PRACTICAL PREPARATION FOR THE FUTURE

You are growing up in a world where much emphasis is being placed on education. While millions of youths are not privileged to receive even a basic education due to poverty or inadequate educational facilities, others show contempt for school by playing hooky or attend only because they have to. Do you manifest such indifference toward your schooling? Or do you manifest the recognition that the education and skills you acquire now will have a great bearing on what you will get out of life?

Schooling involves more than book learning. It also involves the developing of abilities, habits and attitudes. Through this development a foundation is being laid on which you will build throughout the rest of your life. Therefore, in connection with your schooling, look beyond the present.

Habits you acquire now during your formative years will in later years be automatic, to your benefit or to your detriment, depending on whether the habit is good or bad. For example, if you learn to exercise your brain now by applying yourself to your studies, thinking and reasoning powers will be developed that you will use every day of your life.

Your preparation for the future involves more than just your schooling. At home, too, you should be developing qualities or traits that will later identify you as a mature adult. Cultivate such qualities as orderliness, cooperativeness, submissiveness, humility, dependability, initiative and thoroughness. The possession of such will have a profound effect on your relations with others and on privileges received.

ACTING WISELY ON THE BASIS OF THE ‘HIGHEST EDUCATION’

As important as your secular education may be, there is another education that is indispensable if you are going to be truly successful in life. You need to be educated in the Bible, the Word of God. Concerning this ‘highest education’ American educator William Lyon Phelps wrote:

“Everyone who has a thorough knowledge of the Bible may truly be called educated; and no other learning or culture, no matter how extensive or elegant, can . . . form a proper substitute. . . . I believe a knowledge of the Bible without a college course is more valuable than a college course without the Bible.”

Did you know that part of the Bible was written specifically for the benefit of young people? The book of Proverbs, for example, was written “to give to the inexperienced ones shrewdness, to a young man knowledge and thinking ability.” (Prov. 1:4) Among other things, the Bible will show you the advantage that true godly wisdom has over money. (Prov. 3:13-18; Eccl. 7:12) And its counsel will safeguard you against the way of regret and heartache.​—Proverbs, chapters 1, 5, 7.

With your future in view, God’s Word wisely admonishes: “Remember, now, your grand Creator in the days of your young manhood.” (Eccl. 12:1) Hundreds of thousands of youths, the world over, appreciating their indebtedness to their Creator, are remembering him by serving as witnesses to God and his kingdom. Hundreds of them are involved in the printing of this magazine and the many other publications of the Watch Tower Society. You may see them at work in the Society’s printing plants in such cities as London, New York, Helsinki, Toronto and Wiesbaden.

Such Christian youths know what they want out of life. Enlightened by Bible prophecies, they know that current world events mean that this present system of things with its hypocritical false religion, greedy commercialism and corrupt politics shortly now will be destroyed. So they wisely are building with a view to life in God’s righteous new order. They know that an eternity of tomorrows comes from remembering their Creator today, and, with a hope based on the promises of God, who cannot lie, they want to live a purposeful, happy life without end right here on this beautiful earth. Do you, too, want to embrace such a solid hope? Then respond to these words found in the Bible: “Choose life in order that you may keep alive . . . by loving Jehovah your God, by listening to his voice and by sticking to him; for he is your life and the length of your days.”​—Deut. 30:19, 20.

YOUTH AND AMBITION

Youth, young manhood or womanhood, is the time of life to get started in making yourself available for God’s service. That is when many young people begin to make plans for the future, when ambitions are formed. Are you in that stage of physical vigor? Then what are you doing? Are you sharing with worldly persons dreams of a future that will not be? Or do you keep ever in mind that this present wicked system of things is doomed to pass away in a time of great trouble? All its rich promises, its attractive well-paying jobs, its popular activities​—all are due to vanish from the earthly scene very soon now.

“Remember, now, your grand Creator in the days of your young manhood,” is the inspired advice to which you do well to pay attention. (Eccl. 12:1) That does not mean thinking about him as a last resort, or when there is no other thing to do. No, it means having the Creator and his will in mind with regard to all one’s thoughts and plans. If you are going to have a future, it is inseparably linked to God’s purposes and his congregation.

The “god of this system of things,” Satan the Devil, will do all in his power to divert you from a course of devotion to God. (2 Cor. 4:4) He will entice you through “the desires incidental to youth,” through worldly ambitions, preoccupation with sex, inducements to spend entirely too much time on music or the theater or to fill the mind with concern about sports. He is master of the art of occupying people’s minds and commandeering the lion’s share of their time. Will you be one of those caught in his snare?​—2 Tim. 2:22, 26; 1 Pet. 5:8.

Basically, there are only two choices open to you: To serve God or to serve this wicked system of things run by God’s enemy. To entertain ambitions tied in with Satan’s doomed system is in reality a waste of time and it can even place your own future in jeopardy. Far wiser it is to choose life by making yourself available for God’s service.