The Rebellious Years – The Need for Self-Understanding

Dr Peter Masters

Buy Now

This booklet is intended to help readers from mid-teenage to late twenties to understand the source of the inner rebellion that urges us all away from God in the ‘second quarter’ of life. Do we understand this strong urge to independence and unbelief – this battle of mind and soul?

Extract

Our present society is cruelly unkind to the young, treating them virtually as experimental laboratory animals. Millions of young people are thrown early to the wolves of drink, drugs, illicit sex, and so on, their parents imagining that this is the modern, liberated, ­reasonable thing to do. Almost an entire generation is currently ­delivered into the clutches of the millionaire providers of pop, porn and dope, and nobody much cares about the long-term outcome.

    The young are encouraged to accept as legitimate, and even essential, teenage, premarital sexual adventures, and are bombarded with magazines promoting lust, and the techniques for getting maximum satisfaction. The ruthless, callous producers of these magazines exploit millions of teenagers without the slightest interest in the emotional and physical consequences – the untold suffering to be reaped over many years. What do they care about the human lives they hurl into the experimental cauldron of their anti-moral crusade?

    This is an incredibly vicious age as far as the young are concerned. We have to turn to God’s Book to find any note of sympathy and care, and in the Book of Proverbs we hear it repeatedly in that deeply ­touching term, ‘My son!’

    God cares for the young! ‘Come,’ says the Lord, ‘let me tell you about human nature. Let me describe the different character types to you, and warn you about the deeper issues of life, and show you where different actions lead.’ That is the Book of Proverbs – far kinder than any literature to be found in this sin-sick age. We should praise God for his tender and protective love for all, and ­particularly for the young.

    The first verse of the Book of Proverbs introduces us to the human author of most of the book, King Solomon, but the real author is God, who inspired it all. This is God’s infallible analysis of human nature and behaviour.

    Solomon says that his aim is to bring us ‘to know wisdom and ­instruction; to perceive the words of understanding’. These proverbs are devised to enable us to handle life. They show where the traps of sin are hidden, and how to recognise them. They instruct on the ‘how to’ of decision-making. They teach skills.


You may also be
interested in:

What You Should Know About Your Conscience

Bookshop

Tabernacle Bookshop

See website for
opening hours.