All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. 15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “ Abba, Father. ” 16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 17 But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.
Two-thirds of today’s teens are interested in having a meaningful relationship with God, yet less than one-third of them are active in a local church. Alvin Reid—an experienced pastor, professor, evangelist, and youth ministry speaker—suggests these statistics are more an indictment of the way the church does youth ministry than of the teens they try to reach.