Thoughts on April 16th, 2018
What’s on my mind Facebook asks… The challenges placed on our youth and young adults. With wonderful wife, Trisha, attending BYU and interacting daily with college students, as the father of four darling daughters, and serving in an LDS Young Single Adult Ward what else could be on my mind. I love and hurt for the youth and young adults.
Listened to this talk this morning from Ezra Taft Benson, given 48 years ago; but still very profound and relevant today.
“A study of Satan’s methods can alert us to his seductions. In his cunning he knows where and how to strike. It is in youth when his victims are most vulnerable. Youth is the springtime of life when all things are new. Youth is the spirit of adventure and awakening. It is a time of physical emerging when the body can attain the vigor and good health that may scorn the caution of temperance. Youth is a time of timelessness when the horizons of age often seem too distant to be noticed. Thus, the “now” generation forgets that the present will soon be the past that looks to a life left in waste or a past rich in works. These are the ingredients in youth that make Satan’s plan of “play now and pay later” so irresistible. Yes, the devil uses many tools.
A state of confusion is an effective environment for Satan. There is much confusion today. He employs several methods to create it. One is the distortion of definitions. To describe a drug experience he uses the term ‘mind expanding’ rather than the more accurate description of ‘reality shrinking.’
Freedom, a word of noble tradition, is a favorite confuser. Riots, bombings, arson, and killings are committed in the name of freedom. Obscenities test the freedom of speech. Pornography, drugs, and immorality are claimed to be manifestations of personal freedom, along with miniskirts and nudity. License and anarchy are products of these false freedoms.
A confusion of definitions includes pornography. A child can identify it, yet some of the supposedly great legal minds of our time cannot define it.
Tolerance is a word valuable in the service of Satan. Alexander Pope warned 200 years ago that:
‘Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.’ “
… that poem, wow…
The complete talk is a sobering reminder of 60+ years of Satan’s open attack on youth and young adults. It is a good read or listen.1Satan’s Thrust—Youth Ezra Taft Benson