New Morning Mercies for Teens Excerpt

INTRODUC TION

You are a teenager: that means you are in one of the most exciting and most important times of your life! As you begin to read through this special edition of New Morning Mercies for Teens, I want to alert you to seven issues you will face that will influence the shape and direction of the rest of your life.

1. During these years you will begin to decide the meaning and purpose of your life. So far, your values—the things you think are worth living for—have been shaped by your parents. You begin to make that critical decision for yourself during your teen years. What will be the thing that will capture your heart and shape the direction of your life?

2. Will you internalize the faith you have been taught? There is probably no more significant decision in life than this one. Everyone believes something. Every home has religious convictions, whether or not they consider themselves religious. Every home seeks to instill their “faith” in their children. In the teen years, you will decide what you will believe about God, about yourself, about right and wrong, about what is true and what is false, about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and about how you will live out your beliefs in everyday life.

3. You will make significant decisions that shape your future. Wow, there are huge decisions ahead of you! What are your gifts, interests, and passions? What do you see as your life’s work? Where will you go to college? Will the church be an essential part of your life? If you could have your dream future, what would it be?

4. You will begin stepping out of some daily parental protection. During the younger years of your life, your parents made all of your decisions for you. During the teen years, you begin to make more and more of those decisions for yourself.

I don’t mean that you no longer need parents. However, you are moving into ix

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Introduction

a stage where rather than exercising total control over your life, your parents will offer you wise counsel, while you will bear more and more of the burden of making the decisions that will shape how you live.

5. What kind of community will you surround yourself with? This is a big one. Until now, your mom, dad, grandparent, or guardian have chosen the community they felt comfortable having you in. They were the gatekeepers, vetting the friends that came into your life. But now, you will increasingly have that responsibility.

Who will you allow into your life? Whose advice and counsel will you listen to?

Who will you entrust with the important things in your life? Who will you allow to influence the way you think and the way that you live? You will surround yourself with others, and those people will significantly impact who you become.

6. How seriously will you pursue your relationship with God? Most teens were first exposed to God, his will, and his way in their homes and by their parents. My mom and dad thought a relationship with God was the most important thing for me, but I had to decide that for myself at some point (which I did during my teen years). No one can make you love God. No one can make you willing to surrender your heart and life to him. No one has the power to produce faith in you. Will you make God the center of your life? Will you pursue him every day?

7. What kind of success will you value most? Every human being runs after some type of success. Everybody defines what a successful life is. Will you live for material success? Will you live for career success? Will you define success in money terms? Will success be determined by how many people love and respect you?

Will success be defined as living a life pleasing to your Creator? You will define success somehow, and how you define it will determine how you live.

Since you will be asked to grapple with life-shaping issues in your teen years, you will need reliable, true, and trustworthy guidance. What will be your life GPS? Whose plan for life will you follow? I love what the Bible says in Psalm 119:105, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” God gave you his word to be a guide to you. As you walk through the forest of life, often dark with roots that will trip you up, the Bible has been given to you to light the way so you can be sure of where to go and how to get there. The central theme of the word of God is the story of the transforming grace that is ours because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

I am excited that you are about to embark on a journey through this special edition of New Morning Mercies, designed specifically for teens. Each daily reading includes a brief devotional, a passage from Scripture to meditate on, and a

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Introduction xi reflection question that applies to what you’re facing in life. We’ve also added a new Q&A bonus chapter, with questions about topics that every teen will experience and how the Bible provides answers. So be sure to visit and revisit the back of this book when these issues arise in your life.

My prayer is that in your daily devotional time with the Lord and this book, you will be reminded of the truths of God’s word day after day. May it cause you to admit how much you need the forgiving, reconciling, and transforming grace of Jesus. And may it give you wisdom from God’s word to live by. There is no better way to prepare for all the significant issues that will shape your future than to spend time every day meditating on God’s truth, remembering his grace, and recommitting yourself to a life shaped by following him.

May God use these devotions to light the exciting path before you.

Paul David Tripp May 26, 2023

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JA NUA RY 1 Here’s the bottom line. The Christian life, the church, and our faith are not about us, they’re about him—his plan, his kingdom, his glory.

It really is the struggle of struggles. It is the thing that makes our lives messy. It is what sidetracks our thoughts and kidnaps our desires. It is the one battle that one never escapes. It is the one place where ten out of ten of us need rescue.

It is the fight that God wages on our behalf to help us to remember this: life is simply not about us.

This is precisely why the first four words of the Bible may be its most important words: “In the beginning, God . . .” (Gen. 1:1). Everything that was created was made by God and for God. All the glories of the created world were designed to point to his glory. That includes you and me. We were not meant to live independently for our own moments of glory. No, we were created to live for him.

Where is this godward living meant to find expression? I love how Paul captures this in 1 Co­rin­thi­ans 10:31: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” When Paul thinks of the call to live for the glory of God, he doesn’t first think of the big, life-changing, spiritual moments of life.

No, he thinks of something mundane and repetitive, like eating and drinking.

Even the most regular, seemingly unimportant tasks of my life must be shaped and directed by a heartfelt desire for the glory of God. Let’s start the new year by admitting that there is nothing less natural for us than to live for the glory of another. This admission is not the doorway to despair but to hope. God knew that in your sin you would never live this way, so he sent his Son. Jesus lived the life you couldn’t, died on your behalf, and rose again, conquering sin and death. He did this so that you would be forgiven for your allegiance to your own glory. When you admit your need for help, you connect yourself to the rescue he has already provided in his Son, Jesus.

Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness! (Ps. 115:1)

Reflect: Where do you feel hopeless this week? How does reaching out for God’s rescue actually give you hope to live for God’s glory?

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JA NUA RY 2 Your rest is not to be found in figuring your life out but in ­trusting the one who has it all figured out for your good and his glory.

We were on our way to the local mall with our two young boys when the threeyear-old asked out of the blue, “Daddy, if God made everything, did he make light poles?” When he asked, I had the same thought that all parents have: “Why does he have to ask me ‘why’ questions all the time?”

Human beings have a deep desire to know and understand. Each day we spend a lot of mental time trying to figure things out. We don’t live by instinct. We are all archaeologists who dig into the mounds of our lives to try to make sense of the civilization that is our story. We are all theologians.

God gave us this drive to know, and he also gave wonderful abilities to analyze.

This motivation and ability set us apart from the rest of creation. They are created

by God to draw us to him, so that we can know him and understand ourselves in light of his existence and will.

But sin makes this drive and these gifts dangerous. They tempt us to think that we can find our hearts by figuring it all out. We think: “If only I could understand this or that, then I’d be secure.” But it never works.

In your most brilliant moment, you will still be left with mystery in your life; sometimes even painful mystery. We all face things that appear to make little sense. So we never find rest in our quest to understand it all. No, rest is found in trusting the one who understands it all and rules it all for his glory and our good.

In moments when you wish you knew what you can’t know, there is one who knows. He loves you and rules what you don’t understand with your good in mind. Few passages capture this kind of rest better than Psalm 62: For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.

He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

On God rests my salvation and my glory; my mighty rock, my refuge is God. (Ps. 62:5–7)

Reflect: Do you ever struggle with doubt? How does God’s love give better rest to your soul than God’s answers?

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JA NUA RY 3 If eternity is the plan, then it makes no sense to shrink your ­living down to the needs and wants of this little moment.

There is no doubt about it—the Bible is a big-picture book that calls us to bigpicture living. Often we shrink our focus to whatever spontaneous thought, emotion, or need grips us at any given time. Yet the Bible simply does not permit you to live for the moment. God’s word calls you to think about things that happened before the world began and thousands of years into eternity in the future.

But it’s hard to live with eternity in view. Again and again, life shrinks our focus down to the moment in front of us. There are moments when it seems that the most important thing in life is getting through this day of classes, winning this game, or getting more food. There are moments when who we are, who God is, and where this whole thing is going shrink into the background of the thoughts, emotions, and needs of the moment. There are moments when we get lost, even though we’re in the middle of God’s story. We lose our minds, we lose our sense of direction, and we lose our remembrance of him.

God reminds us that this is not all there is, that we were created and re-created in Christ Jesus for eternity. He reminds us not to live for the treasures of the moment: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:19–20).

Think about this: if God has already granted you a place in eternity, then he has also granted you all the grace you need along the way, or you’d never get there. There is grace for our easily distracted hearts. There is rescue for our selfabsorption and lack of focus. The God of eternity grants you his eternal grace so that you can live with eternity in view.

But God said to him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. (Luke 12:20–21)

Reflect: At the beginning and ending of your day, how can you set your mind on eternity?

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JA NUA RY 4 The best theology will not remove mystery from your life, so rest is found in trusting the one who rules, is all, and knows no mystery.

In 2006, a drunk and unlicensed driver swerved up on the sidewalk and crushed our daughter Nicole against a wall. She had devastating injuries. The injury shattered her pelvis and triggered massive internal bleeding. I rushed to the hospital. When I entered Nicole’s intensive-care room, I wasn’t sure if she could hear me. I crawled up on Nicole’s bed and whispered, “It’s Dad, you’re not alone.

God is with you too.”

That day, I felt like the whole world went dark. My heart cried, “Why, why, why?”

If I could choose, I wouldn’t have any of my children go through such a thing.

And if I had had to choose one of my children, I wouldn’t have chosen Nicole at that moment in her life. She seemed so vulnerable. But in an instant, we had been cast into life-changing mystery. And all our belief in God didn’t take that mystery away. Nicole did recover well, but we lived through four years of hardship.

During that time, here was my comfort: when it came to Nicole’s accident, God was neither surprised nor afraid. You see, there is no mystery with God. He is never caught off guard. I love the words of Daniel 2:22: “He knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with him.”

God is with you in your moments of darkness because he will never leave you.

But your darkness isn’t dark to him. He understands all the things that confuse you the most. Your mysteries aren’t mysterious to him. More than that: he is in complete charge of all that is mysterious to you and me.

Remember this: what you see as dark, God sees as light. He holds both you and your mysteries in his gracious hands. And that means you can find rest even when the darkness of mystery has entered your life.

Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?

It is higher than heaven—what can you do?

Deeper than Sheol—what can you know?

Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea. (Job 11:7–9)

Reflect: What confuses you about life right now? Ask God to give you his light about that area. And ask him for strength to trust him in the dark, while you wait for his light.

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JA NUA RY 5 If you obey for a thousand years, you’re no more ­accepted than when you first believed; your acceptance is based on Christ’s righteousness and not yours.

Sin is a bigger disaster than we think, and grace is more amazing than we seem able to grasp. Because if you know what the Bible says about sin, you know it’s impossible for someone to rise to God’s standard of perfection. No one can perform his or her way into acceptance with God. What an insane delusion! Yet we all tend to think that we are more righteous than we are. And when we think this, we’ve taken the first step to embracing our own delusion: maybe we’re not so bad in God’s eyes after all.

This is why the reality check of Romans 3:20 is so important. Paul writes, “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight.” If you prayed every moment of your life, you could not pray enough prayers to earn acceptance with God. If you gave every penny of every dollar that you ever earned in every job you ever had, you could not give enough to deserve acceptance with God. If every word you ever spoke was uttered with the purest motives, you would never be able to speak your way into reconciliation with God. Sin is too big.

God’s bar is too high. It is beyond the reach of every human being who has ever taken his or her first breath.

This is why God, in love, sent his Son (Rom. 5:8). You see, there was and is no other way. There is only one portal to acceptance with God—the righteousness of Christ. His righteousness is given over to our account; sinners are welcomed into the presence of a holy God based on the perfect obedience of another.

Christ is our hope, Christ is our rest, Christ is our peace. He perfectly fulfilled God’s requirement so that in our sin, weakness, and failure we would never again have to fear God’s anger. This is what grace does! So as the children of grace, we obey as a service of worship, not in a desperate attempt to do what is impossible—independently earn God’s favor.

God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

(Rom. 5:8)

Reflect: What’s been the biggest hardship of your week? Take a few minutes to compare this hardship with the disaster of sin. How is Christ your hope over all of it?

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Bonus Chapter

Q & A FOR TEENS W ITH PAUL TRIPP

During the teen years, you will move from having your parents think for you, or tell you what to think, to becoming a young adult, capable of thinking for yourself. In this bonus chapter, I have provided answers to questions about life that you will surely encounter. These answers are not designed to be comprehensive or specific. Yet Lord willing, they will help you to get started in learning how to think biblically about the everyday personal and cultural issues you will face as you continue to mature and eventually leave your home to build life on your own.

The stories, commands, wisdom, and principles found within the Bible have been recorded and preserved for you so that you can think, desire, choose, speak, and act in the way God intended in the context of your everyday life and culture.

Although the Bible doesn’t directly address many of the issues that you will have to face during your teen years, it does provide a body of wisdom that will help you decide how to respond to whatever comes your way.

As you grapple with the questions and answers that follow, may God bless you as you learn how to think through the issues of your generation in a way that is distinctively biblical.

Paul David Tripp May 26, 2023 Anxiety and Depression I feel anxious, even depressed. It feels like I have a dark cloud of sadness that follows me nearly every day, or that I experience panic attacks. I know the Bible says, “Do not be anxious about anything” (Phil. 4:6) and “In your presence there is fullness of joy” (Ps. 16:11), but I just can’t seem to get over my anxiety or depression. How can I find peace and happiness?

367

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368 Q&A for Teens with Paul Tripp These experiences of fear, discouragement, depression, and anxiety are more normal than we tend to realize or are willing to talk honestly about. All of these emotions are pictured for us in God’s word. Why are they normal? First, we live in a broken world that doesn’t function the way God intended for it to function.

Second, that brokenness is not just outside of us, but it’s inside of us as well. Our minds, our emotions, and our physical bodies don’t always function the way God designed for them to function when he created perfect people living in a perfect world. So the first thing you need to do when you’re suffering with anxiety, fear, or depression is don’t let shame drive you into silence and hiding.

One of the beautiful things the Bible tells us is that Jesus carried our shame (Heb. 12:2). Hanging naked on the cross, Jesus shamed shame so that we don’t have to live in shame any longer. Don’t act like you’re okay when you’re not. Don’t put on a front, a happy face. Don’t hide in shame. Be honest with yourself about what you’re facing and then be honest with people around you. When I encounter people who are crippled by fear, crippled by anxiety, or paralyzed by depression, I encourage them to seek help. When you’re dealing with these struggles and emotions, it’s hard to get out of your own head. It’s almost impossible to objectively step outside of yourself and tell yourself the things that you need to hear.

There may actually be physiological components to your anxiety or depression, so reach out for help and don’t hide in shame. Don’t allow yourself to think that you’re abnormal or the only one struggling. These are the regular experiences of life in a fallen world. Because he loves us, God has provided help for us. He has designed for us to live in community, and as a teenager, it’s really good for you to get a hold of this: a healthy life, spiritually and emotionally, is a community project. You can’t do it on our own. You won’t make it on your own. We all need help, so get help. Reach out for help, and don’t hide in shame if you’re struggling with fear, depression, or anxiety.

Sex and Marriage A lot of my friends are having sex, or at least messing around. I know the Bible says I’m supposed to wait until marriage before sex, but if I told my friends I believed that, I’d be made fun of. What’s actually so wrong or dangerous with sexual activity before marriage, and why does the Bible command us to wait?

God designed a world with all kinds of pleasures, and he created human beings to live in that world with what I call “pleasure gates”—our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, our ability to touch—so that we could enjoy those pleasures. Enjoying pleasure is not something God is against. In fact, when I enjoy pleasure God’s way, it actually brings glory to God!

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But any pleasure that God has created and designed for us to enjoy, whether it’s sex, food, or entertainment, requires boundaries. You can’t eat a piece of chocolate cake anytime you want without hurting your health. In the same way, sexual pleasure (which God designed for us to enjoy and pursue) requires boundaries.

The question is: Who is going to define and set those boundaries?

Because God is my Creator, he knows everything about me. He knows everything about the way I am put together. He knows everything about what is wise for me and what is foolish for me, what is good for me, what is dangerous for me.

There’s no one who could know me better than God does. For example, when you buy a new car, what’s in the glove box? An owner’s manual. That manual is there to tell you how to best maintain that car, to keep it running on the road for as long as possible. Why is that manual reliable? Because the manual was written by the person who designed and manufactured your car. It’s trustworthy.

In the same way, God has provided us with a manual of how we are to operate. It’s called the Bible. He made us, he wrote the owner’s manual, and it’s the best thing you could ever trust. So, here’s the decision you have to make, and this is very hard. You will either believe, “My culture and my friends and my desires (which are sinful, mind you!) are right, and they are best for me, so I will follow them.” Or you will believe, “God knows best, and although it’s hard because everybody seems to be going in the opposite direction, I’m going to trust in the perfect holiness, the perfect wisdom, the perfect love, and the perfect goodness of God. Even though it doesn’t make sense and I don’t have all the answers, I’m going to live the way God intended because he made me and knows me and wants what is best for me.”

When it comes to your sexuality, do you believe that God’s laws are good for you? They’re not meant to crush or limit your pleasure. Because God is perfectly holy all the time and in every way, it’s impossible for him to give you counsel, advice, and commands that are bad for you. What God commands of you is always good for you. God’s boundaries for sex and sexual pleasure is never a restriction; it’s an invitation for you to enjoy those pleasures in ways that God intended.

P.S.—If you’re a teen who hasn’t waited, or if you’ve been sexually active and now you’re in a place where you’re feeling shame and regret, let me say this: regret in the hands of God is a good and beautiful thing. God uses regret to draw us to himself. Why? Not so he can condemn us, but so he can wrap his arms of love and grace around us, offer us forgiveness, and give us divine power to take our lives in another direction. If you’re feeling regret about your sexual life, don’t run away from God. Run toward him. Your sin doesn’t make you disgusting to God. Your sin excites his mercy and causes him to offer you the grace you need.

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370 Q&A for Teens with Paul Tripp Pornography and Sexting Lots of my friends are looking at pornography or sending sexual images and videos to each other. I’ve been asked to send these images and have been sent them without even asking. I know I shouldn’t look at these things online or participate in sexting, but it seems impossible to avoid.

If you’re going to stay pure in this sex-crazed culture and age of digital technology, then you have to be prepared to fight temptation 24/7. But it’s not just about avoiding the sin and sex outside of you in the culture, on the internet, and circulating around in your friend group. It’s always first about the sinful and selfish desires inside of your heart. It’s only the sin inside us that every time magnetizes us to the sin outside us.

When Jesus teaches us to pray, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matt. 6:13), he is calling us to admit that the evil that is the greatest danger to us is the evil inside each of us. If you want to stay pure, you need to be honest: while you might be able to escape the evil of a certain location, avoid an evil in a specific situation, or run from an evil person, you cannot run from the evil inside yourself. Only grace has the power to rescue you from you and to deliver you from the most threatening evil of all—the evil that still resides in your heart.

But of course, if you’re going to fight temptation, then you have to be very careful and intentional with what you expose yourself to. Not everything on Netflix is going to help you to think correctly about sexuality. Not everything on TikTok or Instagram will be helpful for your eyes and your heart. Here’s the question: If you want to be sexually pure, are you willing to say no to the popular things that everybody is participating in, watching, or talking about that will increase your temptation and make your struggle with purity even harder?

It’s hard not to be laughing along with everybody else or talking with everybody else about what they saw the night before on that show or when sharing videos or reels or memes. Yet being pure means being willing to make sacrifices so that, by God’s grace, you have greater control of your mind, thoughts, desires, and emotions.

Gender, Pronouns, and Sexual Identity Some of my peers and adults around me are either changing their pronouns, their dress, their gender, or some other aspect of their sexual identity. Why can’t love be love, and shouldn’t Christians accept people for wanting to be their authentic selves? Is the Bible’s teaching about one man and one woman outdated, harmful, and oppressive?

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During this moment in our culture, where the conversation is focused on being your true authentic self, this is where the timelessness of the word of God is so helpful. God intended his word to be so powerfully truthful that it will never become outdated. “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isa. 40:6–8). This is where you have to say, “I’m either going to listen to the word of God, to God’s eternally wise and good and loving perspective,” or I’m just going to say, “I want to be where my culture is.”

The answer to the question, “What is my authentic self?” is found in the very first pages of the word of God. If there is a Creator—and there is—who designed us, created us, and put us together, then my authentic self is found in his creation, his design. If by his creative and sovereign design, I’m a biological male, no matter where my feelings take me, that is my authentic self. Why? Because that is the self the Creator designed for me to be. If he created me to be a biological female, then there’s no more authentic self than the fact that I’m a female. Why? Because that’s the self God designed for me to be.

If you go back to the beginning, it says God designed Adam and Eve male and female. It’s very possible for your desires, emotions, and feelings to go all over the place. Yet that doesn’t mean those emotions or desires are then the ruling definition of authenticity for you. Your emotions will lie to you. Your desires will lie to you. They will change, they will fade, they will blow with the winds of culture. But with the word of God that stands forever, you have a standard that you can run to and say, “Even though I feel this way, even though I’m pulled in this direction, even though I feel, at this period of time, more comfortable over here, God determines who my authentic self is. He’s done that because he is my Creator, he loves me, and he knows what is best for me.”

The Goodness of God and Hell If God is truly good and loving, why do bad things happen? And how can a loving God send people to hell?

There are two things that are important to say to this huge question that theologians have debated for centuries. The first is that God, for our good and his glory, has designed for us to live in a terribly broken world. In Romans 8, the apostle Paul says, “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (8:22–23). You groan when you’re in

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372 Q&A for Teens with Paul Tripp pain, discouraged, or hopeless. We live in a broken, fallen, dysfunctional world, and it’s impossible to live without that brokenness entering your door.

If you’re not suffering now, you will someday, and if you’re not suffering now, you’re near someone who is. That’s not because God hates us, it’s not because he is uncaring, it’s not because he is too weak to help us or his ear is not tuned to our cries for help (Isa. 59:1). It’s because this messed up world is our address, and right here, right now, we don’t get a ticket out of that brokenness.

There’s a second thing that’s important to understand (and I don’t think this is a theological or philosophical cop-out): God will confuse you. God exists at a level beyond our understanding. I can remember when our children were three or four years old, and I would have to say, no to them. They would say, “But Daddy, why? Why not? Why can’t I do that?” As their father, I knew that the explanation I could give was way beyond their ability to understand. So I would kneel down in front of them and say, “Does your Daddy love you?” (Yes) “Is your Daddy a monster who wants bad things to happen to you?” (No) Then I would say, “Daddy can’t explain to you why he said no. Now you can either walk down the hallway and say, ‘I have a bad Daddy because my Daddy says no to me,’ or you can say, ‘I don’t understand why my Daddy said no, but I know my Daddy loves me and knows what is best for me.’ ” Peace will never be found in understanding. Why? Because there are things you and I will experience that we will never understand. Peace is found in trusting the one who understands it all and who rules in a way that we won’t fully understand but ultimately rules for our good. I know you probably want a more specific answer than that, but God never gives it. There are things that remain in his secret will because we would never be able to handle them if we understood them. God says, “I’m good. I love you. I know what is best. Trust me.” It’s in that trust that you find rest.

In the same thought, let’s consider hell. The Scriptures are filled with themes of punishment and the consequences of sin. The most ultimate is hell. And just like the question above, why a loving God allows bad things to happen, there are two important keys to remember when asking about God and hell.

The first is this: human beings are not central in the biblical story, God is.

This is God’s story and God’s world. You could argue that the most important words in the Bible are the first four, “In the beginning, God. . . .” (Gen. 1:1). If God was first on site, if God created all that we know, then everything is his and everything belongs to him. “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36). And so, whatever doctrine or reality we look at and ask hard questions about, whether it’s human

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Q&A for Teens with Paul Tripp

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suffering or hell, we have to look at it from the centrality of the glory, holiness, and perfection of God. You’ll never ever understand difficult doctrines unless you start there. This is God’s world and his rules.

If that’s true, and it is because the Bible declares it to be, then God has the right to do with this world whatever he wishes because it’s his. In addition to my writing, I also like to paint. So when I put my hands, my brushes, and my paint to a canvas, it’s my creation. I can do with it whatever I want because it belongs to me and that’s the position of a creator.

There’s a second key to remember: that human beings are unworthy. The mistake that people make is to think that people are good by nature and, therefore, that we deserve good things to happen to us. Meanwhile, the Bible declares the polar opposite.

One of the most shocking passages in all of the Bible is in Psalm 58:3, which says, “The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth, speaking lies.” Similarly, David writes in Psalm 51:5, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” There’s never been a moment in my existence where I was good, never a moment from my very first breath, where I have had God in his rightful place. “As it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one’ ” (Rom. 3:10–12).

So hell is not this horrible place where an unloving God unjustly sends these good people who are in the center of the universe. Hell is actually the rightful state of everyone who has ever been born because everyone who was ever born rejects and rebels against the one who is central.

I don’t actually struggle with the doctrine of hell. I struggle with how Paul Tripp could ever be freed from that destiny that I truly deserve. How could there be mercy this great? How could there be grace this huge? How could it be possible that people who shake their fists in the face of the one who created them and is central could wrap his arms of love around them and invite them to spend eternity in his presence? That’s the doctrine that is crazy to me, made possible only by the cross of Jesus Christ.

Hell isn’t crazy to me. It’s heart-breaking, and we should never want anybody to ever be in hell, but hell makes sense to me. God’s mercy given to me makes no sense except for the sacrifice, the payment, of Jesus. That’s how I handle the doctrine of hell.

P.S.—These tough questions won’t end after you leave the teenage years. You’ll continue to have them, and you’ll either let those questions drive you away from God or those questions will drive you toward him to find your rest in his wisdom and goodness.

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