Graduation Address

All right I'm cheating a little bit with this blog post. This is the graduation address that I will be giving to the high school graduates at my Church this week, it's only a 5 to 6 minute talk so that's why it's short. I assume most of you will be blessed by the relative brevity compared to the previous posts though ;) Anyway I'd love feedback if you like it or don't like it, just leave a comment. Forgive the lack of blog output over the last few months, I've been reading a ton which will make any future blogging that much more edifying hopefully. I've also been greatly improving at golf.

                Hello everyone, I just want to start by thanking Pastor Morris for this opportunity to address our high school graduates. It’s really a little strange to be here speaking to you guys but it really is an honor. I’m pretty confident that I actually slept through Church this week 3 years ago when I graduated from Centreville so you guys are already a step ahead of the game on me. I only have a few minutes with you guys this morning so my remarks will be short, but as you guys prepare for the next stage of your lives whether it be college or something else I wanted to give you two exhortations and prayers for your futures.

                First, I pray that you will all seek the success in the life that truly matters and turn away from the “successes” of the world that you will be urged to pursue. Most all of you will be going onto this stage of your lives with the same mindset that I had going in, you do not want to fail, you want to succeed. The question I would challenge you to ask yourselves though is what kind of success are you seeking? Pastor Tim Kizzian put’s it like this,

“Our greatest fear as individuals and a Church should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” 

You see as you all move into this next stage of your lives you will be surrounded by people pushing you to succeed in things that don’t matter at all. In fact to word it even more strongly as the Bible does, you will be surrounded by people pushing you to success that can lead only to hell. Hell is as full of brilliant “success” stories as it is failures, and I have no doubt that there are many rich, well educated and nice college graduates there. When you die God will not ask you how much money you made, He will not ask you how many girls you slept with, He will not ask you what grades you made, and He will certainly not ask you how many Keg stands you did. But He will ask you “Were you faithful? Did you treasure me above all else?” So my brothers and sisters I exhort you in this next stage of your life, do not pursue the “successes” of this world, the sex, money and glamour. But pursue that success which is the only success that matters, the eternal success of faithfulness.

                Second, I pray that you will all be intentional in pursuing God during this next stage of your lives. Even after graduating college I still feel like I don’t know much, but if there is one thing that I know to be true of myself it is that my heart will never naturally choose the pursuit of God and holiness. When my heart has to decide between bible reading and SportsCenter I can promise you that it will choose SportsCenter every time. And I don’t think I’m alone in this, in fact the Bible tells us that this is our condition as fallen humans, although created for communion with Him; we will never naturally choose God. Pastor and Professor of Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School D.A. Carson summarizes it nicely like this,

“People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, and obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith…we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.” 

Perhaps many of you are like me and you have had a subpar relationship with God during your high school years. If you’re like me then you are looking forward to this next stage of your life and assuring yourself that you will grow in your relationship with God then. Let me promise you though, that if you are not intentional about your pursuit of God, if it is not the defining priority of your life, then you will not pursue Him nor will you grow in Him. You will spend your entire lives promising yourself that at that next stage of life, after you graduate college, after you’re married, after you have kids is when you are going to finally pursue Him, and then one day you will be facing Him and He will utter those fateful words from Matthew Chapter 7, “I never knew you; depart from me you workers of lawlessness.” But it doesn’t have to end that way, God has given us the gift of His Word and His Spirit to help us grow in our relationship with Him, and I promise you that if you are intentional about it, you will grow and it will be the most magnificent experience of your lives. You may not have the money, acclaim, or number of sexual partners as your peers, but you will have a joy that they do not know, and you will have an eternal life with your creator to look forward too. Be intentional. Let us pray.