Church Kids Lost — E.A. Johnston

The Failure of Superficial Christian Formation

We have a generation of young people today who grew up in church, made some kind of profession of faith, and were educated in private Christian schools at the great sacrifice of many families who left their children's spiritual development in the hands of strangers.

As soon as these kids hit college age, they couldn't wait to move away from home, to get away from all the religious hypocrisy, and to get out from under the smothering strict legalism of a do-as-I-say mentality instead of a do-as-I-do godly example.

We told them that when they walked an aisle, that was salvation. We told them repeating a prayer was salvation. We told them believing John 3 .16 was salvation, because that's what we believed ourselves.

Hypocrisy in the Home and a Distorted Gospel

The kids saw us behave one way at church on Sunday and another way at home during the week. They heard us cuss and swear and tell dirty jokes to our friends. They saw us as we watched sexually explicit movies in our living rooms.

They saw how greedy we were for money and how we told lies as we made excuses for things. We called ourselves Christians, but lived no differently from the rest of the world. They saw no reality of God in the lives of their parents, but were made to feel guilty if they didn't accept their parents' Jesus.

Unfortunately for the kids, the parents' Jesus, in many instances, was not the one found in the Bible, but another Jesus of their own making. Their Jesus was an entity that gave out eternal life to anybody that agreed to take it, and this loving entity was okay with sin and had no demands upon one's life.

You could accept Jesus and get your free ticket to heaven stamped and still remain the way you were before you did that. The kids saw right through the empty religious life of the church that had no power of God there, but who facilitated an environment to keep the kids happy by giving them what they wanted instead of what they needed.

Passing on the Faith Through Scripture and Prayer

So we hosted plenty of pizza nights and movie nights to keep them occupied, but we failed to reach them with the Christ of the Gospel and teach them how to pray. In Judges 2 .10 we read,. And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers, and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.

And that's where we are today, friends, with a lot of the church kids out there who fall into that large category of church kids lost. And that's the title of my message today, friends, Church Kids Lost.

And it's a sad commentary on our situation today. Oh, what in the world happened to so many of our church kids that made them go to the devil? You will find them in their social media sites, posting pictures of themselves as they advertise their homosexuality.

They'll still be enrolled in a Christian college that the parents are paying for, but there will be a picture of Jimmy kissing his new boyfriend, or Susie will post a photo of her kissing her new girlfriend.

Some of these kids say they are transgenders. Some will post that they are out-and-out atheists, but they all grew up in church and at one time or another made some kind of profession of faith. There they are living together, sinning unashamedly together, with no consciousness towards God.

They are living for the moment, with no thought for eternity. Church kids lost. Church kids lost. Why? What happened? I believe in some instances it's nobody's fault but rebellion in a child, but too often the fault lies at church and at home.

Churches Must Preach the Pure Gospel

The churches failed miserably to get our kids safely to Christ by failing to preach the pure gospel, and the churches pandered to our kids and gave them what they wanted instead of what they needed. We changed our music for them.

We changed our message for them. We changed the way we dressed for them. We wanted to be sure they were happy, and all we did was to spoil them. We should have closed down the youth groups and made them sit in the sanctuary under real preaching of the gospel of the Son of God.

We should have kept up the weekly prayer meeting and had it alive with vital Christianity where the kids could have seen broken-hearted saints on their faces, crying out to God in prayer, so the kids could have gotten a taste of the reality of Christ Jesus.

But instead we shoved them out to a conference room for fun and games to occupy and amuse them. The kids saw no real example of a godly life in the home, but they sure saw how a hypocrite behaved. The bottom line is they just didn't want our brand of Christianity anymore because they saw it didn't do us much good ourselves.

The Need for Desperate Intercessory Prayer

It didn't transform our lives. Why would they want the same stale religion? Some of the problem lies in the fact that we don't pray for our kids as we should. Instead of being on our faces, interceding for them in desperate prayer, we're too absorbed in our sports and entertainments.

And when we do pray for them, we don't know how to pray because we'll often say of them, well, Jimmy isn't living for the Lord, but he accepted Jesus years ago. Lord, please bring back Jimmy to you. So we pray for Jimmy to stop living with his girlfriend and to quit getting drunk and to quit smoking marijuana and to leave his back sliding ways and come back to the Lord.

But we might have better results from our prayers if we prayed, Oh Lord, our Jimmy is lost. He needs you. Jesus, bring conviction to his heart and open his eyes and show him he is on his way to hell. Send a gospel witness to him and grant him saving faith for your namesake and for your glory.

We can't go back and erase the mistakes we made with our kids, but we can begin to live right now for God and to pray that God will get a hold of our kids and save them before they wind up in a devil's hell.