Have you looked at your curriculum lately with the eye of one of your students? Does it spend most of the lesson teaching students what they are not supposed to do? It’s natural we would want our students to avoid ungodly behaviors. It’s loving to want them to avoid making ungodly choices at their young age and suffer the earthly consequences. What we sometimes forget is because of their lack of life experience, they may not know what to do instead of the ungodly behavior.
Think about the young child who has just been taught to never tell a lie. He now feels it necessary to share every hurtful thought that races through his head. He needs to be taught that we don’t need to offer our opinion to everyone. It may be our truth and when asked what we think, it is the truth. It is not however necessarily the truth in the reality sense of the word and doesn’t need to be offered just because the child might think it could be true.
Or the teen who is told getting high is not a godly way to handle stress. Great. What are godly ways of handling that stress that will work for her? She may not know. Depending upon her environment, she may be encouraged to replace getting high with equally ungodly behaviors (that she may not realize are ungodly yet.)
The next time you have a lesson that seems to focus on what your students should NOT be doing, make sure you give them some godly alternatives to do instead. Something will go in that vacuum their obedience to God leaves. Make sure they are able to fill that vacuum with godly behaviors and not more ungodly ones. Give them lots of ideas and help them find ones that will work for them. Then when the time arrives, they will be prepared to make good choices.