My Youth
/The most comforting and reassuring thing in the world is obeying God’s word.
As a young man in leadership, I have heard and read 1 Timothy 4:12 a bajillion times. But just hearing it doesn’t comfort me or make me feel any better about being called “Buddy” by older believers.
”Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.”
Throughout my years in ministry, I have struggled through being despised and disrespected because of my age. But it wasn’t until I began leading adult counselors (who are my peers or older than me) that I realized I am actually the worst culprit of despising my youth. I easily find myself in a downward spiral of self-loathing. This causes others to doubt me and despise my youth, ultimately making my leadership ineffective and difficult to follow. And at that point, I look around and find that I’m in complete disobedience to the word. My eyes quickly focus on who I am in the flesh—a 27-year-old youth pastor—and then nothing works or feels right.
I obeyed.
The last several years God has grown me through many issues related to my youth and inexperience, perhaps ones you're facing right now.
When I was 19, I began helping lead worship at my first home church. I played guitar and drums about once a month and I loved having a place to serve and use my gifts to edify the body. I was super comfortable, and God was using me.
Then Brian Bustos asked if I wanted to be discipled by him. That’s when things started unraveling and God began to bring me out of my comfort zone. I was a very young and immature believer, but Brian sacrificed for and invested in me for almost two years. I thank God for Brian reaching out and launching me into all that God had for me.
As we began working through the discipleship lessons, Brian asked if I wanted to help him lead worship at Midtown Baptist Temple at a Tuesday Night Prayer service. He asked me to help several more times on Tuesdays as I continued my once-a-month Sunday routine at my home church. I readily accepted the invitations to play with him until we got to the lesson on the local church. I was at a crossroads and had to decide whether I was going to buy in with discipleship and ministry at MBT or continue at the comfortable church I attended. God called me to MBT. I obeyed.
God put leaders in my life to instruct, protect, and lead me.
I served on the praise team at MBT for several years under Brian, Eric Phillips, and Rosie Fyffe, learning hard lessons of ministry, leadership, and my relationships with the Lord and other believers. Those years are some of the dearest to me and included some of my first experiences getting to lead people. I was young, but God put leaders in my life to instruct, protect, and lead me.
In 2012, the Lord called me and my wife (fiancee at the time) to join Student Ministry. We were called to submit to Pastor Brandon Briscoe as our leader and be trained to teach and invest God’s word into young people.
Kylie and I led worship in Student Ministry for a year or two until Brandon sat me down and asked me to pray about teaching the middle school class. In a short two or three years, I went from deciding which church to plug into to deciding what I was going to preach every week and how to best invest in 12-year-olds. I was only 22 years old and felt fully the weight of shepherding the souls of men. God had led me to a place where I was very uncomfortable, and my age was often at the forefront of my mind. However, God called me to pastor. I obeyed.
But I still have a lot of youth in me
Fast forward several years and I am still a young man, still under 30 years old, yet now pastoring believers ages 11 to 55. I have the same burden as I did before: to let God use me as his mouthpiece to edify, lead, and pastor believers at MBT. I am a pastor, married, have a full-time job, have pretty much given up on participating regularly in sports except for long-distance running and cycling, and have two children... things that would seemingly give me more authority or respectable standing with counselors, parents, and students. But I still have a lot of youth in me. I am still young enough to have my age and inexperience despised.
So how do you shake these feelings of weakness and self-pity? How do you convince yourself that your age doesn’t matter? How do you minister to and counsel people who are old enough to be your parents? How do you pastor and counsel parents when you don’t have children or your children are still young?
The answer I have found: obey.
What people think about you is none of your business.
“Let no man despise thy youth…”
This makes me ask...how do I escape the despising that comes from others and even myself? How do I not allow people to despise my youth?
“But be thou an example of the believers…”
You may not be the dad or mom in their lives. You may not be the big brother or sister in terms of age or life experience. You may not be the pastor. You may not be the popular leader or the popular discipler. But you must be their example.
“...in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.”
The call God has for young leaders is to obey what he's called them to do: exhibit a life that follows God’s word, letting him lead and change and mold and conform you. Obey God.
Maybe my mom can help us all out a little. We're called to cast down imaginations and thoughts that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God, and one way my mom taught me to do that is sharing this timeless advice:
“What people think about you is none of your business.”
The only opinion of you that matters is that of your Father in Heaven. Be young. Be youthful. Be obedient.
Jeff Grasher is the pastor over the student ministry at Midtown Baptist Temple. He serves alongside his wife, Kylie, and their two daughters. In this post, Jeff shares how God has taught him to lead other believers as a young man and the importance of not despising our own youth.