My wife and I help lead the youth group at Lifehouse Church. I've been doing this for about two and half years, Chelsea joining soon after we started dating. For a long time, the group only had five youths, three of them siblings. We played games and went on trips and studied cool books like
Crazy Love
, but nothing seemed to spark real excitement in the group. Then we began studying Wayne Grudem's
Bible Doctrine
. By this time, our church moved into two locations and we met a few teenagers from the Spring Hill area. Then our youth group more than doubled.
I mean, twelve teens might not seem like a lot to the seasoned youth group leader, but for us, it was a little dizzying.
I don't know if I can credit this all to the church now having a location in Spring Hill or if it's because we're digging into questions regarding deep truth, but the conversations during meetings have changed dramatically. We're discussing Common Grace, Sin, Prayer, the Trinity, the Gospel, and the like. And I'm learning something from them about how I lead a discussion. First of all, nothing makes you feel so much like a dope when you ask a question and hear silence from a room full of teens. But instead of accusing them of disinterest, I try to figure out ways to ask questions about the topic so they want to answer.
It's one big reason why I've changed how I do things on this weblog. Not that you're a bunch of teenagers.
The kids also teach me how to ask good questions by, well, asking me good questions. During our discussion on Sin, one of the girls asked, "But where did sin come from?"
How beautifully simple. So I said, "From rules." Only after I said it did I think about it. Paul seems to say as much on his explanation of sin in Romans. Sin didn't exist on earth until God told Adam and Eve "Don't eat that fruit." That's not to say I think God gave men sin by giving them a rule. I mean to say that God created men with a will that would sin. The Fall may have easily happened if God said, "make sure to eat that fruit every day" because the serpent might have countered with, "Aren't you a little full?" and we'd be in the same mess.
I may be wrong. I may be only partially right. But where do you think sin came from? Do you even think sin is real (I'm looking at you, relativist reader)?
