Dial Daily Bread: What Will Grip Teenage Hearts Forever?

This, from Robert Wieland again:

Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"

A group of teenage students in a Christian school nearby were having a Week of Prayer. Their hearts moved, they lit a bonfire for their rock music CDs. They realized that some if not many of the popular rock lyrics are frankly the worship and glorification of Satan. The "great controversy between Christ and Satan" is raging right inside teen hearts. The struggle can be intense. The whole world is encapsulated in one human soul.

It's the modern counterpart of the revivals and reformations in ancient Israel when an occasional king like Hezekiah or Josiah would be moved to throw out the sex-worship gods and goddesses from the holy Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. Indignant against this seductive and alluring pagan worship, they did like the great Phinehas at Shittim in Numbers 25. "Israel ... began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab" and "joined himself unto Baal-peor." When Zimri, a most prominent "prince" in Israel, openly paraded "a Midianitish woman" into his tent right before Moses and "all the congregation," young Phineas followed him into the tent and "thrust both of them through. ... So the plague was stayed" (vss. 1, 3, 8). But often those "revivals" were short lived because they were basically Old Covenant in nature--all the way back to Mount Sinai.

Our widespread obsession with Satan-worship through music has gripped legions of Christian youth. Hypocrisy with boring lukewarmness in grownups has fueled and encouraged the deep-rooted apostasy. A harsh fear-motivated return to legalism cannot be a permanent solution. All egocentric devotion disguised as the worship of Christ soon becomes Baal worship again, as in ancient Israel, over and over. On and on we go, decade after decade, repeating ancient history, until we can come to grasp the New Covenant principles of the gospel. They alone grip teenage hearts forever. Do not despair. The pure non-Babylonian, most precious gospel is still the power of God unto salvation. It works!

From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: October 8, 2002.
Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. Wieland.

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