Last night we had the youth group students over to our house, as we often do. We normally have a meal together and then have a discussion-based devotional. I love being able to have them over, but sometimes the discussion is more difficult than others. Teens these days have a lot on their minds. There’s the stuff that has always been on teens’ minds: school stresses, crushes, self-esteem issues, family angst, but now all those things are amplified by their awareness of everything all at once thanks to smartphones, the internet, and social media.

With all of that swirling around in their heads, its hard to want to dive deep into Scripture – actually, I don’t think its a lack of wanting to, but its a quicker frustration with not immediately reading and understanding well enough to have some thoughts. In our culture of immediacy, sitting and soaking a text up can be hard because we’re not used to doing those things.

Last week, we read Hebrews 11. I’m not sure we got past verse 1:
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for, and assurance about what we do not see.” This is a great piece of text, but it’s so abstract! It’s so easy to get caught up in the semantics (just the English, not even the Hebrew/Greek) and lose the point. So many words to define. And after that we have to think about what this means for us, examples from our lives etc etc. I know that last week was fine, good, and helpful because we were together in our home reading the Bible, praying together, and talking about our faith, but afterwards Madeline and I were kind of left wondering whether we had all really “gotten it.”

Contrast that with last night. We’ve been reading through James as a church, and this week we talked about James 2:1-13, so last night we read it and talked about it with our students. It starts like this:

“My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. ² Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. ³ If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” ⁴ have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?“

After we finished this portion, our resident eighth grader blurted out: “That is the easiest to understand part of the Bible that I have ever read!” It was a beautiful moment. She heard something from the Bible and it made sense to her. So of course, we didn’t call it a night and all head home, we talked about it. Sometimes following Jesus isn’t nearly as hard as we make it to out to be with all of our meetings and word studies. Simply put: Love everyone. Don’t treat people better or worse based on what they have or don’t have.

I’ve really enjoyed listening to, reading, and talking about the book of James with our church family over the last few weeks, and we’ve still got a few weeks to go! If you want to read and talk about the Bible with your family – or you want to think about how Christians should live – I recommend James as a great place to start. It’s Christian Living 101.

Blessings!
MC