Spiritual Adulting Series

I talked with a man this week. He's thirty-nine years old. His name is Reggie. He works at

ShopRite. So you might see him there. Should you come in contact with him, you can greet him

as I did. We were talking about life. Reggie now at thirty-nine years old is getting his life

together, so to speak. He made decisions in his teens and his twenties that now have made it

difficult for him to kind of get his life together. But now he's getting his life together in some

good ways. And I commend him for doing that.

There's a word we use for that. It's called adulting. Adulting is a word. Maybe you haven't heard

of it, but young people use it a lot. Because it refers to this idea of kind of growing up. It’s when

you start managing yourself because your parents aren't managing you anymore. So you've got to

manage yourself. I was talking to some people in their twenties this week and they were saying,

“Yep, we're learning how to eat differently. We can't eat now like we ate in our teens.” I’m

thinking, “Yes, I’m learning that too.” There's these important lessons that we learn that are all

part of adulting in our lives. And Reggie now at thirty-nine is adulting.

I wish that I could help young people do the adulting thing earlier. Because there's so many

things, there's a path that you can take in life where you can avoid much of the stuff that you

accumulate when you go off and do things that aren't the best, that are not according to God's

ways. But sometimes when you're a teenager or when you're in your twenties you don't know the

dangers that are out there, so it's hard exactly to know what to do.

I made a decision at fourteen years old. I was saved already, but at fourteen years old I decided I

was not going to get involved in some of the things the other teenagers were getting involved in.

I wasn’t going to rebel against my parents, which seemed to be the norm at that time. I was going

to just try to do the right thing. And I am so glad that I did that.

There's a way to live your lives that can start adulting a lot easier. If you're here today and you're

thirty-nine and above or you're adulting now, that's okay. I commend you because whatever age

you are, adulting is important. But if you're younger, I just want to say, trust the Lord now and

start the adulting process early. It'll save you a lot of pain and a lot of challenges that you might

experience in your life.

If we were to look at a key passage of scripture that's about adulting, we would come to this one

in Ephesians 4:14-15. So let me read this to you. Because this is what it says. So that we may no

longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine,

by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are

to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. When we understand what that

means it really helps us to make some decisions that could help us to be more serious about our

faith, to grow up in our faith because that is where so much of the success is found in our lives.

That's what the believers in Nehemiah’s time are discovering.

So we're only going to look at two verses today. I'm going to slow the whole study down a bit.

We've been taking a chapter at a time. But the next three weeks we're going to take just a couple

of verses. Next week, only one verse. And we're going to slow it down a bit because we're going

to see adulting happening in these people over the next three weeks.

What's happened is that they have… Well let’s read the passage. Stand with me. Let's read these

two verses, that's all, in Nehemiah 10. We're not going to read the first twenty-seven verses,

which are just the names of all the people that signed the agreement. But in verse 28, it's one big

long sentence. I'll take breaths in the middle. I can't get through the whole thing in one breath.

But it's one big long sentence. It says this: The rest of the people, the priests, the Levites, the

gatekeepers, the singers, the temple servants, and all who have separated themselves from the

peoples of the lands to the Law of God, their wives, their sons, their daughters, all who have

knowledge and understanding, join with their brothers, their nobles, and enter into a curse and