Becoming a Christian is not the end of your spiritual journey. It is simply the gateway to a new journey altogether. The path you will follow will retrace the steps of Christian in Pilgrim's Progress. It will lead you along quiet streams and through green valleys, where you will find rest and strengthening. But it will also take you to places of temptation, danger, perhaps even soul-rending battle. It will be a narrow path, because it was not made to accommodate crowds of travelers. Your walk would sometimes be lonely except that you will always have a companion, the Lord Himself, who will accompany and help you because He desires your fellowship. Yet if you wish to enjoy a continuing sense of His presence, you must meet certain requirements.

We live at a time when few young people in the church are interested in entering Christian service. One reason is that the hearts of many are self-absorbed and self-serving rather than devoted to the interests of God. We will not see greater numbers being recruited for Christian work until revival descends upon our churches.

Yet even now, there are young people answering the call to do God's work. These are the ones with hearts liberated from bondage to self.

The church cannot pass Biblical truth to the next generation unless it readopts traditional standards, and unless also it devises new standards to combat the latest forms of sinful amusement. The devil is always building new armament to send against the church under siege, and the new armament must be countered by new fortifications. Negative rules (“do not drink”) help the church defend itself from attack, just as positive rules (“love thy neighbor”) help the church carry out evangelistic sorties into the enemy's territory.

God placed man in a matrix of social institutions designed to restrain sin. He founded the church, so that man could hear the law of God. He founded civil government to deter crime and punish criminals. And He founded the family, so that each generation could pass on its best achievements and wisdom to the next, and so that each individual could live in a situation fostering cooperation, unselfish service to others, and love. Although the devil has attacked all these institutions, his special target has been the family, because it is the most important.

Ask young people today to define a word like "prudence" and you will find that they have only a dim notion of its meaning. The same is true of many other words naming important Christian virtues. If the young hardly know what these virtues are, how likely is it that they will perfect these virtues in their lives?