Dealing with peer pressure can make or break your life as a Christian.
In order to properly deal with such a powerful matter, I highly recommend you ask yourself these 3 questions:
- What is peer pressure?
- How is peer pressure affecting me?
- How can I manage the peer pressure in my life?
What is Peer Pressure?
Peer pressure can be defined as “influence from members of one’s peer group”1. Having the people around you impact the decisions you make in life is the best way to understand peer pressure.
To give an example, if you hang out with a bunch of friends who smoke weed, it is extremely likely that they will pressure you to smoke with them. Whether it’s intentional or not the influence will always be there.
How is Peer Pressure affecting me?
This is a very important question to ask yourself because you must understand the peer pressure that exists in your life, as well as what parts of your life it’s affecting. You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Feeding off the example given in the last section, if you are around 5 people smoking weed, chances are you smoke too.
The best way to find out how it’s affecting you is by identifying the habits and conversations that come from the 5 people closest to you. Then, you analyze what similarities most of your circle shares, and you’ll have your answer.
How can I manage the peer pressure in my life?
Finally an answer, there are tons of ways to deal with peer pressure in your life. The best thing to do is to take full control of it. After you’ve defined and analyzed your personal peer pressure, if necessary you need to redefine the relationships of certain people in your life.
There are many scriptures that guide us on how to handle peer pressure: 1 Corinthians 15:33, Romans 12:2, Galatians 1:10, etc. The one that supports this point the most is:
The righteous choose their friends carefully,
but the way of the wicked leads them astray.
Proverbs 12:26 (NIV)
Peer pressure should be viewed objectively. It can have a positive influence and an equally bad influence depending on how you manage it. If you’re attempting to grow closer to God, one of the best ways to do that is by curating your inner circle with strong-willed Christians. They will influence and support you to do more things in Christ that will help you on your journey.
