U - D-Vote

Devotion - Week 9

TEXT

TEST

POINT
            As you become a student of influence, you can expect to be rejected by unbelieving friends. Here are three reasons why:

  1. You are a foreigner.

Speaking to his disciples only hours before his betrayal and arrest, Jesus said, “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you” (John 15:19)
If you were like everyone else in your high school, then you would be accepted as such. But Jesus’ point is clear: As a follower of Christ, you are not like everyone else. You are an alien. You’re like E.T. walking through the school hall. You stick out like a Marilyn Mason at a George Strait concert.

  1. Your unbelieving friends don’t have a relationship with Christ.

Jesus continued: “They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me” (John 16:3).
In rejection, the issue is a lack of relationship, not a lack of information. Unbelievers don’t believe that Jesus is who he claimed to be. Or they believe, but they have never trusted in him or submitted their lives to him. The whole idea of submitting to Christ – of placing their lives under the authority of an invisible God – seems incomprehensible and threatening. Rejection, then, is the result of unbelieving students not knowing Jesus. You are guilty simply by association.

  1. The Holy Spirit is at work convicting your friends through you.

We touched on this point in the last devotion. When you live out the Christ-life before your peers, the barrier that separates them from a holy God grows increasingly evident to them. You don’t have to continually berate your friends about sinful habits or lifestyles. What will cause sin to become more noticeable will be the striking contrast between their compromised lives and your life of freedom in Christ.
Why do you think your friends practically beg you to sin? Why the constant, never ending cascade of Max Q: “Come on, just one drink… just one drag… just one sniff”? Because you represent everything they know they could and should be – and they hate the comparison.  They want to blur the contrast.
Which teenagers will reject you the most vehemently? Not those “pagan” friends who have never stepped foot in church, whose lives are in complete shambles. No, the most intense rejection will come from those students who grew up in church and have since abandoned it. It will come from those teens that have experienced enough of religion to make them wary and skeptical. It will come from those who have seen the worst in people and mistakenly connect their bad experiences with God.
Be forewarned: Jesus was rejected. So were the disciples. You will be too. How will you respond? Are you secure enough in Christ to be able to handle rejection? What does being rejected say about you? Take a moment to write down your thoughts.