The people around you definitely have a big impact on your life. And the friend you have now will have a big influence on your quality of life now and where your life ends up later. That's because friends are a big deal. So we need to surround ourselves with the right influences who make our lives better. We get to choose the impact they have on our lives.

Growing up, we weren't always taught how to be good friends. We were taught to say thank you, work hard and behave, but we weren't taught how to manage friendships well. So we are left to try to figure out friendships naturally on our own, which is hard to do when friendships are always changing and expectations aren't always met. But to create good friendships, we need to be proactive instead of reactive. That means we need to serve our friends, just like Jesus served His disciples.

All teenagers think about their body image. In fact, even adults think about their body image all the time. We have a specific way that we view ourselves, and we have a specific way that we think that other people view us. And this can center around any number of things. Things like our height, muscle mass, hair, acne, skin tone, weight, as well as other things. But when it comes to body image, you and I need to examine our thoughts. We need to be kind to ourselves and see ourselves as made in the image of God, as a beautiful creation.

No one is meant to figure out life on their own. With so much noise going on around us, we need to figure out who to listen to. When we look for someone who is older than us who is living the life that we want ours to look like, then we should allow ourselves to listen to them. Everyone needs a mentor in their life who can speak truth into our lives so we can grow in wisdom.

When Paul wrote to the young leader, Timothy, He didn't see him as someone who would be a great leader later. Paul saw him as someone who could be a great leader while he was young. Even though you're young now, God still has a purpose for your time as a teenager. So decide what you want your teenagers years to be all about, and live it out.

When it comes to our faith, some of us feel underestimated by others. We feel like our faith is not challenged. But some of us feel like there are just too many pressures when it comes to our faith. Like we have to live up to a certain level to be a "good Christian." Today we look at the example in 1 Timothy where Paul tells Timothy to be the example and don't let anyone look down on you because of your age. When we see how Timothy lived, we can realize that we can own our own faith and grow to be more like Jesus.

Most of us feel like we have to fight for ourselves to get through life on top. That may mean cutting others down so we can feel better about ourselves. But Jesus flipped that idea upside down. He cared more about how we love and serve other people. He knew that when we served others, we would experience the true freedom that Jesus wants us to have. We are free to make a difference in other people's lives.

When we think about sin, we think about it like a sliding scale. Some sin is definitely worst than others. So then we start to naturally ask the question, "What can I get away with and still not be a 'bad person'?" But that shouldn't be the question we ask at all. What we should do is think about what our future will look like with the choices we make now. Because what we plant now is what we'll harvest later. So the real question we should ask is, "What do we want to harvest?"

As teenagers, we're always worrying about winning the approval from others. Maybe it's our parents, our teachers, our coaches, or even our friends. We care what people think about us. But scripture tells us that the only approval we need to be thinking about is God's approval. When we do things for God, it changes the priorities of everything else in our lives.

Many of us may think that when it comes to our faith, it's all about the rules. "Thou shalt not do certain things and thou shalt do other things" is what we have probably heard while growing up. But because of Jesus, we are set free from the rules. Instead of thinking of faith as things that you can and cannot do, it's more important to think of faith like a destination. What do we want our future to look like? Now start setting the right course for our lives.