Empty Promises Part II: A Call to Action

This post is meant as a follow-up to to Empty Promises Part I, which I published about a month ago (before a hiatus for my marriage proposal and the holidays). So if you don’t remember the thoughts there, go ahead and re-read Part I if you would like this to make sense.

I guess I want to start with a question. What’s the Church to do when the music industry churns out 15 year-old pop stars who generate 22 million hits on a single YouTube video all on the premise of exploiting the eternal longings of teenage girls? I can think of a couple that might be helpful:

1) Tell the better love story
Justin Bieber is making millions by performing songs written by people who know the formula for stirred teenage emotions all too well. They’re sort of poets of corruption; people well-acquainted with the desires and longings of the human heart who can weave words masterfully to illustrate a compelling, yet unattainable solution for them. But we can do better.

As followers of Christ, we have been been awakened to the deepest needs of our heart by the God who satisfies every longing. And He removes our need for the hiding and denial we relied on when we knew no one who could meet them. I think that means we should have the most compelling songs in the world. The Church should be the ones writing most beautifully of the perfect solution to our heart’s longings because we’ve actually experiencing that longing being met; its not mere fanciful imagination as it necessarily is with other songwriters.

I would love to see preachers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ begin to put the music industry to shame in terms of their ability to proclaim of a lover who satisfies. Imagine if Justin Bieber’s second album absolutely tanked because the next generation of young people has instead been captivated by a community of psalmists and storytellers who proclaim a love infinitely more beautiful than anything heard in a pop song. We already have the Scriptures (which tell of the greatest love story ever known to man) for inspiration. Now if only we would let the creative spirit of the Imago Dei work in us.  That’s what I mean when I say we could use to sharpen our storytelling.

2) Teach a Theology of Love
I think there needs to be an active effort in the Church to teach teens what true love actually looks like. Older (especially married) believers know that the expectations of romance cast in Justin Bieber music videos are fanciful, ridiculous, and extraordinarily unhealthy. It’s why you don’t see screaming 40 year-old women at Justin Bieber concerts or Twilight premiers. But our teens deserve to know better also.

Our youth pastors need to preach compellingly on what biblical love looks like. Yes, it looks like sacrificing greatly for the joy and benefit of another. Yes, romance is incredibly beautiful and meant to mimic the way Christ relentlessly pursues His Church despite all her failings. But we need to teach a clear understanding of depravity also. Another human being can bring you great joy, but not all the time. And if your expectation is that someone would make you happy all the time or deeply fulfill you, you will be a very depressed person.

You’ll be depressed because you’re practicing idolatry: putting a created thing (a human being) in the Creator’s proper place (Romans 1:25). Idolatry destroys the self because our heart and soul were not made for fulfillment to come from another human, they were made for fulfillment to come from knowing God.  Thus our deepest longings are necessarily left unmet if we expect another person to bring us that fulfillment. To put another human being in that place not only robs the Lord of his proper place in our heart, arousing his righteous jealousy, but it’s horribly unfair to the other person to put such a great weight on them. No wonder the first year of marriage is so often the most depressed year of a person’s life and the divorce rate is what it is in America. Our expectations (most of which come from popular media) have set us up for monumental failure.

The good news is that we can actually restore the deep satisfaction and joy that come from great relationships with one another by teaching young people what relationships can and cannot rightfully fulfill in this life. I truly believe that we could see the divorce rate in the Church plummet simply by teaching on relational idolatry from a young age. But as it stands, it seems that Justin Bieber is our teacher on relationships.

And just in case you forgot the implications of that, let me leave you with one thing…

Related posts:

1. Empty Promises Part I: A Tragedy
2. We Are All Witnesses