Nut grass, by yourself. Because I advertised my autonomy for the next two weeks I was on my knees in the hot, boiling South Carolina sun pulling nut grass. I promise you, the weedbed was at least double the size of this stage. It was monstrous.
As spiritual adolescents our Heavenly Father will tell us to do things. He will say to be in by 8:00pm. But we reply that we have got the keys and the girl. I will do what I please, thank you very much. God knows what is best for us and when we break His directives and His rules and His perimeters, we end up spiritually speaking reaping the consequences of disobedience, pulling the nut grass in those giant weedbeds of rebellion. Spiritual adolescence.
We basically ice God out in two ways. We ice God out by putting on the headphones. Do you ever put on headphones? I do. You turn the music up, crank it up. When people are talking to you, it is great. You cant hear a word they are saying but you can hear the beat. And then, we look at God and He is trying to speak to us but we say to Him that the music is cranked up. When Gods word kind of fits with our agenda and our lifestyle, we will listen to it and do it. We will go through Gods word and obey those nice verses that are good and fine and holy and pure. But when something begins to ease into our vocabulary, or begins to press against the wall as regards honesty, or begins to talk about our lustful thought life or our materialistic nature, we just tune out. Do you have those earphones on drowning out Gods word? God is always telling us to apologize to someone, to stop something, to start something, to continue something, to be something. But adolescents have those earphones on.
Ed Young Church also says that, adolescents we do another thing. We make a big old giant pot of spiritual gumbo. You know I am pretty much of a health nut, but I love gumbo. It is bad for me, but I love it. Gumbo has a lot of ingredients in it, doesnt it? We think that as spiritual adolescents we can have it all. We believe we can have the fast track career, the soccer star kids, can run 10Ks, golf in the low 80s, read the latest novels, go to the latest movies and still have a little room for God.
