from God. And young men will notice and they will do whatever they can to get you to have sex with them. They will make you think that they love you and that you are special. But really all they want is to use you. If they really cared for you, they would work on building a strong relationship with you, one based on mutual love and trust . They would demonstrate how worthy they are of you by how they live, how they treat you. I’ve seen it again and again. A young man manipulates a young woman to have sex with him. She wants to be accepted and to feel loved and allows him to have his way. He disappears. She feels betrayed. And then what happens if she gets pregnant? Is that young man going to come and do the right thing and take responsibility for what he as done? Perversely, everybody will probably blame the girl. I say ‘perversely’ because it takes two people to make a baby. And then to add to the nightmare, the young woman is going to be under pressure from the boy, from her parents, from her friends, to do what? To have an abortion.
An abortion seems like such an easy solution to a challenging problem. But do you know what an abortion is. Inside that young woman’s womb is a baby, a human baby, no different from you or from me when we were in our mother’s womb. When you get an abortion, the doctor kills that baby. He might inject a very salty solution into the womb which burns the baby to death. He may insert a special knife up the vagina and into the womb and cut the baby into pieces. Or he may induce labor and allow the mother to deliver a baby maybe too small to live outside the mothers womb, and they let the little girl or the little boy die. Abortion kills a little girl. Abortion kills a little boy. It’s a kind of murder. And the reason most people get abortions is because they don’t want to be bothered with having a child and caring for a child and loving a child. We kill our babies for the sake of convenience.
I know of a young couple – he was in his last year of secondary school and was the captain of the football team. She was two years younger – 15, and was celebrated for her beauty. They fell in love. And then their relationship became sexual. And then she became pregnant. In their town, premarital sex was considered shameful. The boy’s father was an elder in the local Presbyterian Church. The girl’s family were Methodists. And now she was pregnant. What do you think they decided to do? This is what they did. The young man and the young woman decided to get married. They did so secretly – they eloped to a different place and a judge married them. Then they came back and lived with her parents. And she gave birth to a little baby girl. The mother was 16, the father was 18. It was a difficult decision for them to make. But I am so glad they did. Because that little baby girl grew up and was my older sister. And she became a scientist and a professor at an American University. But if her parents had chosen to ‘end the pregnancy’, to abort the fetus, to kill the little girl, do you see what would have happened? The world would have been denied a beautiful and remarkable life, full of life and a blessing to the people and colleagues and students and family and friends who know her.
Every child we kill stops a life like my sister’s. Every abortion doesn’t just end a human life, it robs this world of someone and all their potential and all the good and all the blessing they could be. And all for nothing more than selfishness.
Young women (and young men), to cover up the pregnancy that you caused by resorting to a greater evil, by killing the baby God has blessed you with. Western NGOs will tell you that abortion is just another form of birth control. But this is a lie. It certainly prevents a birth from happening, but at the cost of an already conceived baby’s life. Better yet, stop being so selfish when it comes to sex. Sex is a beautiful thing, but God intends it to have its place in the context of a committed relationship, where the woman and the baby don’t have to worry that the man is not going to fulfill his part as father and husband. Someone who is committed to Christ and to living the way of Christ will wait until they find that person with whom to commit themselves before getting sexually involved. That’s what I did. And I didn’t die. And I wouldn’t do it any differently if I had the chance.
The last thing I want to do is talk about our money and our stuff and our time, all these things that we think are ours. I want to help us understand what being a disciple, what being a real Christian, means with respect to our money and what we have..
But first let me ask you a couple of questions. Who gave you life? Who brought you into this world? God did. Who gave you your abilities, and a mind to think, and a voice to talk and sing? God did. And this day called today, and this hour, and this moment – where did they come from? God has given you every second, every day, every year. And everything you have, the stuff in your house, in your bank account, in your wallet or pocketbook? It all comes from God. Even the ability to think, to walk, to work, to make a salary – all of it comes from God. So my question is this – why has God given you all of this? Why are you here?
Jesus uses a word to describe what we are, what he is calling us to be, and that word is ‘steward’. In Jesus’ day, a steward was a slave. He was brought on to manage the landowner’s estate, or to manage everything in the landowner’s house. Did the steward own the land? No, the owner did. Did the steward own the machines or the other workers or the crops? No, the owner did. The steward’s job was to manage all those things that the owner put under his responsibility. You and I are stewards. We don’t own our time, our money, our stuff, our abilities, our jobs – it all belongs to the Lord. The Lord is asking us to manage all of these things, and to manage them in such a way that we glorify God and we advance his kingdom in this place.
So what are you doing with what God has given you? Are you finding ways to use the things and time and abilities and money to live for Christ, to be His man or His woman where you are? Or are you not even thinking about it? Maybe you’re just thinking all this stuff, this time, these abilities is simply yours to use or misuse however you want to. But your life and everything you have is not yours. It’s been given to you by the Lord, to manage for his glory. The Lord is coming back, and He is going to have a conversation with you and with me, and He is going to ask you, ‘So what have you done with all the good things I gave you?’ He’s the owner and he’s going to hold us all accountable for what we have done or not done with all of his incredible gifts. Don’t be like the steward who told his master, I took what you gave me and I dug a hole and buried it.
So
we have talked about the pressure to drink and get drunk. We have talked about sex and the consequences
that you will face if you decide to pursue sexual relationships before you are
married. And we have talked about what
it means to be a steward as we take Jesus and his call on our lives
seriously. In all of these areas (and
even more because I have only had time to touch on these three), you have a
choice to make right now. You can choose
to build your life and your next step and your future on sand. Or you can choose to build your life on the
rock. The Rock is Christ. And there is
urgency here, because it is not a matter of if storms will come, but when
storms will come. Build on rock and your
life will stand. Build on sand and you
will get washed away and wiped out. Of
course the easy way is to build on sand.
It is much harder to take Jesus seriously. But he promises to help you if you choose his
way. That’s why he gives His Holy Spirit
so that He can enable you to do what He wants you to do and be what He wants
you to be.
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