*This blog post is a follow-up to Episode 98 of the Provoke & Inspire Podcast: When the Church Doesn’t Get You, Keeping 1st Things 1st, and David Gets Called a Lady.

If you haven’t listened to this episode yet, you can do so here:

iTunes: https://apple.co/1QrunuE
Soundcloud: https://bit.ly/2Jmgxhv

Loneliness is killing us.

Several years ago, I experienced a short season of loneliness that gave me a taste of how intense it can be.

Recently, I saw a meme that showed a cartoon Jesus and a tagline that said, “I died! April fools!” and another one that exclaimed, “YOLO. JK. BRB!” (You Only Live Once. Just Kidding. Be Right Back!)

Some of you may have seen these and even laughed. I didn’t.

To hear the guys discuss this topic on the Provoke&Inspire podcast click here.

In a recent interview with the Australian music website Music Feeds, Spencer Chamberlain of the band Underoath claims that Christianity ruined his life. 

God wants to use your life to change the world, but I’ve learned that this will not happen without courage. The trouble is that there is a lot of confusion over just what it is.

One second I was talking with my dad and Valery (one of Steiger’s Ukrainian missionaries), and an instant later, it felt as though a bomb had gone off. Stunned and covered in debris, it was hard to process what had just happened. We were on tour in Brazil with No Longer Music, and our driver had gotten into a lane not intended for the height of our bus. Traveling at well over 60 miles per hour, we smashed into a horizontal steel beam, knocking our air conditioning unit clean off the bus’s roof.

I had never experienced a more violent moment in my whole life.

Living radically for Jesus has never been easy. Throughout this blog series, I have unpacked some specific obstacles for millennials entering into a life of radical obedience to Christ. I will try to wrap things up by addressing a barrier that is arguably the most problematic of them all, and it’s this: many millennials fail to follow Jesus radically because they are unwilling to submit to institutions and the leaders that run them.

God desires to use Millennials to change the world, but as with every generation, they face unique roadblocks to living in radical obedience, and they seem to experience a particular difficulty in entering the mission field. In my previous blog posts in this series, I addressed two significant reasons why: fear of commitment and the need to instantly specialize.

In this post, I would like to look at a more fundamental barrier - the fear of the very title itself.

I am passionate about challenging millennials to get outside of the church and boldly share the Gospel. Each generation faces unique barriers to following God in a radical way. In every age, we are called to subvert the values of secular culture and confront the idols that are destroying people. There is perhaps no greater idol today than ourselves.

The first time I heard about Nabeel Qureshi was when someone handed me a copy of Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus. I was on tour with No Longer Music, and I flew through the book on the two-day journey from Germany to Portugal.

I have had the privilege of sharing the Gospel in many countries with predominantly Muslim populations, including Northern Iraq, Lebanon, and Turkey, and Nabeel’s story was inspiring and incredibly helpful. I was profoundly affected by his remarkable testimony, and was struck by how difficult it is for a Muslim to convert to Christianity.