Growing up Jesus?

This past weekend I had the pleasure of staying with a friend who, along with her husband, is raising her five grandchildren, ranging in age from 11-17, from their deep-in-the-woods rural homestead outside Peoria.

What made my visit so remarkable was that I once lived with this friend for a time in 2008 after she had just gained custody of the kids and was raising them alone in a trailer out in the boonies of Texas up from the Gulf Coast.

I never could have imagined the impact of her Christian leadership and mentoring--home-schooling each one of them--to turn these young ones into such lovely, stable Christian teens.

One thing in particular that grabbed me was when I first walked into their house and immediately heard popular KJV Bible narrator, Alexander Scourby, reading from Paul’s epistles over the stereo system.

This was something my friend did on and off all day when I lived with her in Texas. She put the children to bed each night with Scourby in the background, as she still does. In fact, the kids testify they have a hard time falling asleep without him.

Not only does my friend say all of her grandchildren have an innate ability to recall Scripture—word-for-word and verse-to-verse--especially Paul’s epistles, but that her oldest grandgirl “knows the Bible better than I do!”

When her one grandson, now turning 12, developed a sore throat and fever and could not go out with the rest of us for the evening, he was asked what he would like to watch on DVD in the family room. He said he wanted to see some recorded studies from preachers speaking at a Bible conference!

This, too, was something we did all the time in Texas, especially watching old VCR tapes of class studies from Grace School of the Bible.

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Scientific research says the brain of a young child is like a sponge and whatever the parent says or does has a lasting impression.

In a magazine article I have on this subject, it explains the newborn child’s brain contains about 1,000 trillion synapses, or points in which important connections between neurons are made.

The number is twice as high as that for an adult brain and by age three the child’s brain is operating at peak levels for learning—at least twice as fast as an adult brain. By adolescence the number of synapses drops in half to 500 trillion.

This, according to the article, means any concept, event or experience that is reinforced with a child results in a signal sent to a corresponding synapse. If the signal continues to be sent, the concept or experience eventually becomes a permanent part of a child’s memory.

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An article in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, written by Liesl Schillinger, explains that while the brain's neocortex is responsible for writing, speaking and hatching schemes, it's the brain's limbic brain that makes up our "repository of emotions, instincts and implicit memories of nurturance, grievance and deep preference."

It is the limbic brain, common among all mammals, that "allows mammals to form attachment bonds with one another," the article says. "Love is definitely limbic."

As an illustration of how the limbic brain works in conjunction with the neocortex, the article gave the sentence: "THE cht MEOWED AND PURRED."

"If you read the sentence," the article explained, "your mind will correct 'cht,' both because the brain knows 'cht' is anomalous and because it remembers that it has seen the word 'cat' near the words 'meow' and 'purr' thousands of times. The implicit limbic memory of stroking a cat or having it twine between your ankles is awakened every time you read the word.

"By the same token," the article continued, "a woman (call her Lady X) who habitually indulges the memory of a certain dark and brooding man (call him Man X, whose glance was, to her, electric, who had crooked teeth, liked a certain kind of food and listened to Josh White) burns thousands of links to him into her brain.

"Long after he's gone, the neurons in her neocortex will forge a new connection every time she sees crooked teeth, hears 'Careless Love' or smells Indian food—and these neocortical facts will rain down on her limbic system, irrigating the trench of memory where Man X resides. Anyone she meets who resonates with Man X registers as warmly and familiarly as 'cat.' Anyone else is 'cht,' anomalous, a mistake—depending on his context."

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The data indicating the vast majority of Christians trust in Jesus Christ as Savior from the ages of 4-14 is so overwhelming that is now commonly referred to as the “4-14 Window.” Conversely, the Barna Research Group says teens aged 14 to 18 have only a 4% probability of accepting Christ.

The most significant outcome of the Barna survey, in the eyes of the research group’s founder, California-based author George Barna, “is the prevalence of decisions made during childhood.”

Barna reasons, “Families, churches and parachurch ministries must recognize that primary window of opportunity for effectively reaching people with the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is during the pre-teen years. It is during those years that people develop their frames of reference for the remainder of their life – especially theologically and morally. Consistently explaining and modeling truth principles for young people is the most critical factor in their spiritual development.”

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“The term 'adolescence' is psycho-babble for a teenager because modern psychology has never been able to figure out what life is when a person goes through puberty and becomes a teenager,” explains Richard Jordan in a study.

“Until they grow those 5, 6, 7, 8 years into maturity . . . Mark Twain said when kids turn 13 you put them into a barrel, seal the lid and feed them through a knothole because that’s the only safe way to handle one. Then when they get to be 16 you plug up the knot hole because here’s someone growing into adulthood.

“Modern psycho-babble says 'adolescence' is where you don’t have good self-worth and self-esteem and you feel rejected. All that’s just selfishness. You know who the Bible says is worthy? The Lamb. Why? Because He was slain. The verse says ‘worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.’

“You want to have some worth, you’re going to find it in Him. You’re a sinner. The Book says all of your good works are as ‘filthy rags.’ That don’t sound too worthy, does it?

"You see, the problem is when people, instead of taking the truth of God’s Word and believing what it says--and taking the solution God’s Word gives you--they want to do it themselves and it don’t work.

“All this self-esteem stuff, and how you have to have this good self-image and that stuff, implodes on itself. It sounds good: ‘I am somebody!’ It sounds great but it can’t hold up under the weight of reality, because who we really are are sinners who come short of a holy God’s righteousness and it takes God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ to provide us the life we so desperately need in the place of our death.”

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Over the years, I've had quite a few people tell me they were in their mid-teens when they abandoned belief in the Bible and the Christian faith they were raised in.

I've never forgotten the time a 40-something male colleague of mine once succinctly summed it up for me: "By the time I hit 14, it was '(D) None of the Above.' " He had been raised in church by two Bible-believing parents and participated in evangelistic-type youth group activities through his early teens.

In his autobiographical book, "Surprised by Joy; The Shape of My Early Life," author C.S. Lewis—born in 1898, Belfast, Ireland—reveals he was 13 when he "ceased to be a Christian."

He partially attributed this "disaster," as he labels it, to the influence of a school matron, Miss C., who, at the time, was exploring Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism and Anglo-American Occultism.

"Nothing was further from her intention than to destroy my faith; she could not tell that the room into which she brought this candle was full of gunpowder," writes Lewis. "I had never heard of such things before; never, except in a nightmare or a fairy tale, conceived of spirits other than God and men."

Lewis says he immediately found a passion for the Occult--a "spiritual lust" which, "like the lust of the body, it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. . .

"It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians. But the result of Miss C.'s conversation did not stop there. Little by little, unconsciously, unintentionally, she loosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges, of my belief. The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultism began to spread—yes, and to spread deliciously—to the stern truths of the creed.

"The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) altering 'I believe' to 'one does feel.' And oh, the relief of it! Those moonlit nights in the dormitory at Belsen faded far away. From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting.

"I do not mean that Miss C. did this; better say that the Enemy did this in me, taking occasion from things she innocently said.

“ . . . And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief. . .

"Dear Miss C. had been the occasion of much good to me as well as of evil. For one thing, by awakening my affections, she had done something to defeat that anti-sentimental inhibition which my early experience had bred in me. Nor would I deny that in all her 'Higher Thought,' disastrous though its main effect on me was, there were real and disinterested spirituality by which I benefited. Unfortunately, once her presence was withdrawn, the good effects withered and the bad ones remained."

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By the time he turned 18, Lewis, in what he admits had become a "ravenous, quasi-prurient desire for the Occult, the Preternatural as such," had fully immersed himself in pagan writings—everything from Greek, Norse and Celtic mythology to Lucretius' Tantum religio and William Yeats' poetry.

In general, Lewis recalled experiencing in this "enlightenment" period, "a kind of gravitation in the mind whereby good rushes to good and evil to evil. This mingled repulsion and desire drew toward them everything else in me that was bad.

"The idea that if there were Occult knowledge it was known to very few and scorned by the many became an added attraction: 'we few,' you will remember, was an evocative expression for me. That the means should be Magic—the most exquisitely unorthodox thing in the world, unorthodox by Christian and by Rationalist standards—of course appealed to the rebel in me.

" . . . If there had been in the neighborhood some elder person who dabbled in dirt of the Magical kind (such have a good nose for potential disciples) I might now be a Satanist or a maniac."

Lewis reasoned, "Whether Magic were possible or not, I at any rate had no teacher to start me on the path."