a word before we begin
I should tell you plainly where I am writing from, My Friend, because it bears on everything that follows and I would not have you weigh a word of it without knowing. I am young. Not a child, but young, and young enough that some who read this will be a good deal older than I am, and will feel, not unreasonably, a flicker of the obvious objection: what does a young person imagine she has to say to me about wisdom, of all things?
It is a fair question, and I mean to answer it honestly rather than dodge it, because the answer is the whole reason this booklet exists. I am not writing as one who has arrived. I am writing from the position Timothy was given, a young person handed something true to carry and told by an old apostle to carry it, and told in the same breath exactly what a young person must beware of while he does. For Paul said two things to that young man, and he said them both on purpose, and this booklet lives in the space between them. He said, let no man despise thy youth. And he said, not a novice, lest he fall. Both of those are true. Both of them are for the young, and both of them are for the old who must decide what to do with the young, and I mean to hold them together and not let go of either one.
So this is written to the young and to the old alike, and everything true in it I received from others, most of them older than I am and a good many of them now home with the Lord, teaching me still through what they left behind. I did not generate one ounce of the wisdom in these pages. I am passing on what was handed to me, which is, come to think of it, the very thing the booklet is about.
chapter one
let no man despise thy youth
The warrant comes first, the permission the young are so often told they do not have, because the Word of God gives it plainly and I want it settled before we take up anything harder.
Paul wrote that to Timothy, a young man he had set over a church full of people older than himself, and it is a striking thing to say. He does not tell Timothy to wait until his hair goes grey before he opens his mouth. He tells him not to let anyone hold his youth against him, and then he tells him how to make the objection melt away, which is not by arguing but by living, by being an example so plainly godly that a man would be ashamed to sneer at it. The point is not that the young are wiser than the old. The point is that youth, all by itself, is not a disqualification from carrying a true thing, and the Lord has never once been shy about proving it.1
Look at how often He has done it. Samuel was only a boy, sleeping in the house of the Lord, when the word of God came to him in the night, and it came to him precisely because old Eli, the priest whose eyes had grown dim, had gone deaf to it. The Lord passed by the seasoned man and spoke to the child, and the child had to carry a hard word back to the old man in the morning. David was the youngest of all his brothers, left with the sheep because no one thought to call him in, and while the grown men of Israel stood frozen and trembling before the giant, it was the boy who saw plainly what the Lord could do and went and did it. Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign and still a young man when he tore down the idols his elders had bowed to for a lifetime. Daniel and his friends were youths in a foreign court when they held a line that older and wiser-seeming men had already surrendered. And a young girl named Mary, barely more than a child by our reckoning, carried the Lord of glory in her own body and sang a song that the church has not stopped singing in two thousand years.2
Youth, all by itself, is not a disqualification from carrying a true thing, and the Lord has never once been shy about proving it.
So do not let anyone tell you, and do not tell yourself, that a young person has nothing true to say until the calendar says otherwise. That is not the biblical picture. Truth does not check your age at the door. When the Lord has given a young soul something out of His Word, that soul may speak it, plainly and humbly, to the young and to the old alike, and the grey-headed man who will not hear a true thing merely because a young mouth said it has a problem of his own that we will name honestly in its place. The warrant is real. Hold it. But do not hold it by itself for even one page, because the very next thing Paul said to that same young man is the thing that keeps this warrant from turning into a disaster.
not a novice
is waiting for you
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sources & notes
- 1 Timothy 4:12, Paul’s charge to the young Timothy, “Let no man despise thy youth,” followed by the means of disarming the objection: exemplary conduct rather than argument. Cf. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Faithful (on 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), on Timothy’s youth and standing.
- The examples of youth entrusted with a true word: Samuel (1 Samuel 3), to whom the Lord spoke while Eli’s eyes and hearing had dimmed; David (1 Samuel 17), the youngest son who faced Goliath; Josiah (2 Kings 22:1; 2 Chronicles 34:1–3), king at eight and a reformer while still young; Daniel and his companions (Daniel 1); and Mary (Luke 1:26–55), whose Magnificat the church still sings.
- 1 Timothy 3:6, on the neophutos (“novice,” literally “newly planted”) not being set into leadership “lest being lifted up with pride he fall.” See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Novice,” on the horticultural image. The peril Paul names is pride, not merely inexperience.
- Proverbs 20:29 (“The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the grey head”), with Proverbs 16:31 (“The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness”). Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Proverbs 20 and 16.
- 1 Kings 12:1–19 (and 2 Chronicles 10), the account of Rehoboam forsaking the counsel of the old men for that of the young men who grew up with him, resulting in the permanent division of the kingdom. Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on 1 Kings 12.
- Titus 2:3–5, where the aged women are to sophronizo (train, school, bring to soundness of mind) the younger; with Deuteronomy 6:6–7 (teaching diligently “when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way”) and Psalm 78:4–6 on the generational handing-down. See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, on the sound-mindedness word group (sophron).
- The phrase “chronological snobbery” is C. S. Lewis’s, described in Surprised by Joy (1955) as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Lewis credits his friend Owen Barfield with curing him of it.
- Hebrews 5:12–14, on the mature (“of full age”) who “by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil,” distinguishing milk from strong meat; with 1 Peter 5:5–6 (“ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder... humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time”). Cf. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Confident (on Hebrews).