Introduction

How many of you all were here last year? It’s a joy for me to be back here this year, and I was very honored that you would think to ask me to come back. That means I must’ve done something right this year. But there’s also a lot of pressure now to produce a good sequel to last year. I told John that I’m hoping this retreat is a lot more like Empire Strikes Back and not Attack of the Clones. He told me as long as I don’t pull a Cars 2 everything will be ok.

So, not much has changed for my wife and I in the last year, has it honey? I’m trying to think if anything significant has happened…let me see..

I became a Christian 8 years ago, almost 8 years ago this month actually, when I was 23. So this was after college. I was raised to be somewhat familiar with going to church, however belief in Christ was never something that I grabbed a hold of. And the reason for that was because I never had really heard the gospel, that Jesus died for my sins and on the third day was raised to new life and that I could find forgiveness if I simply put my faith in him. I had never really heard, even though I was going to church. What I tell people is that I’m not sure if it was just because I wasn’t interested in being a Christian, or if it is because the church my family sometimes went to didn’t preach the gospel. It was probably both.

Either way, by the time I got to college I had pretty much made the decision that I didn’t need any kind of religion or church in my life. My middle and high school years were hard for me, and I’ll fill in some of those details more in our time together but at some point I made the decision that if a God existed, he must not much care about my life if it was going as poorly as it was. And so, I thought, why should I care much about a God if he doesn’t care about me?

So I ditched the idea of God altogether and lived life the way I wanted to live it through college and then even after I graduated. But that all changed when I started having some Christian friends who began to share their life with me. They didn’t just share the gospel with me – which they did – but they also shared their lives with me. I started to get invited to go to church. I would go, but more because I was looking for a social experience than anything else.

That all changed 8 summers ago when I heard the gospel. And I don’t just mean heard it as an audible message in my ears, but the Holy Spirit made my heart come alive and I HEARD the gospel for the first time. It was in that moment where I became truly convicted of my sin. Up to that point, I had basically told myself that I was a good person so long as I didn’t really hurt anyone. By the way – I did hurt people, so I was just lying to myself. But on that day I realized that not only was I not a morally good person, but that this God had created me, that my life was subject to him, that I owed him everything, and that he was now offering himself to me in Jesus Christ and the gospel. And so I received Christ at the age of 23, and my whole life changed.

I immediately got involved in Men’s bible studies, and I couldn’t stop studying and reading the Bible for myself. It was like the text on the pages came alive to me in a way that can only be described as Supernatural. As early as 9 months later I began to feel the Lord leading me toward becoming a pastor. By 2012 I was enrolled at the same seminary pastor Jon was attending.

In these last 8 years the Lord has done a lot in my life. He’s given me a wonderful wife, Neva, who you will hear from tomorrow evening. She has a beautiful testimony and I think you’re really going to enjoy hearing how the Lord has come alive for her personally as well.

I love all things Marvel, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings. I’m team Captain America all the way, Episode VIII is a great movie, and I boycotted seeing Solo in theatres because I think it was an unnecessary movie for the Star Wars universe. Don’t try to debate me on that because I will win. I don’t count the DC movies because they were just bad, although I really liked Wonder Woman and thought she was an excellently acted character. I DO really enjoy all the DC shows on the CW network though, Flash season 1 is my fav. I try to read fiction when I can, right now I just started a new Star Wars book about Thrawn and Darth Vader teaming up, its muy bien. I also enjoy catching up on comic books when time allows, and I just finished a new series that came out about Thanos. Speaking of which, lets talk Infinity War. Not now, in case someone hasn’t seen it, but come find me and we can talk all our theories for the next film.

Well, I think that’s everything you need to know about me. In all seriousness, my life is an open book, and you can ask me questions about anything I say at any point this weekend. One thing I would love to do is answer your questions while we play some games or eat a meal, so come find me at any point and let’s chat.

It’s my privilege to be here with you over the next several days teaching about God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ and his gospel. God’s grace is what completely changed my life 8 years ago, and I hope that you’ve reached a point in your life where it has changed everything for you too. But if you’re not sure yet, if you’re not sure where you stand with believing in Jesus, I want you to know that this is a safe and open place for you to ask your questions, to share your doubts, and perhaps even to believe in Christ for the first time. I’m really hopeful and about what God will do here in our time together this weekend.

Does anyone remember what the theme was last year? Yeah, so last year we were focusing pretty specifically on one topic, our adoption in Jesus and all that means for us. If we are a follower of Christ we have been adopted sons and daughters of God, which means not only that we have new identies of great value God’s eyes, but also that we are a part of a new family in the church. We are obligated to each other because of what Christ has done for us. Last year, because the topic was a bit more contained, I was basically able to use 2 texts that we just went really deep into: and .

This year is a bit different. The theme of this retreat is “Looking to Jesus”, and we are trying to unpack this idea of what it means to Look to Jesus in the midst of the culture that we live in today. We want to look more at the Scriptures to see what it means to be faithful to Jesus, to engage our culture with the gospel, and to live lives that are uniquely and distinctly Christian.

The idea of “the culture” is such a wide ranging subject, and there are so many things within “the culture” we could talk about. Last year, one of the big points of application we talked about was depression and anxiety and how much that is impacting young people today. I’m hoping you all will feel free to ask more about that in our Q&A this year. But a lot of our application this year is going to focus on things like: Sex and sexuality, pornography, technology use, and the way we engage people outside the church.

Because we are hitting a pretty wide range of topics this year, we are going to be looking at several different texts this year. I’ll be pulling from 3-4 texts in each session, and my hope is that in doing this, its going to help give you a uniform teaching of what the Bible says about these subjects. Does that make sense?

So let me give you an order of how this weekend will go. Tonight we are going to focus on and this idea of “Looking to Jesus,” and I want us to talk about what this means for us. Tomorrow morning we’re going to talk almost exclusively about sex and sexuality, and what the Bible says about your bodies and your gender. Tomorrow night we will look at what the Bible says about engaging the culture and the world more broadly, and what it means to bring Christ to the world.

On Saturday morning we’ll talk about what it means for you to be a part of the church and why that is so important. Saturday evening will be focused on how the church as a family engages the culture and the world. Finally, Sunday morning we’ll be talking about calling, what God has called us to, and how we can know God’s will for our lives.

Does all of that make sense?

One last thing. Last year I told you all that I had never done a youth retreat before. This is my second youth retreat now. So, I’m very honored you would invite me to come back. Speaking to youth isn’t really my specialty, you could say. And yet, here is what I’ve found. Speaking to youth isn’t really any different from speaking to adults. Sure, we can have some fun talking about games and stuff like that. But the issues each of you face every day with your friends in some ways are far deeper and far more difficult than what many adults face. Your generation has been impacted in ways that we’re not even really entirely sure what the results are going to be. The rise of technology and social media, changing views of sexuality and gender, questions about mental health. Culture is always changing, but this is one of the few times in history where so many things have changed so significantly in such a short amount of time.

One of the questions that really perplexes church leaders today is, “Why are young people leaving the church?” And it may be more complex than this, but I think I could summarize the answer like this: Because we often treat you like kids who need to be entertained. But you’re not kids that need to be entertained. You’re the future of the church. You’re the future leaders of our culture. So we need to teach you how to handle the big issues. We need to teach you how to lead. We don’t need to teach you how to avoid culture, we need to teach you how to engage culture and make culture and transform culture in a way that is glorifying to God. We need to teach you how to be good employers and employees, how to handle money and treat people in a way that makes Jesus shine into the world.

You don’t need entertainment and you don’t need me to make cute jokes. Anyone who says otherwise is feeding you garbage. It’s garbage. And I think it’s a tragedy that people want to treat you that way. It’s a tragedy because there has never been a time where issues like depression, anxiety and suicide have so plagued an entire generation of young people – your generation. It’s a tragedy because there has never been a time that has been so confused about what sex is, what its purpose is, what Godly sex, gender and sexuality looks like, and it has become devastating to my and your generation. It’s a tragedy because you live in a world that is addicted to distraction and pornography on the little devices that most of us keep in our pockets. It’s a tragedy because the love of God in Jesus Christ has never been so needed in our society and yet at the same time it has never been so publicly mocked in our country as it is now. It’s a tragedy because Christian’s have never known so little about what God has said in the Bible as they do today. It’s a tragedy because young evangelical Christians are leaving the church in herds once they get to college, because they’ve never been taught how their faith answers the challenges of their day.

It’s a tragedy because you all are not children that need to be entertain. You don’t need my jokes. You don’t need stories, you have Netflix for that. You are young men and women with real questions, real desires, real doubts, real struggles, and I believe you want to know how your faith in Christ addresses all of those things. And that’s how I’m going to treat you. I’m going to treat you like young men and young women who don’t want entertainment, but want deep biblical teaching that actually shapes how you live your life.

Of course we can have lots of fun together, and I hope that we do. But the most important thing for me is that you leave here having been challenged and having grown through the teaching of the Scriptures.

You dig?