Listening for Answers to the Questions Every Teenager Is AskingSample

Day Five

Being WITH One Another

Scripture: John 13-17

Young people are hungry to be accepted, known, and welcomed for who they are. As they search for an answer to the big question “Where do I fit?” we can help them discover the Christ-centered answer: I belong with God’s people. 

God has created us to be in community WITH Him and WITH others through Jesus. We don’t have to earn love, acceptance, or our place in the body of Christ. We belong to God and one another. We are not alone. We are family. 

This is better news than just feeling “safe to be me.” Safety is fleeting, conditional and subject to how others make us feel. Make no mistake: safety is critical for relational connection. But our truest belonging is not dependent on the success or failure of others to live it out. It has already been decided by the unconditional love of God. 

As many of our teenagers have painfully discovered, those who initially make us feel like we belong can (and have) regularly let us down, making belonging perhaps the most complicated of the three big questions. 

Jesus’ entire life on earth put flesh on God’s commitment to be WITH us and is a model for how we are to be WITH one another. But perhaps no other portion of the Gospels captures WITH better than John chapters 13–17.

The introduction for this entire section is framed in love, which is the heart of belonging: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1). 

In John 13:1-30, the Master takes on the physical job of a servant, washing dirty feet. 

Then he tells the disciples to keep doing this for each other (John 13:14-15). That extends out to us—an invitation to take the same posture of being WITH one another by serving one another. 

Without missing a beat, Jesus sits at a table with his friends—even friends who would betray and desert him—and hands out bread. 

Taking these chapters as a whole, we see that Jesus gives us a better answer to the big question of belonging: We are friends who wash feet and share tables.

Christian community is fundamentally marked by a relational God who is willing to be WITH us—stinky feet and all.

What has been your experience, good or bad, of being WITH God’s people? How might that influence how you relate to teenagers in your life?