"If I am not willing to take a stand for my generation, then who will? This year I have come to terms with the idea that I might be my own best hope to defend my future. Hopefully all of us will realize that we are the ones we have been waiting for." — envorinmentalist Tim DeChristopher, 27.
When I read that quote I thought, wow, that’s epic. Then I thought about this generation of teens and young people and how they are spiritually lost and morally corrupt. Here are some statisctic:
From Aquire the Fire (http://battlecry.com/pages/magnitude.php)
TELEVISION
This generation views 16 to 17 hours of television each week and sees on average 14,000 sexual scenes and references each year. That’s more than 38 references every day.
INTERNET
This generation spends three hours a day online and is the first to grow up with point-and-click pornography. Almost 90 percent of teens have viewed pornography online at one of the 300,000 adult websites, most while doing homework.
MUSIC
More than 25 percent of teen-targeted radio segments contain sexual content; 42 percent of the top selling CDs contain sexual content
ADVERTISING
With more than $128 billion dollars in their pockets, this generation has been targeted by corporate America, who does everything it can to grow brands and profits without any regard to the moral decay of a generation.
From Feminist Women’s Health Center, a *pro-abortion* website (http://www.fwhc.org/teens/teen-fact.htm)
The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate of all developed countries.
Most very young teens have not had intercourse: 8 in 10 girls and 7 in 10 boys are sexually inexperienced at age 15. Most young people begin having sex in their mid-to-late teens, about 8 years before they marry; more than half of 17-year-olds have had intercourse.
Nearly 1 million teens become pregnant each year; 78% of these pregnancies are unintended.
At current rates, 43% of American women will have at an abortion by age 45.
New study shows a "significant" increase in sexual content on TV over the last 2 years. The number of episodes with sexual content increased from 56% in the 1997-1998 season to 68% of all episodes in the 1999-2000 season.
From http://www.teendrugabuse.us/teendrugstatistics.html
– Illicit teen drug use as of 2003.
* 8th grade — 30.3%
* 10th grade — 44.9%
* 12th grade — 52.8%
– In the last thirty days 50% of teenagers report drinking with 32% being drunk at least on one occasion.
From cnn.com (http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/09/02/teen.suicides.ap/index.html)
The [teen] suicide rate was about 4.5 per 100,000 in 2005,the most recent data available. That follows an 18 percent spike the previous year that alarmed experts when first reported.
And perhaps the worst statictic of all:
Taking matters a step further, the Barna statistics show that the percentage of teens who are evangelicals – i.e., those who are not only born again but also believe in the accuracy of the Bible, personal responsibility to evangelize, believe in salvation by grace alone, and possess orthodox biblical views on God, Jesus and Satan – have declined from 10% in 1995 to just 4% today. — http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=111
Christians, we are losing a generation. We need to evangelize and pray for teens like never before. We need to support teen mininstires like Aquire the Fire, Dare 2 Share, and most importantly youth pastors at local churches. We need to reach out and show them the message of Salvation is just a releveant and powerfully today as it was 2000 years ago.
Tim DeChristopher is right. Who’s going to stand in the gap for this generation? It has to be me and you. Fighting for the envrionement is a noble cause, but fighting for the souls of men and women is an eternal cause.
C.S. Lewis said, "All that is not eternal is eternally useless."
Joel
