TEENS
Calling Young Men to Battle
By Julie Ferwerda with Kenny
Luck
CBN.com –
Earth is not heaven. Jesus said earth is war. And Kenny
Luck, author of Every Young Man God’s Man, is on
your side. “We can fight the fight and help each other win
for Christ, or we can abandon each other in the battle. And when
a soldier is abandoned by his warrior he gets speared. And so,
I want to fight with you and that’s why I’m calling
you out. God is using me to call you out to The Great Battle,
which is for His kingdom. We’ve been commissioned and we
need to fight. God’s equipped us with everything we need
to win, if we just say yes.
A Radical Call
What is the battle about? According to Kenny, God wants every
young man to love Him with all of who he is. That’s
really where the spiritual warfare starts. “The question
is, can I give it all to Jesus Christ? Can I give my
whole life or am I just giving pieces of it? When you give just
pieces of your life to Jesus, you are miserable. Young guys want
adventure, they want excitement, but if they don’t step
on the throttle in their commitment to God, they’re not
going to experience the speed and adventure of what it means to
walk with Jesus and to have an adventure. So you have to go that
final step, which is to give it all to Him and that’s really
the ministry of this book.”
Why Fight?
“Jesus took the hit for you. That’s a motivation that
will catapult you past the strong moments of temptation and battle.
Jesus showed up for you so that you could show up for Him. That’s
Gods active grace toward you and without it; you’re going
to lose more than you win. It’s what drives us all to want
to fight those battles, delay gratification, and risk rejection.”
Unfortunately, it usually takes a crisis or painful set of circumstances
for most men to have a change of heart and to begin seeking God.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Kenny’s heart
is to motivate you to begin your quest for truth because the next
thirty to fifty years of your life depend on the decisions that
you make in the next five years. It is a quest to take ownership
personally of your faith and begin living out of your identity
as God’s man.
Enter the “Man Zone”
In Kenny’s book, the “man zone” is the place
that Paul talked about when he said, “When I was a child
I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I gave up childish
things (I Corinthians 13:11).”
“Do you have the courage of a man or will you run from
your problems? The man zone is that place where your age and your
emotional and spiritual maturity are working together not at different
ends of the spectrum. It’s that place where, it’s
not all about play anymore, it’s about having a strong commitment,
having strong convictions, taking responsibility, and that’s
where we want to move the audience of this book.
“The majority of guys are sloshing into adulthood saying,
‘I really want the dream but am I willing sacrifice for
it?’ Jesus said in Matthew 16:25, ‘The man who seeks
to gain his life loses it but whoever loses his life for me will
find it.’ So you’ve got to feel like you’re
losing something to gain something. You actually find your life
when you risk losing it.”
The Assault Weapons
“Every survey I’ve ever done has indicated to me that
one hundred percent of men would say the sexual assault is their
number one source of disconnection from God,” Kenny pointed
out. “Desire for intimacy is God-given. We’re all
meant to love and be loved. That’s okay. The big battle
is delaying gratification, and being God’s man in the area
of sexual integrity. The only way you can hope to win more battles
than you lose in that arena is to really get to have a strong
relationship with God, understand the power of the Holy Spirit,
understand the role of the body of Christ, understand God’s
plan for honesty and confession and how all that works for you
not against you.”
Young men have to realize that the sexual assault is not harmless,
especially all forms of pornography. “It’s an insidious
cancer—it’s the Devil—and that’s where
you have to confront the thinking because it all starts in the
mind—where all sin is conceived. You are what you think,
and you do what you think. So if you can right the thinking, you
can right the doing. But it starts in the mind.”
Spiritual Surgery
Confronting the lies we believe is how God cuts on our character.
Because He loves us, God will cut on us but it’s not a stab
to kill, it’s a cut to heal. In the book there’s a
chapter on “Kenny’s Code.” This identifies the
lies that young men believe such as: I can be neutral with God;
I can keep secrets without consequences; I can mix God’s
values with other values; and there’s such a thing as harmless
fantasies about girls.
“God says in Proverbs 4:23 to watch over your heart with
all diligence for from it flows the springs of life. So the emphasis
for God is always the heart. Why? Because you can fill your heart
with truth or lies. What your heart is filled with forms your
character, and your character is expressed in conduct, and your
conduct either breaks your relationships with God and people or
it makes them healthy. To be after the truth you’ve go to
hunt for it. You don’t have to go looking for the trash
because the trash will find you. But you’ve got to look
for the truth.”
Fighting in the Ranks
Timothy (in the Bible) is a young Christian guy, and what does
Paul say to him? He says, “Pursue righteousness, faith,
love, and peace with those who call upon the Lord from
a pure heart (II Timothy 2:22).” Staying accountable to
other men is critical. “The assault on the character is
so strong that without a strong identity in God and a strong connection
to other young men who are traveling on that same path, I don’t
see how a young man can weather that storm without getting swallowed
by it. It’s the most critical thing.”
A Worthy Soldier
“One pastor said, ‘If I reach the man, I reach every
relationship he has.’ When I read the Bible, I see that
the man is in the center of the family, and his character, should
be rooted in a relationship with his Creator. If it’s not
and he gets un-tethered, it affects his character and then it
affects his conduct, which harms people and their relationship
with God. That’s why I love my mission—to provide
the widest possible call and the highest possible calling, and
that’s to be God’s man.
“I find that, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, a young
man’s identity is connected to his relationship with his
dad. The way kids spell love is ‘t-i-m-e.’ If your
dad paid no attention to you when you were growing up, then it
doesn’t matter if you are sixteen or thirty-six, there’s
a big question over your head, ‘Am I worthy of love?’
And you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to answer
that question if you don’t get in touch with how perfectly
God loves you. When you do that, you can stop living out of the
wounds of your past.”
For more on this topic, Kenny Luck's Book Every Young Man,
God's Man is available here.
Visit www.julieferwerda.com.
Visit CBN.com's Youth section.
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