Moving Forward Personally: Walking the Discipleship Pathway | Chilliwack Campus

As you turn there, I want to talk to you about a fascinating cultural phenomenon happening right now.

Sociologists call it prolonged adolescence.

Are you familiar? Prolonged adolescence.

It's exactly what it sounds like.

Countless young adults in our nation continue to bear the markings of adolescent teens well into their twenties and thirties.

traditional markers of adulthood or things like finishing school, finding a career, leaving home, gaining financial independence, and sometimes getting married, starting a family.

These are all markers of adulthood, but these markers are being pushed back further and further in the last couple of decades.

Now, there are a number of factors for why that's happening.

Now, the common caricature of this, of course, is the 30-year-old guy who lives in his parents' basement.

And the only commitment he's made is to like video game marathons.

You know, and that's all he's got going on.

I know that's the caricature.

But what we all know that there is something deeply tragic about a 30-year-old acting like a teenager.

And that thing is funny in a sitcom, but it's actually heartbreaking in real life.

Why? Because we expect children to grow up.

The expectation is that young children grow up and that they mature, they mature physically, they mature mentally.

And when that doesn't happen, we actually recognize it's an indicator, something's wrong here.

Something's wrong.

Now, Here's the danger for us today is, well, we can spot prolonged adolescence from a mile away.

We're often completely blind to our own spiritual adolescence.

In fact, our text this morning, I just gotta be honest with you.

It pulls no punches.

It goes further than adolescence.

The author accuses the community of believers he's writing of being spiritual infants.

The writer of Hebrews, my paraphrase is like, you guys are babies, right? It's problematic.