Don’t Be a Young, Proud, Know-It-All

At times, youthfulness carries with it a negative stigma. Mark Twain said, "youth is wasted on the young." And I believe the reason he said that is because typically young people are not humble, but proud. And so, we sure don't want that lack of humility. We don't want as young people to be noisy and self- assertive know-it-all's. I've seen that before. On the news I was watching recently, there were young people - college age, millenials as they're called - that were advocating socialism in the government. Communism basically - socialism. They were advocating that. There were high schoolers that were also very vocal in what the school system should do to fix itself so that it would be safe. You know, we've had recent shootings in school systems. And these kids were being put on news programs. They were hosting rallies. They had a voice given to them and they were very noisy and very assertive. "This is what our country should do. We should go the way of socialism." Or, "this is the reform that we should make in our school system in order to make it safe." And I couldn't help it, but I had the thought, you know, you high schoolers - how is it you've become an expert on such a difficult matter when you've only had your driver's license two months. I mean, there are great minds at work trying to figure out what we should and shouldn't do in these ways, and here are these kids that are noisily asserting that this is what we ought to do. I've seen young people, unmarried, teenagers, who had assertive, confident advice for older, married couples - how they should handle their kids and their marriages. I have seen, and these are examples that I'm aware of - I've seen teenagers reprove their pastors with confident, assertive opinions on how the pastor should handle their church policies and the way things should be handled in the church. You see, that noisy, confident, assertive viewpoint - that ought not to be in our young people. There ought to be an element of humility because what that causes is it takes away all their credibility and it gives people a reason to look down on them because of their youthfulness. Rather than being noisy and self-assertive we ought to concentrate on this right here that we find at the very end of that verse: an example. Be an example. A quiet example of a genuine believer. And I say that such a simple example as that is often undervalued. You look at a young person and you say this is an example of a young believer. That's good.