“Do Today’s Youth Accept Absolute Values? - Part 1”

Friday, July 12, 2024

Do Today’s Youth Accept Absolute Values? - Part 1

By Tom Rose

When we speak of challenges today among Christians, few are more critical than those involving our families – particularly the need to raise faithful children. A prayer heard at many weddings includes the phrase, “if children be born to this union, may they be brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). Perhaps you know of a strong Christian couple, whose children no longer assemble with the saints, and who speak out of firsthand experience when they observe that converts from the world often appreciate the Lord more than their own children. Why are the ranks of young people in our congregations thinned as they grow toward maturity? Perhaps, the answer might lie in the way they view Truth.

A majority of our young people – even the brightest and best of them – have adopted the view that moral truth is not true for them until they choose to believe it. For example, ask both a teenager and an elder “Why do you believe the Bible to be true?” The younger will usually answer, “The Bible is true because I believe it.” The older will likely respond, “To me, I believe it, because it is true.” In effect, youth often believe that the act of believing makes things true. And those things will be true only until they choose to believe something else. As soon as something more appealing comes along, they are likely to begin believing that – whether or not it’s biblical.

Over the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of high school young people have taken a pledge to be sexually pure until marriage (Heb. 13:4). These kids participated in the “True Love Waits” campaign and took a stand for the truth on sexual purity. Although this was an encouraging stance in the midst of a promiscuous society, most young people heard that truth through their own mental “filter” which told them that all truth is subjectively determined. In other words, premarital sex was wrong only if they personally believed it was wrong. So while our youth may be willing to state that certain things are right or wrong, they believe it applies only to them personally.

Therefore, it should not come as a shock that research has found seventy percent (70%) of our churched young people believe there is no absolute moral truth. In other words, the vast majority of our youth do not believe there is a truth outside themselves that determines right from wrong. They do not believe there is a universal truth that is right for all people, in all places, at all times. (“Show me Your ways, O Lord; Teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation” (Ps. 25 :4-5). In today’s culture, even church-going teenagers have been conditioned to see truth in the area of religion and morality as a personal, private matter. Furthermore, they often surmise that no one should be allowed to impose his or her own ideas of what is right or wrong on another.

However, the attempt to determine spiritual and moral truth by personal preference leads only to certain disaster as it did in ancient Israel in the time of the Judges when “everyone did whatever he considered right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6). The resulting anarchy led to unprecedented depravity and wickedness. Treating universal truth as personal preference is always disastrous because God never intended us to see scriptural Truth as optional or to position ourselves as the sole arbiters of what is right or wrong. But isn’t that precisely what many young people are doing? Consequently, they are making wrong choices …while thinking they are right (see Col. 2:8).

(Part 2 next week)

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