Persisting through Pressures

Intro: Activity

I promise there’s a point to this, but I want to see how many of you I can name.

[do that]

At this time last year, I knew almost everyone’s name. Now there are so many of you that have shown up here that I see but I don’t know you. You don’t know me.

But here you are at youth group listening to me teach you about the Bible. There’s something about our church culture that actually can hurt us in the long run:

We do a lot of this stuff corporately, which is great. But we don’t stop to take our relationship with Jesus from one that happens corporately to one that we decide personally.

I imagine that to some of you, Jesus feels a lot like me. You listen to him tell you stuff about how to live or what to do with your life, but there’s no personal connection there. There’s just this loose, ambiguous religious authority because you have subscribed to the beliefs of Christianity.

(serious) If that is as close as you ever get to Jesus, your faith is not going to make it past high school.

You have to choose for yourself to get serious about knowing Jesus.

Intro: Picture

As we move forward tonight, I would like to give us a picture of what that looks like. But to do so I need to know:

Raise your hand if you have read or seen Harry Potter.

There are three main characters in Harry Potter that I want to use as pictures of what our faith can look like:

Ron: Grew up in a family of wizards. Been around magic and the wizard realm his whole life.

Harry Potter: Full-blooded wizard but doesn’t know it because his wizard parents were killed when he is a baby. He is new to all of the wizarding stuff, and he’s just kinda taking it in as he goes.

Hermione: Her parents are human (called Muggles), and she didn’t know that she was a witch or that magic existed at all until recently. But unlike Harry who just takes it as it comes, Hermione found out and she went all in on it. She read everything she could about what kinds of spells there are and wizard history and everything!

Now, when it comes to faith, I think most of us in the room are like Ron. We have grown up in church. Our parents are Christians. This is all very familiar to us because we’ve been around it a long time.

Some of you are Harry, and you are new to this church stuff and Bible stuff and you think you like it but you’re really still just figuring it out.

I hope that everyone would want to be Hermione.

Because here’s the thing about her: She would’ve been an amazing Muggle. She would’ve gotten straight A’s and received a full ride to college and had a successful career. She could’ve chosen to continue in the successful life she was already building for herself.

But when she realized that she was made to be more than that, that she was made to contribute to another realm, she abandoned everything to pursue that. She counted as loss all she knew and all she had and all she was to know everything she could about her new life.

Teaching Part One: Paul

If this all sounds familiar, you’re not crazy.

There was someone else—a real guy—who had everything going for him. He had dedicated his entire life to one career. He studied about it from the time he was a child. He was literally perfect at his role. He was more committed than anyone else. He would’ve been the most proficient person in his role, ever.

But then he met Jesus.

In an instant, he learned that there was this whole other realm of reality that he hadn’t believed in before. He realized he was made for something bigger than what he had been doing, even though he was the best at what he had been doing.

So he left behind everything: his reputation, his career, his prominence, his power, his position, his self-confidence. He realized that none of that mattered. Because all of that would’ve gotten him to the very top of his field in the regular realm. But he was made to live in another realm. Even his very best efforts in the wrong realm were worth nothing.

And when he realized all this, he wrote:

But everything that was a gain to me, I have considered to be a loss because of Christ. More than that, I also consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Because of Him I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them as dung, so that I may gain Christ. (Phil. 3:7-8)

Paul was literally on his way to go arrest and kill Christians when he encountered Jesus. He radically switched from the person trying to put an end to Christianity to being its biggest proponent.

So Paul is very well-equipped to teach us about some of the pressures we face as Christians. But before he even gets to that, he wants us to know what we just read: that

The ultimate aim of all of this stuff that we do and study and learn is to know the person of Jesus. Christianity is not submitting our will to a religious idea or to a spiritual belief but to a living person who loves us and walks with us.

We have to know Jesus closely to be able to sustain these pressures. What pressures? I’m sure you feel them!

1. Culture Pressure: the world pulls you to conform

Paul warns against this in verse 2. He says:

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 3

2 Watch out for the dogs, watch out for the evil workers, watch out for those who mutilate the flesh.

He’s referring to some people called Judaizers but all you need to know is they were people who tried to put rules around the way Christians could live out their faith.

We deal with that a lot too. We actually are in a minority now just believing in God and the Bible.

So I think there are two categories of cultural pressure you feel:

Cultural & Value Conflict → Students see the church as out of touch with the world, especially around social issues, identity, or justice. Culture keeps shouting, “This is what matters most!” and it can feel easier to bend faith than resist.

And our culture is not just telling us to stay in our lane with our beliefs, it is telling us to change our beliefs to fit the cultural consensus.

And it can feel easier to do that when we are dealing with the second category:

Negative Church Experiences → Hypocrisy, judgment, or exclusion inside church often line up with what culture already criticizes—

to believe in an ultimate truth is arrogant and to hope that others would believe it is seen as judgmental…

so students just follow culture’s lead instead of sticking with Christ.

We have to be committed to knowing Christ because if this is just about religion then we may be swayed to bend to Cultural Pressure.

2. Cognitive Pressure: your mind wrestles with doubts and pain

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 3

18 For I have often told you, and now say again with tears, that many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.

MANY. Most people in the world do not believe that God exists or that He is active in the world today. And when we believe something in the minority, it creates cognitive pressure.

That looks like people expecting you will grow out of your religion once you are smart enough to reason through it… or emotionally stable enough to not need the crutch of God anymore.

It creates thoughts of, “Why doesn’t anyone around me believe in God? Can they all see something I can’t see?”

These problems happen in two main categories:

Intellectual/Theological Doubts → Science, philosophy, suffering, and contradictions they see between what they were taught and what they experience. Doubt creeps in and can feel smarter or safer than faith.

Unanswered Prayers / Problem of Evil → Pain and suffering spark deep “Why would a good God allow this?” questions. These mental battles, and many others, can push someone toward giving up on belief.

Here’s the reality:

When people de-convert from Christianity, it’s often because they ask one question that they don’t immediately have an answer for and then instead of diligently seeking answers, they stop seeking anything.

I have seen this happen to most of my family. They believe in God their whole lives and then one day they have a question they haven’t ever asked before and instead of looking at logical answers and working through evidence they just throw out all of their beliefs.

So you need to know: Can your faith take a question you don’t know the answer to? When you feel dumb for your beliefs so you dig for answers or do you abandon it?

It takes works to understand apologetics and to examine the evidence for Jesus and for God, but God is truth. He has answers. You will find them if you look.

The craziest part about all of this is that when people de-convert from Christianity, they end up with a hodge-podge belief system (we call that syncretism) that makes less logical sense than believing in God and that has far less evidence than the biblical worldview.

It feels “easier” to stop pursuing God, but if you stop pursuing God then that means you’re changing your belief system to a different one. And it’s one that can’t hold up to scrutiny.

We have to be committed to knowing Christ because if this is just about religion then we may be swayed to bend to Cognitive Pressure.

3. Complacency Pressure: your heart drifts when Jesus isn’t precious to you anymore

Christian Standard Bible Chapter 3

20 Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.

We are still waiting. And none of us are eager.

Why would we be? It’s been 2000 years!

But when we lost sight of the reality of eternity, when this becomes about getting to heaven one day instead of knowing Jesus, we become complacent.

Knowing Jesus is a process that happens daily: not in a day, but every day. Over a lifetime.

Here’s where we feel this most:

Shallow or Empty Experience of Faith → Church becomes routine, prayer feels rote, and Christianity seems like rules rather than relationship. When pursuit of Jesus stops, faith drifts into just “going through the motions.”

Or we get tired of waiting for God to give us a plan for our life, so we start making our own decisions and just asking God to bless them.

Or we feel like there aren’t any consequences for not taking God seriously, so what’s the need?

We have to be committed to knowing Christ because if this is just about religion then we may be swayed to bend to Complacency Pressure.

Closing

I want you to identify where you are.

Do you feel the weight of the cultural pressures?

Do you feel the wight of the cognitive pressures?

Do you feel complacent in your faith?

And now I want you guys to go to your small groups, and tell them, because when we confess to one another, God shows up. If what you need is for God to show up in your life, start by confessing that.

I want you guys to pray for each other. If you’ve got faith like Hermione, help the faith of the Rons and Harrys in your life.

Pray.