faith This morning marks the halfway point for us here at Camp Caudle. Yesterday evening we heard a Bret McGowan of Greenbrier preaching a sermon on the subject DO I REALLY LOVE JESUS?

As noted yesterday, in the morning sessions our young people are studying the word “faith.” Yesterday’s devotional took a look at one aspect of the word that needs to be understood in order to better appreciate it; we considered how faith is all about ACCEPTING.

Today let’s consider how faith is also all about how “I” have to have my own faith.

I have to have a PERSONAL relationship with God.

It’s unfortunate that the term “personal relationship” has been co-opted and turned into something un-Biblical, because it really is an idea taught in Scripture (Jeremiah 31:31-34). It doesn’t mean “you do whatever you think is right.” It means “you do what God says because YOU have a relationship with Him that isn’t dependent on the faithfulness of others, like mom or dad or husband or wife.”

The reason people fall away, especially young people around the time they leave high school, is because their faith wasn’t their faith; it was their parent’s faith. Parents brought them to church, parents made them go to class, sit quiet in the pew and then go home when it was over. And in the days between Sundays parents offered no godly instruction at home. There was no discussion of Christ in those homes to help mold the child to grow into his own faith. The child ended up just piggybacking off his mom or dad. And then when he was on his own he had no support, spiritually, and he fell away. Why? Because he never understood the importance of a PERSONAL relationship with Christ.

But it doesn’t stop there: Because that young person, who never developed his own faith, will grow up, get married and have kids and then he’ll say “Hey you know what…we need to get our kids in church.” Notice: OUR KIDS – not US. No, it’s always “we need to do this for our KIDS.” And so they take the kids to church, they sit them in the pew, they tell them to be quiet. And the child gets no godly instruction from the parents because the parents have no faith. There is no Christ in the home, so the child has no faith, and the cycle continues.

The only way to break that cycle is to help young people by nurturing within them their own relationship with Christ. Challenge them with questions and then make them seek out the answers on their own. Force them to defend what they believe and why. The most important thing a parent can do is foster the environment where Christianity is as much a part of the atmosphere at home as it is when the family assembles somewhere to worship on Sunday morning. There shouldn’t be a difference between Tuesday night at home and Wednesday night at Bible class.

In the end, the child is going to mature in his own way and at his own pace. We must help our young people, as they mature, to develop their relationship with Christ on a personal level. That way, when they leave home, they will not leave the faith.