Doubt, Faith and the Teenage Brain

hey guys I just want to take some time to share a short clip of a video from a sermon that I preached back in I believe it was like May of 2017 specifically relating to adolescents who are doubting and have skeptical questions about their faith and I wanted to share that because um I know a lot of parents and I know a lot of you who are either teens or you have teens that you're raising who are starting to ask questions about their faith and for someone who doesn't understand what's happening inside the teenage brain that can be a scary thing because we look at them and think that they're abandoning their faith but really what's happening is their brains are just growing and they're beginning to ask questions of everything everything was you know even the things that they believe in when it comes to Jesus and so I'm hoping that this is this video clip reassures you that it's a natural thing to have doubts but there are also some things that we can do to help teens work through their doubts as you're watching I hope that you'll click that subscribe button and even the thumbs up to like the video so that any parents who are looking around YouTube or looking around the internet for why their teens or down and go spell upon this video and hopefully will then it be a benefit to them just like I hope it's a benefit to you so check out this video now when you're a kid everything's wonderful and everything's great and you make all the right decisions but those decisions come from the parents teaching you right like I know for my my kids I taught them things like I said this is the ABCs and that's an important thing to keep in your mind this is the one two threes and we taught them how to count we taught them to always listen to adults and always be respectful and always to say sorry and they get that and one of the things that happens in the brain of a child is they develop all these neurons of the brain like way more brain cells than you could ever use like millions upon millions and that's why kids always ask the question why why why why it's because they have all this new cells in their brain and they're trying to fill it up with little pieces of information but then along comes the adolescent years and they begin to lose their minds literally begin to lose their minds this is what happens during the adolescent years they take all that information that we taught them as a kid and it to transfer from a child's brain into an adolescents brain so that I become can become an adult brain and essentially what happens is that all that information all those right decisions all that respect that we taught them it begins to be trying to be poured into the adolescent brain and it gets messy like they start to lose their mind all over the place the things that we taught them I taught you to be respectful how could you not be respectful in that incidence it's because they lost their minds in the transfer of information of the adolescent brain when you ask them how could you not do your homework I don't know like didn't I tell you to go clean your room and then five seconds later you sit on the couch in front of the TV and start typing on your phone did you not hear what I told you to do oh no guess what they don't know they got lost somewhere in the process now what happens in the transfer of this information something a little more complex than just pouring it into a backpack what's actually happening with those cells inside of the brain is it goes through a process of preparing for adulthood and the first the preparation of that is actually all those little pieces of information in the individual brain cells and in those neurons there's this little road that connects all of our brain cells together called synapses and during this time those little roads of information that sends information from one cell to the other to the other to the other they begin to go through a construction process where instead of being roads when you get in the adolescent years it turns into super highways of information we're information that you have in your brain it begins to travel at 200 times the speed that it did when it was a child now for most of you most of your brain cells I would hope have already gone through this process and all of this decisions you make you can make decisions really really fast and you know that decisions are dependent on other parts of life as well so you can make a career decision at the same time you're thinking about your family at the same time you're thinking about your hobbies at the same time you're thinking about a whole bunch of different things because all the information travels really fast for an adolescent they're just starting to get that that ability it's slow moving processes they look like adults and they're turning into adults but anytime you're doing road construction turning a road into a highway for those of you ever driven on 70 or 64 you understand that road construction causes lots of problems and everything gets lost in the process right now something else happens with that information all this information that you learned as a child all these brain cells that you got not only is the connection between them getting faster but your brain is also starting to make decisions on what to keep and what to get rid of because there's way too many you don't need that many and so it begins to go through a process called pruning and basically pruning is a use-it-or-lose-it strategy that the brain uses the brain looks at all these pieces of information that you've given like oh your parents taught you the ABCs we use letters we use language all the time so I'm gonna keep that in my new brain I'm gonna use that for the rest of my life and we learned about math I personally did not use that very much and so my brain said you're never gonna understand that and it just got rid of it now there's other things that are really important what your brain says is the more you use it this is what solidifies in your brain if you use it we're gonna keep it in the seamen's gonna become dry and it's gonna be a part of who you are for the rest of your life if we don't use it we're gonna toss it to the side and you can find later you can in other phases of life you can go searching for and make it part of it but it's going to be much harder for those of you who are really into sports and really good at sports during those adolescent years the brain said we're gonna keep that skill some of you are like never good at sports and like art was your thing or music was your thing and so your brain got rid of that that ability and kept the artistic stuff now this is something really important to understand and the reason that we're talking about this is because this has huge implications for faith development is here's what I know that a lot of you guys have experienced as a child or maybe you're experiencing now with your child where your parent comes along and they pray with you or they take you to Sunday school or they're reading the Bible to you and they're putting the information in your brain about God loves you and they make it a part of who you are in your childhood that we love you and they make it a part of your childhood or that Jesus Christ he died for us and he's real and they make it part of the childhood and then along comes adolescence where the brain begins to look at that information that you've put in and they begin to do something for the very first time adolescents gain the ability to question and doubt information and this isn't the thing that they were able to do in childhood you would put it in there and they were just accepted as fact now in the adolescent brain they begin to question and doubt everything is math useful do I need to keep this in my brain yes we'll put it in no we'll get rid of it but they also ask that question to the stuff we teach them about faith is God really loving and they ask questions for the first time I know Mom said he is I know dad said he is is Jesus real does prayer really work and during this phase adolescents begin to question and doubt everything and this is crucial and it's also scary for adolescents for the first time they're saying well maybe this isn't true what they said about God in church or at home and it is frightening because many adolescence most adolescents start to have these questions but they don't feel like they have someone comfortable they feel comfortable asking those questions too if I ask mom and dad they're gonna panic and think I'm leaving the faith I can't ask those at church because I got to pretend like I know everything and I just got to believe in faith without asking questions and so they keep those things quiet and then it's crucial for parents because parents look at it as like they're bad parents like if I was a good parents if I did all the right things my kid wouldn't question Jesus and that's not true questioning and doubting is all part of transfer of information into an adolescent brain and questioning and answering is not a bad thing in fact it's natural it's not a sign of bad parenting it's a sign of turning into an adolescent there's this lady Cara Powell she's the executive director of a Research Institute in California she says it's about when it comes to faith she says doubt isn't toxic to faith but silence is doubt isn't toxic a lot of us think if you've got doubts then that means the other your faith is falling apart and that's not true if you've got doubts that means there's stuff to learn where it becomes toxic is if you have doubts in your mind and you have nobody to help you determine whether this is something to keep or something to get rid of and so we've got a lot of teens a lot of people in the adolescence face who have those doubts have question about what do I do with this do I keep it or do I get rid of it and we have to surround them with people who aren't afraid of their doubts

Channel: Nikomas Perez

Views: 6,200

Keywords: teaching, christian, harvester, sermon, devo, bible, adolescence, doubts, skeptics, gen z

Id: E_q9IJqflSI

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 02 2018