A Challenge To Young People

  By Lois J. Stucky (1928 – 2014) 

    I would especially challenge young people to consider carefully before God how they should spend their lives.  Young friends, do your best to get an answer from God to the tremendously important question:  “Lord, what would You have me to do?”

    I am reminded of when I was a Bible School student years ago.  Each Friday night we had a missionary speaker.  It was the first in-depth exposure I had had to missions.  Leaving the service week after week, I would bypass the snack bar and go to my room.  Soon I was on my knees and my heart cried out, “Lord, I know I fit into this mission scene somewhere.  Show me where!”  At the same time I reasoned (and Satan doubtlessly encouraged me in it), “You, a missionary?  You have never been farther from home by yourself than 60 miles.  You, crossing an ocean?  You who so dreads speaking before people, you being a missionary speaker?”

    But what mattered most to me was finding and doing God’s will.  Although my heart nearly failed me time and again, by the grace and strength of God, after a few years I was serving Him overseas.  In a few more years He led me to Herald of His Coming.  Here I have been privileged to help lift up the name of Jesus and to herald His Second Coming to many countries of the world. 

Young Hearts for God

    Readers, as we sow the Gospel seed into young hearts and the lives of others, who knows what God will accomplish?  Oh, precious young people, hold back nothing from God!  Invest your life for Him!  You’ll not be sorry.

    And parents, hold back not even the treasure of your sons and daughters from God.  Yes, the price to pay is great.  But think of Calvary – costly, costly Calvary, where God gave His Son.  Encourage your young people to obey God.  Many of us will testify that had it not been for the caring and counseling and prayers of our mature friends and family, we would have fallen by the wayside in our youth.  How much better to entrust our young people to the hands of our trustworthy God who loves them best of all, than to lose them to the vanities of this world or to worse things.  If our hearts must bleed, remember Calvary, and the glorious afterward.

    We need the wisdom of God in order not to put a stumbling block in the path of young people set on obeying God.  Maybe our zeal has waned with our strength through the years.  It may seem to us that their zeal is outrunning their wisdom.  Let’s give them all the help we can, and take care not to wreck something good God is doing but hasn’t had opportunity yet to complete.  They are safe in His hands, even as we were in our immature days.  Might we hedge them around with fervent prayers of faith.

    It will take “sweat, blood and tears” – and death for some – to finish what God wants to do in this world in our hour.  Then He will send His Son again to accomplish the ultimate in His program for this age.  God forbid that we hold anything back that He asks from us.  We must obtain grace to be obedient and to give all.  God is more than willing to bestow that grace upon us if we will ask.