Sermon preached by John A. Huffman, Jr.
June 18, 2006
Copyright © 2006 John A. Huffman, Jr
All rights reserved

HOW TO GET LIFE OFF TO A GREAT START

How can young people keep their way pure? By guarding it according to your word. With my whole heart I seek you; do not let me stray from your commandments. I treasure your word in my heart, so that I may not sin against you. (Psalm 119:9-11)

The other day, I heard someone spontaneously sigh, "Oh, to be young again!"

I did not want to insult the person, but inwardly my response was, "Do you really mean that?"

I'm not so certain that I would like to be young again. By young, I mean a teenager. Granted, it would be fun to experience the carefree years of childhood and to live life with the spontaneity of youth. Yet, every time I project myself back into those teenage years, I realize that being young wasn't and isn't that easy!

Some say that it's much harder to be a young person today. In a way, I agree.

A friend of mine, Dean Borgman, heads the Center for Youth Studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He has devoted his life to finding answers to questions about youth culture. Dean shared with us some observations about today's youth culture. Let me read to you some of his data:

a million American kids run away from home each year!
a million and a quarter teenage girls get pregnant each year--each year one out of ten teenage girls gets pregnant!
one out of five kids are physically or sexually abused!
kids spend more time watching TV than at school, church, and in significant family time--combined!
violent crimes committed by teenagers have doubled in the past twenty-five years!
one out of two marriages in the U.S. fails, and children of divorce are increasing by 1.1 million each year!
of the children born in 1980, one of three ended up living on welfare sometime during their first 18 years!
at least half a million kids attempt suicide each year--six thousand of them succeed, many more killing themselves in violent accidents!
still, many young people are doing very well, thank you!

I have to admit that some of his observations are so foreign to the experiences of my youth. It is not easy to be a teenager in 2006 with these intense realities that young people face.

And if you are a young person, I love you, and I anguish with you on the kinds of intensified problems you are forced to handle.

At the same time, I would contend that it has always been difficult to be a young person. Every generation has its problems. My generation also had to deal with matters of sexuality, alcohol and financial struggles. I remember thinking of colleges I might like to attend but never dreaming that the financial resources would be available, so I lived at home, fortunate to have a very good college just a few blocks away from my house.

My generation worried so much about war. Our parents had lived through World War I and World War II, as well as the Great Depression. The specter of creeping world Communism hung over us in a way it doesn't for our young people today. In a way, those concerns my generation faced have been replaced by the controversy over the war in Iraq and the specter of random international terrorism.

There has always been the struggle with self-esteem, wondering whether or not I am accepted by my peer group. This impacts young people of every generation. Also, so much of who we are and our possibilities for the future are determined when we are young. We make those decisions which are so crucial in regard to our habits of life, our place of education, the person we marry, where we start out geographically. Some of the decisions that we make in such an offhand, unthought-out way will impact us the rest of our lives.

This was driven home to me in a fascinating way as I observed the biography of New York Yankee baseball star Mickey Mantle, one of my boyhood heroes. How sad it was to see a man of such athletic accomplishment brought to his knees, physically, emotionally and spiritually, by his alcohol addiction. Right when he could be enjoying some wonderful years of his life, he ended up paying the price for decades of alcohol abuse. He and some of his teammates, including Billy Martin, lived as if there was no more tomorrow. He used to brag about hitting home runs hung over from the night before. Casey Stengel, the Yankee manager, would find out which of the fellows was breaking curfew by giving the elevator operator a brand new baseball and asking him to collect the autograph of every team member who came in after 12:00 midnight. The next day, the elevator operator would give the ball to the coach. Mantle, who sewed his wild oats in his youthful years, made this fascinating observation toward the end of his life: "If I knew I would live beyond age 50, I would have lived my life differently." That observation was made all the more poignant by the fact that his father, at age 41, his grandfather and two uncles, in their thirties, died of Hodgkin's Disease. His son died, after a long struggle with Hodgkin's, of a heart attack at age 36. Mickey Mantle made a false assumption. He misestimated his life span, assuming he would die young, he lived the way the Bible says so many people live: "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die." The reality is that none of us knows for certain how long we will live.

Today is Father's Day. Today is the day in which we have baptized sixteen infants. Today is also Youth Sunday, and we have been so inspirationally led in worship by our teenagers. And last Sunday was the day we celebrated the graduation of our third graders and gave Bibles to sixty-eight of them in our three worship services, with Anne and me hosting two hundred persons at our home, including the third graders along with their significant family members.

The word I have to say this morning is a life-changing word for youth. Remember, it is for youth of all ages. I've specifically designed it for these young people whom I've described, who are either here in the sanctuary or will have access to these words through the printed sermon or our website streaming of this message. It's not restricted to those in elementary, junior high, high school, college or our young adults. It is also a word for the rest of us, because we, no matter how old we are, are still young in terms of tomorrow. There is that commercial motto that at one level is so trite but at another is so profound: "Today is the first day of the rest of your life!"

If you are a sixteen-year-old, who has sixty more years or only two, or if you are a seventy-year-old, who has yet one more year or twenty-five, today and every day from here on out is important, no matter what you have done with the years leading up to this moment.

Today's challenge is very straightforward, as heartfelt a word as I've ever shared, it comes from the Old Testament Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible. It is capsuled into three verses and reads as follows (Psalm 119:9-11):

How can young people keep their way
pure?
By guarding it according to your
word.
With my whole heart I seek you;
do not let me stray from your
commandments.
I treasure your word in my heart,
so that I may not sin against you.

The psalmist raises a rhetorical question, "How can the young person keep his way pure?"

The bottom-line vernacular expression of this is, "How can I live the way God designed me to live?" Or for someone who has messed up, the question is, "How can I clean up my act?"

Purity is not the lifestyle about which you hear much talk these days. At the same time, is there not a deep hunger in each of us for a life that is cleaned up? I'm not talking about an unrealistic, super-pious, perfectionist existence. The Bible is very clear that each of us will struggle all of our life with our fallen nature. We are fallen persons living in a broken, fallen world.

You and I know that there are people we respect, even in this world in which our heroes have been toppled from their pedestals. There are still people who challenge the best in us.

I know this is the world of the tabloid newspapers through which we browse at the checkout counters. It is a world of television talk shows in which nobody seems to blush anymore about any topic, no matter how intimate and/or perverted it may be. It's a day in which we are mesmerized by titillating speculation about what movie star is sleeping with whom, and we can't wait to see pictures of babies who have been born out of wedlock to movie stars who have hopped out of bed with one partner into bed with another--the "beautiful" people.

Although they are perhaps fewer in number, and that generation of genuine heroes is dying out, we still have the ultimate respect for Pope John II, a Mother Teresa, and an aging but still living Billy Graham. For every one of these well-known veterans of faithful service, there are literally tens of thousands of others unknown to the masses but appreciated and looked up to by the individuals who have been touched by them. I will let you recite their names. You know who they are. Fill in the blanks as I mention the category. Name that teacher who saw promise in you. Who was that coach who invested so much time and interest in you? Who was that scout leader? That pastor? That youth leader? Who was that mother? That father? That uncle? That aunt? That grandparent who saw you as unique and special? Name the name of that person who put up with your nonsense, who cleaned up your messes for you, who stood by you in the tough times and stands by you and others in their tough times now.

I'll assure you who they aren't. They aren't the characters of the tabloids, talk-shows, Entertainment Tonight, and Hard Copy. No, they are the men and women with integrity. For the most part, they are people who believe in God, who claim the Lord's provision of forgiveness and have walked with God in the service of others.

You know something? You and I can be one of these people. And if you are a young person right now, you can establish yourself in a way that you can start out life with God in the service of others and follow all the way through with that core commitment. Or if you have wandered off in another direction, whatever your age may be, it is not too late to come back and be that kind of person. Claim God's forgiveness through Jesus Christ and have His gift of a fresh start at life! The psalmist, in a very straightforward way, gives a three-fold formula. It is his life-shaping word written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He gives some pretty good advice for young people of all ages who really do yearn for purity, who really do want to live the right kind of lives, who are sincerely interested in cleaning up their act.

His response to his own rhetorical question is addressed not to the way mass communicators speak, exhorting crowds of people. He speaks not as a politician trying to get votes or even a preacher trying to impact a congregation. He answers the question, "How can young people keep their way pure?" by making three specific statements prayerfully to God. Let's take another look at this passage, muse on it and see how he frames this.

How can young people keep their way pure? By guarding it according to your word. With my whole heart I seek you; do not let me stray from your commandments. I treasure your word in my heart, so that I may not sin against you. (Psalm 119:9-11)

Do you see how this is structured? There's a rhetorical question, "How can young people keep their way pure?" Then comes the prayerful response.

First, you are challenged to live according to God's Word.

Every day, you and I encounter many different words like those siren voices of Greek mythology, seductive voices. But if we listen to them, we will veer off course and crash against the rugged coast of contemporary living.

If you are a young person and your steady diet is MTV, questionable chat rooms on the internet and/or pornographic websites, you are setting yourself up for disaster. I'm not a politician running for office. I know it's popular today to dump on Hollywood. The fact is that the media does have an impact on how we live. And what we seek out as entertainment does shape our values. And those optimistic studies of previous decades that claimed that one can be exposed to violence and sexual immorality in entertainment without being impacted by it have been repudiated. Even secular society is desperately concerned that somehow we must do something about those influences that undermine our values and produce lifestyles individually and corporately that destroy.

I said this is a life-shaping message for youth of all ages.

I work hard to be careful in the kind of entertainment to which I expose myself. One cannot today hold a TV remote control and cruise the channels in just about any family room or hotel room without confronting, in a matter of minutes, exposure to the best, the worst and the mediocre. How much of our entertainment, whether it be the trivial nature of the daily TV soaps all the way to the top-rated box office movies, is built on themes of selfishness, personal material and sexual gratification, no matter what the expense might be of a long-term nature to marriage commitments and responsibility to our children.

You and I can live our lives listening to these words with a relativistic society that doesn't take God seriously, or we can desire to live according to God's Word.

I'm reminded of Daniel and his colleagues taken in to captivity by the Babylonians who destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC. They lived in an alien culture that promised them so much if they would only compromise. The Bible says, "But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the royal rations of food and wine. . ." (Daniel 1:8).

Daniel, along with a host of young people of all generations who become middle-aged people and older people, determined to go God's way and live according to God's Word. It was a costly existence at points, but, in the long haul, it paid off for him and the significant others in his life. And it still pays off today! Even the leadership of that pagan society recognized his integrity and that of his colleagues and placed him and them in positions of trusted responsibility, for they were seen as persons who did not take shortcuts, who understood life and lived it in a quality way.

Second: You are challenged to seek God with all your heart, so that you will not stray from His commandments.

God desires to be in relationship with people who really love Him, who really seek Him with all their heart. This connotes a kind of life that wants to know God and be in intimate fellowship with Him. Is that where you are?

The psalmist continues in his prayer, asking God, ". . . do not let me stray from your commandments."

This man understands his vulnerability. This man knows that, left to his own orientation, he can really mess things up.

Are you aware of your vulnerability? I certainly am aware of mine.

As a young man, I took as my life verses Proverbs 3:5-6. I frequently share them with you. They read:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight.
In all your ways acknowledge him.
and he will make straight your paths.

That's the kind of direction I needed as a young man, and that's the kind of direction I need today. Yes, this is the first day of the rest of my life. I need God's direction. I need His straightening of my paths.

I've been tossing around this week some images that describe what can happen if we do not seek God with all our heart. What is it to stray from His commandments?

One picture is that of thinking that one is going in the right direction when one isn't. You've had that happen to you. We men, in particular, drive our cars convinced that we know where we are going, infuriated by our spouses second-guessing and backseat driving. The most painful reality is to discover that she was right all along.

It's not just a matter of stubbornly being determined to find our own way, independent of God's map, the Bible. It is possible to think you are headed in the right way and end up suddenly veering off in the wrong direction simply out of a sense of exalted self-confidence.

A number of years ago, when my daughter Janet, who is now 31 years old, married and expecting a child, was a little girl, she went with me to an Angels ball game at Anaheim Stadium. I had parked on the street outside the stadium to save the parking fee and to enable us to get home faster. When the game was over, we walked out and headed straight to the car, only to get to the street where I thought the car was to find out there was no car. We walked back and forth, block after block, trying to find the car, until finally we retraced our steps back to the stadium and found that, at the angle at which we came out of the stadium, there were two walkways. It started out looking like they were going the same way, but they veered off in a "V" shape, sending us to a very different place than that to which we thought we were going.

It's important in life to know with certainty that you're headed down the right path.

Another image is that of vertigo. Occasionally, pilots get it when they're flying by instruments. They feel their instruments are wrong. I am told that one basic instruction to persons flying by instruments is that you always trust your instruments, not your feelings.

Trust God's Word. It will not lead you in the wrong direction, if you are faithful to it, studying it in context, not taking passages out of context, but exposing yourself to the whole counsel of God's Word. Otherwise, you will end up morally, spiritually and sometimes even emotionally and physically lost--when you're determined that you can find your direction without a map or you angle off so subtly in the wrong direction to end up far from where you thought you were going, or end up upside down because you don't trust the instruments of God's Word.

Third: You are challenged to hide God's Word in your heart that you might not sin against God.

Do you memorize verses from the Bible? Are you a person of the Book? I know people who think they are living according to God's Word, but they don't read, don't study it, don't memorize it. They're not in a covenant group. They don't go to adult education classes. I know people who quit, ten or fifteen years ago, having a quiet time, exposing themselves to God's Word. You may be one of them. You may have started out as a young person in the right direction, but you are neglecting the reading of Scripture and, even at a deeper level, the hiding of God's Word in your heart. This involves a meditation. This involves a musing on the teaching of God's Word in which it is applicable to you today, not just in the objective truth that you studied last year or ten years ago.

I know a lot about the Bible. But unless I, at age 66, open the Bible each day for a fresh word from God, I'm in trouble. Just as our automobiles can run out of gas, you and I can run out of spiritual fuel. We need to keep filling up the tank.

This is where the work of the Holy Spirit comes into play. You need that renewal that comes from meditating on God's Word with a meditation that is empowered by the Holy Spirit.

And not only do you need that private meditation, you need that coming together with brothers and sisters in Christ.

One winter, after Dr. Norman Vincent Peale retired as senior minister of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, he and his wife Ruth decided to spend a month vacationing in Florida. They were staying near a golf course. One evening as they walked up to the clubhouse for dinner, they heard a loud humming sound. Curious, Mrs. Peale relates that they looked for the source and found it coming from a long row of golf carts plugged into outlets for recharging. "Now that's a sermon illustration!" exclaimed Dr. Peale. "What do you mean, Norman?" she replied. "Just think, Ruth, all those carts no matter where they have been on the golf course come together in one place to plug in and get their power from one source."

You and I need that individual and corporate recharging of the Holy Spirit of God. We get it from meditating on His Word. We get it from not neglecting the assembling of ourselves together in Christian fellowship and teaching, in covenant group relationship, in worship. I urge you, however old or young you are, to accept these challenges of the psalmist. I urge you to cry out, "Create in me a clean heart, O God!" I challenge you to claim Christ's forgiveness, a new beginning, that spiritual heart transplant that makes you a new person in Jesus Christ.

I challenge you, along with the writer of Ecclesiastes who in my stage of life had experienced everything that life had to offer and saw its futility, now, this day, before it's too late, to discover what he discovered the hard way after a life of painful disillusionment. He writes, "Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them'" (Ecclesiastes 12:1).

I conclude by reading to you a copy of an old Chinese Proverb shared with me by my Washington, DC, friend Doug Coe. It reads:

If your vision is for a

year,
plant wheat.
If your vision is for ten
years,
plant trees.
If your vision is for a
lifetime,
plant people.

Add to these profound thoughts these words of Emily Dickinson: "We turn older with years. But newer every day." Let your vision be for eternity, realizing the blessings of God that are new every morning, as you allow yourself to be planted by the streams of Living Water, so that you will be fruitful for God and others in this life and for eternity.

This is how to get life off to a great start if you're a young person or to get the rest of your life off to a great start no matter how old you are!