Pressure
When I was a teenager, my brother and I had a friend named Travis who lived down the road from us in a nice neighborhood. Almost every week, he would show up at my house wanting to do “something fun.” While there were times when his idea of fun was simply playing video games or sports at a park, more often than not, that kind of fun wasn’t good enough for him, and he would come up with bigger, riskier ways to be entertained.
Sometimes he wanted to bang on doors late at night and run away. Other times he suggested going to Wal-Mart—not to shop, but to ride shopping carts and even bikes down the aisles. Needless to say, I didn’t care to participate in such antics, and yet, several times, I did. Why? Two words: peer pressure.
Webster’s Dictionary defines peer pressure as “a feeling that one must do the same things as other people of one’s age and social group in order to be liked or respected by them.” Anytime I hesitated to go along with his schemes, Travis would whine about how cowardly I was and how I didn’t know what real fun was. He made sure that if I refused to do what he wanted, I would feel as small as an ant.
When I was only 13, someone even tried to coax me into drinking moonshine. I didn’t exactly know what it was, but I knew the person offering it was not to be trusted. How many lives have been ruined by people giving in to peer pressure? This is not just a teenage problem. Buckling under peer pressure affects people of all ages.
The very first Psalm declares: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.” (Psalm 1:1–2) For the Christian, life should not be guided by the expectations and pressures of society, but by the truths and principles of Scripture. How wonderful it would be if believers were more concerned with yielding themselves to the leading of the Holy Spirit than with paying lip service to and following others!
