Scripture: 1 Timothy 4:12
Canadian Justin Bieber, age 16, arrived in Sydney recently. At the Overseas Passenger terminal, a small concert was hurriedly arranged. It was eventually called off by the police because they could not control the crowd of 6000 girls, mostly aged about 13 years who had spent all night waiting for him. Eventually police called in the Riot Squad, as the girls ran in one direction then the other following rumours he was coming. This follows two other riots by similarly aged girls in New York.
I asked a mother who I knew had allowed her three young teenage daughters to travel and spend the night unaccompanied in Sydney, why she did it. “Do you know who Justin Bieber is?” I asked. “No, just some boy from Canada.” “Why did you allow three such young girls to be alone all night in Sydney?” “I couldn’t control them. They just went feral. I cannot understand my girls.”
I asked her if she remembered the Beatles when she was young? Or the Bay City Rollers? Then I asked if she realized what 13-year-old girls with raging hormones could be like? She replied, “I never thought of that.” It is just as hard for parents to understand teenagers as it is for teenagers to understand parents, (to be addressed in the next in this series).
This week has seen in the news several reports of teenagers committing serious crimes. Four young teenagers held up a taxi driver with a meat cleaver and stole his money. A 13 –year-old was arrested for drug trafficking. An 11-year-old was arrested for stealing and driving cars. The 11-year-old was so uncontrollable that he had only spent 7 days at school this year. His parents did not appear in court nor take him home after he was charged, saying that they could not control him. His mother requested he be held in custody because she could not control him. A magistrate remarked that teenagers committing crimes were becoming younger and younger. The TV show “60 Minutes” showed a program called “The Wildness of Australian Teenagers.”
There are just over two million young people in Australia between the ages of 15 and 24. But four out of five teenagers in the world are to be found in less developed countries. That youth population, which represents nearly one-fifth of the people on earth, must be reached with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
They are being reached and exploited as no other generation in history. They are the target of thousands of millions of dollars of advertising by Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Nike, Reebok, MTV, Levis, Pepsi and ten thousand other advertisers.
Parents often cannot understand teenage behaviour. They often wrongly ascribe their own theories about the behaviour of their children and frequently blame themselves.
There is “conduct disorder” that refers to a group of behavioural and emotional problems in youngsters. Children and adolescents with this disorder have great difficulty following rules and behaving in a socially acceptable way. They are often viewed by other children, adults and social agencies as “bad” or delinquent, rather than with a correct understanding about what is going on within them.
Many factors may contribute to a child developing conduct disorder, including brain damage, child abuse, genetic vulnerability, school failure, and traumatic life experiences.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) suggests the following ways for parents to prepare for their child’s teenage years:
· Provide a safe and loving home environment.
· Create an atmosphere of honesty, trust and respect.
· Allow age-appropriate independence and assertiveness.
· Develop a relationship that encourages your teen to talk to you.
· Teach responsibility for your teen’s belongings and yours.
· Teach basic responsibility for household chores.
· Teach the importance of accepting limits.
http://www.aacap.org/
Remember that your teens will probably experiment with his or her values, ideas, hairstyles and clothing in the attempt to define, or find, themselves. This is completely normal behaviour. However, inappropriate or destructive behaviour can be an indication that there is a problem.
Teenagers, especially any with self-esteem issues or family problems, are at risk for any number of self-destructive behaviours such as experimenting with drugs or alcohol, or taking chances with unprotected sex. Depression and eating disorders are common health issues that teenagers face. The following may be warning signs that your child is having a problem:
· Agitated or restless behaviour
· Unusual weight loss or gain
· Less focus on school work
· Trouble with concentration
· Sadness that does not go away
· Indifference about people and things
· Lack of motivation
· Fatigue, loss of energy and lack of interest in activities
· Low self-esteem
· Trouble falling asleep
· Trouble with police or other authority figures
If you are worried about your child’s emotions or behaviour, you can start by talking to friends, family members, your spiritual counsellor, your child’s school counsellor, or your family physician about your concerns.
If you think your child needs help, you should get as much information as possible about where to find help for your child. Parents should be cautious about using Yellow Pages phone directories as their only source of information and referral. Other sources of information include:
· Employee Assistance Program through your employer
· Local medical society, local psychiatric society
· Local mental health association
· The mental health department
· Local hospitals or medical centres with psychiatric services
· Departments of Psychiatry in nearby medical schools
· National Advocacy Organizations
· National professional organizations.
The variety of mental health practitioners can be confusing. There are psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric social workers, psychiatric nurses, counsellors, pastoral counsellors and people who call themselves therapists. Few states regulate the practice of psychotherapy, so almost anyone can call herself or himself a “psychotherapist” or a “therapist.” Take care.
1. The concerns about Australian teenage boys
The Reader’s Digest recently asked: “Where have all the fathers gone?” A professional counsellor gave the case of a 15 year old boy, sullen, angry, and beyond the control of his desperate mother. Dad had walked out years previously. It was a pathetically sad story. What was the advice of the counsellor?
“The boy needs a man to pay attention to him, someone he can look up to.” In some communities of Sydney, there is hardly an intact family where the man is living with his family, is employed, provides support and leadership to the family and is a role model to the young men. In one street I know, in all of the houses there is not one man who is the father of the family of that house.
The men there are largely inadequate, alcoholic, and lacking direction in life. They lack pride in their role as husband and father, and their sons have no idea what it means to be a man and a father.
Australian schools have had strategies to help girls. We have self-esteem programs for girls, mentor programs, maths and science programs. These programs have been stunningly successful, and now girls outrank boys in graduation from High School, are top of the high school in 66% of the classes, topped the state in 103 subjects compared with boys topping 51 subjects, in having the higher number of places in universities, and so on.
There are three quarter of a million children living with one parent. There are 373,000 children of sole parents where the parent is not employed. Those teenagers represented by these figures are a ticking time bomb unless they develop some purpose, meaning and significance in their lives. There is a hopelessness among teenage boys that is reflected in their poor performance at school, a horrifyingly high suicide rate, injury rate and their involvement in crime.
“It took women 30 years to change society’s ideas about what women are, now we can re-educate people about boys,” says senior lecturer in education at the University of Western Sydney Nepean, Peter West. “How much longer are we going to put up with the statistic that Australia has the highest rate of male teenage suicide in the world and that 80% of successful suicides in Australia are by men? We are doing something wrong. Boys have the message that they have to live fast and die young.”
Teenage boys must understand their role and significance but most are uncertain and react only with aggression and violence. There is a desperate need for boys to come into contact with a good male role model, preferably their own father. Unfortunately many of my generation are poor at communicating with their sons at the very time when sons need good role models and to understand the hard facts of life.
Dr John Powell, an American psychologist, spoke very movingly about his father’s death. At the moment of his father’s death his mother was on one side of the hospital bed and he was on the other side. He helped put some pillows behind his father’s back and the last minute of his father’s life he records like this: “I remember that minute my father died. I was on one side of the bed and my mother was on the other. He was barely conscious but all of a sudden he sat upright and he looked with a face of awe and I knew that he was dying because my father never showed any emotion on his face, he kept everything inside his guts.
Then I lowered him back onto the pillows and he shut his eyes, and I said ‘Mum, he’s dead. Dad is dead.’ She leaned across to me and said ‘Oh, John, he loved you so much. Did you ever know how proud he was of you?” And those words hit me like a blunt object. I wanted to say ‘Why did you tell me that?’ but instead I said to her ‘I’d better go and get the doctor to confirm he’s dead.’
And out in the corridor I kept asking myself, ‘Why did she tell me that?’ And then I suddenly realised. She told me that because he was always too frightened to tell me that.
“He never told me he loved me and he never told me he was proud of me. I went back with the doctor into the room and I stood against the wall crying and a nurse came up to me and said all the usual things. I couldn’t talk to her. I wanted to say to her ‘I’m not crying because my father died. I know it’s a blessing for him. But I’m crying because he never told me he loved me. I’m crying because he never told me he was proud of me.’ It would have made such a difference to me if I’d known he loved me and he was proud of me.”
One of the hardest things in the world is to stand beside a grave and think of all the things that ought to have been said in life that never were said. True communication in families means to talk and to listen to one another. There is a growing concern that our teenage boys have few role models and little communication. A commitment to Jesus Christ gives a teenager the greatest role model of all, and Jesus is a friend through whom we can communicate everything to God in prayer. He is our model of manhood, and the means of our communication with our Heavenly Father.
2. What is it that teenagers want?
“Project Teen Canada” was a nation-wide survey of young people from 15 to 19 years of age, conducted in 1984. It surveyed 3,600 young people asking about their beliefs, hopes, values, sources of enjoyment, and their attitudes toward family, friends, sexuality, and the church. The project was co-ordinated Dr. Reginald W. Bibby, professor of sociology at the University of Lethbridge, author of “The Emerging Generation”.
Young people today place a high value on friendship, expressing indifference for institutions, including the church. They are “open to God – closed to the church.” The teenagers’ beliefs were consistently higher than that of their parents. 85% of teenagers indicated belief in the existence of God (compared to 81% of adults). 85% of teenagers reported belief in the deity of Jesus Christ (compared to 68% of adults). Regarding life after death, 80% of teenagers professed belief (compared to 69% of adults).
91% indicated they considered friendship to be very important to them. Seven other values were very important to a decreasing number: Being loved 87%; Freedom 84%; Success 78%; Excitement 58%; Acceptance by God 41%; Recognition 41%; Being popular 21%. (Leslie K. Tarr. World Evangelisation, December 1986).
An Australian teacher took a similar survey, asking “What do teenagers want?” He asked fourth year/Year 10 (fifteen to sixteen-year-olds). They replied:
1. We want to achieve something in life – success.
2. We want to prove to our parents we can “make it”.
3. We want to be trusted by our parents – over money matters, over times of coming home, over the choice of our friends; to be trusted to make our own decisions.
4. We want our parents to stop nagging us about study.
5. We want some privacy to get to know who we really are.
6. We want to be popular.
7. We want fun. You’re only young once.
8. We want to be understood. Listen with patience.
9. We want to know the facts of life, sex, human relationships, feelings and values, the big controversial issues in economics, politics, sex and religion.
10.We want what sensible, responsible adults want!
I was impressed with how one teenager wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald: “Sir: I am only 17, but I have become very cynical about the problems facing the average kid in Australia, and how nothing is ever really done to help. I believe that unemployment, drugs, teenage suicide, youth homelessness, juvenile sex and child poverty are a symptom, not a disease. These problems are rapidly growing and, at best, politicians are covering up the realities that confront the average teenager every day. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that one in seven teenagers would seriously contemplate suicide if their lives meant anything.
Similarly, I don’t think the average 13 to 19 year-old would need 10 different sexual partners each year if he found stimulation and enjoyment from life. Maybe if teenagers could sense some hope they would stay at school or try to work, but nothing is being done to provide that hope. In the 60s, teenager rebelled against authority, trying to change their destinies – they failed, and my generation is the result. We have no cause, we let life direct us without trying to make a difference. We don’t try, as our parents did, to change the system because we see that there is no point. The system doesn’t care. The youth of Australia are looking for someone to bring some hope to their plight. I hope such a person exists.”
That someone is Jesus Christ. He cares for teenagers and His Apostle Paul spelled out to young Timothy how a teenager should live.
3. The Bible’s advice to teenagers
The world always regards teenagers with suspicion, and even Timothy was suspect. The advice given to Timothy is the hardest possible advice to follow, and yet it was the only possible advice. The advice was that Timothy must silence criticism by conduct.
Plato, the great Greek philosopher, was once falsely accused of dishonourable conduct. “Well,” he said, “we must live in such a way that all men will see that the charge is false.” Arguments and verbal defences cannot silence criticism; conduct can. What then were to be the marks of Timothy’s conduct?
Paul wrote to young Timothy (1 Tim 4:12) “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.”
1. An example in speech. Too many teenagers are foul mouthed, trying to impress. Paul asks that your speech should always be honest and loving, “speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15).
2. An example in life. This suggests that our lives are to be controlled by our commitment to God, not like the hypocrites Paul described (Titus 1:16): “They profess that they know God; but in their works they deny Him.”
3. An example in love. Love, the greatest of Christian virtues, means an unconquerable benevolence. If a person is guided by Christian love, no matter what other people do or say, a Christian will seek nothing but their good. A Christian will never be bitter, never resentful, never vengeful, will never allow hatred, will never refuse to forgive. No matter what others are like, no matter what they do, a Christian will seek only their good. This kind of love takes over the whole of one’s personality. Ordinarily, love is something which we cannot help. Love of our nearest and dearest is an instinctive thing, which is part of our being. The love between the sexes comes unbidden.
Ordinarily love is a thing of the heart; but clearly this Christian love is more than a thing of the heart; it is a thing of the will. It is not something which a man cannot help; it is an achievement and a conquest. Christian love is that conquest of self whereby we are enabled to develop an unconquerable caring for other people. One authenticating mark of the Christian leader is that he cares for others, no matter what others do.
4. An example in faith. This implies that we trust God and are faithful to Him. Faithfulness to Christ, no matter what that fidelity may cost. It is not difficult to be a good soldier when things are going well. But the valuable soldier fights well when his body is weary and his stomach is empty, when the situation seems hopeless and when he is in the midst of a campaign the movements of which he cannot understand.
5. An example in purity. “In purity” is important as we live in this present evil world. Ephesus was a centre for sexual impurity and the young man Timothy was faced with Kings Cross-style temptations. He must have a chaste relationship to the women in the church (1 Tim. 5:2) and keep himself pure in mind, heart and body. Purity is an unconquerable allegiance to the standards of Jesus Christ.
When Governor Pliny was reporting back to the Roman Emperor Trajan about the Christians in Bithynia, where he was governor, he wrote: “They are accustomed to bind themselves by an oath to commit neither theft, nor robbery, not adultery; never to break their word; never to deny a pledge that has been made when summoned to answer for it.” The Christian pledge was to a life of purity. The Christian ought to have a standard of honour and honesty, a standard of self-control and chastity, a standard of discipline and consideration that is far above the standards of the world. The simple fact is that the world will never have any use for Christianity, until the Christian Church can prove that it produces the best men and women in the world.
The authenticating mark of the Christian leader is a life lived on the standards of Jesus Christ, and not on the standards of the world.
Nigel Lane at his excellent blog: http://youthworkercoach.com/blog/ says there are eight things that set Christian teens apart and that make Christian teens different.
1. The Bible – they read it, study it, and meditate on it. Non-Christians just ignore or ridicule it.
2. Prayer – they do it as a part of their normal lives as opposed to only when a crisis occurs.
3. Temptation – they recognise it and resist it [not always successfully] as opposed to embrace it or not even see it as temptation but simply as a fun thing to do
4. Guidance – they understand that there is a plan worth finding and seek guidance from God and others as opposed to letting life pass them by.
5. Witnessing – they talk to others about their faith [this is not an easy one and they often need support].
6. Peer group pressure – they can spot it from a distance and do everything they can to not get sucked in by the popular crowd.
7. Personal relationships – they treat people with respect and offer them support and love at all times rather than look down on people different to them.
8. Self image – they get theirs from God and what he says about them rather than following the popular fads and media provided images.
Jesus calls teenagers to a radical, new life-style, different to the rest of community. Without Him you will always be only average, but with Him you will become one of the change-agents of this world. There is no greater challenge for any teenager than in the freshness of life to commit yourself to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC
• If it’s possible for any closer to give up runs quietly, then that’s what 
