Grab Them With Passion

Kevin deYoung asks the question, "How do we win the next generation for Christ?" (He's not just talking about children.) He has five answers, each of which are given a chapter in this short book:

1. Grab them with passion
2. Win them with love
3. Hold them with holiness
4. Challenge them with truth
5. Amaze them with God

Grab them with passion

We would be far less likely to lose young people and far more likely to win some others if the spiritual temperature of our churches was something other than lukewarm. People need to see that God is the all-consuming reality in our lives.

We need passion, a zeal fueled by knowledge (Rom 10.2). Young people want to see that our faith actually matters to us. They are like Ben Franklin when asked why he was going to hear George Whitfield preach, "You don't even believe what he says," people told Franklin. To which he replied, "I know, but he does."....We cannot pass on what we do not feel. George Whitfield blasted the church in his day because "the generality of preachers talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ. The reasons why congregations have been so dead is because they have dead men to preach to them."

Every generation needs to hear the gospel with personal, passionate pleading...They need to hear the message from someone who not only understands it but has been captured by it. To grab the next generation with passion, we must be gripped with it ourselves. The world needs to see Christians burning, not with self-righteous fury at the sliding morals in our country, but with passion for God.

W.E. Sangster: "I'm not interested to know if you could set the Thames on fire. What I want to know is this: if I picked you up by the scruff of your neck and dropped you into the Thames, would it sizzle?"