“Where were you last night, Tasha?”

“My brother and me had to go to this new church last night with my mom. They had a Wednesday night youth group.”

“Oh, how boring. I’m sorry.”

“No. Not at all. It was quite interesting, actually. When we got there, there were about 15 guys there about our age… I guess there were only 3 or 4 boys and the rest were girls. What was weird is there were 9 adults hanging around the youth group at that church.”

“Nine adults? How wacked was that?”

“Really, it was quite cool. They had a youth pastor who gave the message and did most of the talking and stuff. Man, he gave a really cool message. He talked about sin and stuff, but he gave this, I guess it was a kind of a one-man play where this guy says to God ‘I can’t come to church.’

“And he went on like that. Then he said that if Jesus is your Lord and Savior and you are really sorry for your sin and you're willing to stop doing that stuff, then God forgets all about it. He won’t even remember what you did. It’s all gone! It‘s like you never did it and stuff!”

“I never heard of anything like that before. What about all those other adults?”

“Oh. They were cool. We split up into groups and talked about some stuff and some of them went into the groups with us. They helped us with trying to figure stuff out and stuff. Then after we prayed, some of us felt bad because of how we’ve been acting at school and against our friends and stuff, then some of the other adults prayed with us and stuff. I didn’t know adults even cared about how we feel, you know? In our old youth group, the adults put us as far away from them as they could and it felt like they just wanted us out of the way. Here, they were right there, like they really cared about us and stuff. It was weird, but it felt really good.”

“Were they all leaders?”

“No. That’s the weird part. They just hung out and when we were alone, they would come over and talk to us or see if we were all right and stuff. One or two adults did most of the talking and leading in games, but all those other adults were there, like when we really needed them and stuff. One of the moms brought cookies and stuff, it was really cool!”

“So, you think you’re gonna go back to that place?”

“They were really friendly and stuff. And those adults were really cool. They knew things out of Bible and stuff. So they were able to help us understand some of the stuff the youth pastor was telling us about and could help us understand better.”

“Did anybody get in trouble?”

“This one kid… he was really, like, hyper. He wouldn’t settle down. He kept poking this other girl. Then finally one of the adults came over and, like, sat on his lap and stuff. It was really cool. The kid stopped poking people after that. It was really funny.”

“So, you didn’t tell me, are you going back?”

“Yeah, I want to see if that’s for real. We really had a good time even though we talked mostly about the Bible and stuff. But it was cool. I’m going to check them out again. Yeah.”

“You mind if I come with you if it’s alright with my mom and stuff?”

That wasn’t an actual conversation, but it could be. Adults need to be in the lives of children--especially teens. When I was a scout leader, almost every kid in there had a dad or mom who stayed and helped out with things from time to time. But they were always there to help and the kids really appreciated it.

When kids go to youth group and see one or two adults, they feel like these were the guys who drew the shortest straw. teens are used to being just a second thought. But when adults are in the room--magic happens! All of a sudden it’s ‘are all these guys here because they like teens? These guys really care? Wow.’

All adults do not need to be the “leader.” Just coming to a weekly event helps the teens feel appreciated and cared about. That’s the most important thing that can happen in a teen’s life, feeling appreciated and cared about!

When more adults get involved, then more programs can happen. An active youth leader can now offer more programs to the youth, creating more options to stay away from worldly things. More adults mean that there can be more than just one night a week meetings. Now there can be discipleship classes and other “go deeper” kind of programs offered. Coffee shops can be incorporated. More field trips can be offered because not all of the leaders will need to go to all the events all the time.

If we are to be an Acts 1:8 church, couldn’t you give just two hours a week to be with youth? We’ve got a boat load of stuff that needs to get done and really, it cannot happen without you.

Bill Wagner

I believe that C. S. Lewis was one of the most brilliant writers of the 20^th century. He wrote in such a way that the reader could almost feel like being in the story as a tag-a-long character and actually feel and participate in the consequences of the actions of the characters in his books.

I really like how Lewis portrayed sin and how the remedies are performed in his The Chronicles of Narnia. The fifth book in the series is called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and he introduces new primary characters who join Edmund and Lucy in this story. One of the characters is Edmund’s and Lucy’s cousin, Eustace.

Eustace is not a particularly bad person as he is annoying. In fact, he is as annoying of a person as any teen or pre-teen can be. Eustace was an absolute butt-head, no question about it.

In this story, Eustace gets sucked into the adventure in Narnia along with Edmund and Lucy. Edmund and Lucy quickly figure out what’s going on because they have been to Narnia before in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They are on a sea-going vessel on a great quest along with the current King of Narnia, King Caspian--Eustace just hates it. And just to make sure that everyone else knows that he hates it, he takes every opportunity to complain and whine about every adverse situation while always seeing the wrong viewpoint of everything that is going on around him. Like I said, he’s a real butt-head.

All of this was to get you up to speed so I could relate to you an illustration Lewis gives, in this case, about Eustace’s sinful nature and how it is dealt with by Aslan. We would be able to relate to Aslan in our world as Jesus Christ. The ship The Dawn Treader anchors off the coast of a mysterious island. The crew needs to find a source of water so a landing party goes ashore which includes Eustace. Eustace wants to get out of any possible work so he decides to sneak off to the top of one of the tallest hills and nap while everyone else is about their jobs.

While Eustace is up there, he gets turned around, gets lost, and stumbles into a dragon’s lair. That dragon crawls out of the lair, scares Eustace to pieces then for some unknown reason, lays down and dies. Of course Eustace treats this as his victory, though he did nothing to slay the dragon.

The sun goes down, Eustace cannot get to the rest of his party so he ends up falling asleep in the dragon’s lair for the night. Meanwhile the rest of the party who realizes that Eustace is gone and probably lost is in a fit because they have to take time to form search parties to try to find him--what a nuisance!

The long story made short, Eustace turns into a dragon himself! Once he realizes this, he gets really thoughtful and remorseful because he knows that he will be separated from fellowship with any other normal being for as long as he is a dragon. This thought makes Eustace very lonesome.

Eustace the dragon makes his way back to the beach and tries to communicate to the others who he is. The others see a dragon and feeling threatened, they want to kill it. Eustace cannot speak, so he cannot explain himself. But through very pitiful body language and lots of crying of dragon tears, Eustace was finally able to relate to the others who he really is.

Everyone works for days and days trying to find a way to break the enchantment and restore Eustace to his formal irritating form. Eventually, everyone figures out that there is absolutely nothing in their power that can help Eustace out of this situation. Soon after that, everyone also realized that they will have to continue on their voyage and there was no way they could take Eustace with them. So now Eustace faces the possibility of losing fellowship with everyone he knew and loved (even if it was based upon him being a pain-in-the-you-know-where).

You need to know that Eustace’s sinful nature is being represented by Eustace’s dragon nature. C. S. Lewis describes Eustace’s sinful nature as being scaly and ugly and unbearable. There was nothing that Eustace could do on his own to get rid of his dragon (sin) nature, that’s just the way he is at this point. But, out of his repentance, there was one who could help, Aslan.

Aslan did help. Eustace did not completely understand who this Lion was, but was willing to trust Him and accept His help. Aslan leads Eustace up to a high mountain which contained a very large pool. Eustace was to go into the pool and get cleansed. But before he could do that, he was first told to “undress.”

Eustace realized that he had to get rid of his old dragon skin before taking the dip in the cleansing pool. So Eustace peeled off his first layer of skin. The book explains how good it felt to get rid of this first layer. But looking into the pool, Eustace realizes that there is yet another layer to “undress,” so he does. Then after that, he discovers that there is still a third layer, so he takes that off as well. Eventually Eustace realizes that there is nothing he can do to “undress” the ugliness of his sin. That is when Aslan took over.

This is how Eustace described it to Edmund shortly after the fact: “‘The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff pull off. You know--if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.’”

After Aslan peeled all the skin off of Eustace, He grabbed Eustace in his mouth and threw him into the pool. It hurt at first but soon it become “perfectly delicious” and it felt very good.

When Eustace came out of the pool, he realized that he was a boy again and the pain had simply gone away. Aslan dressed him and put him back on the beach where Edmond found him soon afterward.

The thing is, the restored Eustace was now different. Now he understood when he was being intolerable. He still acted like his old self from time to time, but largely he began to behave better. He wanted to behave better. He wanted to be a different person than he used to be.

When Eustace finally made it back to his own world, other people found that he was different. Others started to comment upon how he had improved and now what a nice boy he has become. Not everyone approves of the change, however. His parents think that his cousins have simply brain-washed him and made him dim-witted.

When a person chooses to turn sin over to Jesus and have them washed away, not everyone will always see or agree with the “improvement.” Some people, sometimes to even include family members, will hate those who turn to God and accept Jesus as Lord.

Jesus said that people will hate you because they first hated Him. But Jesus also said that if others do hate you because you love Him, there will be a blessing.

Sin is ugly, scaly and unbearable. Sin separates us from those who love us, especially God. In fact, you can never be in God’s presence if you have sin. You must first “get undressed.” And you cannot “undress” yourself. The Lord Jesus has to take off all that ugly, scaly and unbearable stuff for you. When you accept this free gift from God, then you can fellowship with God for eternity. And you will begin to be a different person afterward.

Bill Wagner