(Graduation address continued)
Finally, if we want to know how to live, we have to learn to be people of honesty and forgiveness. Jesus said, "The truth will set you free."
I walked into my doctor's office about 8 years ago complaining of a chronic intestinal issue. It was a problem that went all the way back to my college days. I expected my doctor to give me a pep talk about my diet and to give me something to take for it. Instead, she looked at me right in the eye and said, "Until you deal with whatever is upsetting you, you are going to keep coming back here for the same problems." What? I thought she had lost her mind until I realized there was truth to what she was telling me. She wanted me to face my problems head on, tell myself the truth about them, give them to God, and then let go of them. On that day, I started down on what I call the "path of truth", and I've never looked back.
We live in a world of liars. Politicians lie, parents lie to their children, children lie to their parents, we live to ourselves. We lie, because we cannot face the truth about ourselves.
The truth is, we are made in the image of God, born with incredible gifts and abilities, but sin has destroyed that beauty. Like a masterpiece painted on a rotting canvas that has been knifed and then spray-painted with graffi, we cannot look at the beauty that is us without looking at the rot and damage that has been done. The horror that something so beautiful could be damaged so badly is unbearable to us, so we look the other way, or we lie about it.
This is why we must have that relationship with God that I talked about when I started. Christ died and rose again to deal with our sin. When we yield ourselves to God and allow Him to deal with our fallen nature, we begin to see for the first time who He meant for us to be. He begins restoration (our sanctification) on the masterpiece that is us. He restores the rotten canvas, cleans up the graffiti, repairs the holes, and we start becoming what He meant for us to be all along.
That means we ask God for grace to live a life of honesty and forgiveness: honesty with God by confessing our sins to Him daily and accepting His forgivenss; honesty with others by not hiding who we really are behind masks, vowing to tell the truth no matter how much it hurts, and forgiving others when they sin against us; and honesty, by refusing to lie to ourselves about what and who we really are and forgiving ourselves when we fail.
How shall we then live? We must vow to live with and for God first, and then for others.
What kind of people should we be? We must be men and women of truth and forgiveness.
I will close with this quotation from Oliver DeMille and Sharon Brooks in their book Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens.
It is said that when God wants to change the world, he sends a baby--perfectly timed to grow, learn, prepare, and then take action at the right moment...when God sees a need coming in the world, he sends a baby.
But there are times when one baby won't suffice, when the challenges the world faces are just too much; and so instead of a great reformer or a few key people, what is needed is a whole generation of leaders.
When the world is broken, a generation is born. We live in such a world. And you are such a generation.
Gandhi is ofen credited with saying that you should be the change you wish to see in the world. We wonder if he meant literally that you should change the world's problems in yourself? Maybe.
But we think he also meant that you should be who you were truly born to be-the best, true, Real You!
Is there anything in the world as powerful as a person who is truly himself? Or herself? Especially when the person is in love with good?
And I will add, especially when that person is in love with God and others.
Monday, May 17, 2010
How Shall We Then Live - Part Three
(Graduation address continued)
Next, if we want to know how to live, we need to learn that people are more important than our education, our jobs, our success, or our personal pleasure. Jesus said that the law can be summed up this way, "Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself." When we love our neighbors as ourselves, we think of others and their needs before our own.
There is a song written by Harry Chapin that was popular when I was growing up. I heard it again in the grocery store recently. It's called, "Cats in the Cradle". The song is about a father who is so busy with work and bills and responsibilities he doesn't have time to spend with his son. When the son is all grown up and the father finally has found some time to spend with his son, the son is too busy. It's a sad song, because it mirrors what so often happens. Our lives, our plans, our goals, our selfishness gets in the way of the people in our lives.
In February, we lost my brother-in-law to a tragic death. His own son shot and killed him. My sister's world was turned upside down in a matter of seconds. When she looked at the mess of her family and the destruction of her home by the police and investigators who ransacked her house and belongings, she said to me, "Next to God, the only thing that really matters in life is people." My sister lives what she said, and it became apparent when hundreds of her friends showed up to support her on the day of her husband's wake. The lines of people were out the door, and the ushers finally had to close the doors and send people away, because my sister was so exhausted from greeting them. There were over 500 who showed up, and she took the time to speak personally to every person who stepped in the door.
In the days that followed my 22-year-old nephew and I sat in a restaurant sipping coffee and reflecting on the lessons that God was teaching our family. I was telling him how difficult it is to balance all my responsibilites of housework, homeschooling, church and family and still give attention to the people in my life. He challenged me to make people my priority by doing at least one thing for someone every day that is a sacrifice to me, simply because I love them. I took up his challenge, and it has changed my life.
For me, a sacrifice is dropping what I'm doing to help my husband with one of his chores, or listening to one of my children telling me the same thing for the 10th time, or being kind to someone who has been unkind to me without expecting something in return.
If our society, if our world is falling apart, it's because we have forgotten that it is people who make our world what it is. And each perons in this world has value. If we don't invest in others, our soceity will self-destruct.
Next, if we want to know how to live, we need to learn that people are more important than our education, our jobs, our success, or our personal pleasure. Jesus said that the law can be summed up this way, "Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself." When we love our neighbors as ourselves, we think of others and their needs before our own.
There is a song written by Harry Chapin that was popular when I was growing up. I heard it again in the grocery store recently. It's called, "Cats in the Cradle". The song is about a father who is so busy with work and bills and responsibilities he doesn't have time to spend with his son. When the son is all grown up and the father finally has found some time to spend with his son, the son is too busy. It's a sad song, because it mirrors what so often happens. Our lives, our plans, our goals, our selfishness gets in the way of the people in our lives.
In February, we lost my brother-in-law to a tragic death. His own son shot and killed him. My sister's world was turned upside down in a matter of seconds. When she looked at the mess of her family and the destruction of her home by the police and investigators who ransacked her house and belongings, she said to me, "Next to God, the only thing that really matters in life is people." My sister lives what she said, and it became apparent when hundreds of her friends showed up to support her on the day of her husband's wake. The lines of people were out the door, and the ushers finally had to close the doors and send people away, because my sister was so exhausted from greeting them. There were over 500 who showed up, and she took the time to speak personally to every person who stepped in the door.
In the days that followed my 22-year-old nephew and I sat in a restaurant sipping coffee and reflecting on the lessons that God was teaching our family. I was telling him how difficult it is to balance all my responsibilites of housework, homeschooling, church and family and still give attention to the people in my life. He challenged me to make people my priority by doing at least one thing for someone every day that is a sacrifice to me, simply because I love them. I took up his challenge, and it has changed my life.
For me, a sacrifice is dropping what I'm doing to help my husband with one of his chores, or listening to one of my children telling me the same thing for the 10th time, or being kind to someone who has been unkind to me without expecting something in return.
If our society, if our world is falling apart, it's because we have forgotten that it is people who make our world what it is. And each perons in this world has value. If we don't invest in others, our soceity will self-destruct.
How Shall We Then Live - Part Two
(Graduatin speech continued)
So, how are you going to live your life? What kind of person are you going to be?
When my daughter was born, we put a lot of thought into what to name her. Her name is one my husband and I put together. "Anna" means "grace" and "lyn" (spelled slightly differently in Welsh) is a word that means "a rushing stream or waterfall". When she was a baby, I made a plaque to put on her wall. It had the meaning of her name, and it had some Scripture verses, one from Isaiah 55:1 which says "Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;" and from John 7:37, 38 "Jesus stood up and cried out, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water'".
We chose that name for our daughter, because we wanted her to remember every time she heard her name that God's grace is what she needs every day, and that the thirst of her soul can only be quenched by Jesus Christ. And this is true of all of us.
We are all thirsty in our souls, and our greatest temptation every day of our lives is to try to quench that thirst with anything we can think of but God, whether it be success, money, clothes, power, or prestige. The truth is that God is our source of satisfaction and all other things in life must revolve around our relationship with Him.
One of my dear friends passed away about this time a few years ago. To the world's standards, he died a failure. He had spent the first 45 years of his life trying to satisfy the needs of his heart with relationships, sex, hobbies, work, money and alcohol. But it all failed him. One day, he was taken to the hospital and died on the operating table in the emergency room. He had overdosed on something, and the doctors were ready to send him to the morgue when suddenly he came back to life. He told me, "When I died, I was not a Christian. When I woke, I was a Christian." He only lived another 5 years. At first, not much changed after his brush with death, and even to the casual observer, his faith in Christ seemed nothing more than an outward profession. He had been an alcoholic before, and he was still and alcoholic.
Within a year, he started connnecting with other believers, and his faith in Christ began to grow. he found a church and started meeting with a pastor who encouraged him to get some help with his alcohol addiction. He finally quit drinking, but sadly, the damage that had been done was so bad there was no hope for a physical recovery. He spent most of the last nine months of his life in a hospital bed dying of cancer brought on by decades of drinking. In those last months, we talked a lot, and our conversations would usually turn to the Lord. He would tell me how much he loved God, and then he would say "God has never let me down."
How could someone who was lying in bed in excruciating pain and dying of cancer which was brought on by his own foolishness say with such conviction, "God has never let me down."
In the last days of his life, my friend had finally learned how to live. he had developed a relationship with God. He was drinking from the foundation of living water, and his soul was being satisfied.
If we want to know how to live, we must make loving God the number one priority in our lives and learn to run to Him first and drink deeply when we feel thirst in our souls.
So, how are you going to live your life? What kind of person are you going to be?
When my daughter was born, we put a lot of thought into what to name her. Her name is one my husband and I put together. "Anna" means "grace" and "lyn" (spelled slightly differently in Welsh) is a word that means "a rushing stream or waterfall". When she was a baby, I made a plaque to put on her wall. It had the meaning of her name, and it had some Scripture verses, one from Isaiah 55:1 which says "Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;" and from John 7:37, 38 "Jesus stood up and cried out, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water'".
We chose that name for our daughter, because we wanted her to remember every time she heard her name that God's grace is what she needs every day, and that the thirst of her soul can only be quenched by Jesus Christ. And this is true of all of us.
We are all thirsty in our souls, and our greatest temptation every day of our lives is to try to quench that thirst with anything we can think of but God, whether it be success, money, clothes, power, or prestige. The truth is that God is our source of satisfaction and all other things in life must revolve around our relationship with Him.
One of my dear friends passed away about this time a few years ago. To the world's standards, he died a failure. He had spent the first 45 years of his life trying to satisfy the needs of his heart with relationships, sex, hobbies, work, money and alcohol. But it all failed him. One day, he was taken to the hospital and died on the operating table in the emergency room. He had overdosed on something, and the doctors were ready to send him to the morgue when suddenly he came back to life. He told me, "When I died, I was not a Christian. When I woke, I was a Christian." He only lived another 5 years. At first, not much changed after his brush with death, and even to the casual observer, his faith in Christ seemed nothing more than an outward profession. He had been an alcoholic before, and he was still and alcoholic.
Within a year, he started connnecting with other believers, and his faith in Christ began to grow. he found a church and started meeting with a pastor who encouraged him to get some help with his alcohol addiction. He finally quit drinking, but sadly, the damage that had been done was so bad there was no hope for a physical recovery. He spent most of the last nine months of his life in a hospital bed dying of cancer brought on by decades of drinking. In those last months, we talked a lot, and our conversations would usually turn to the Lord. He would tell me how much he loved God, and then he would say "God has never let me down."
How could someone who was lying in bed in excruciating pain and dying of cancer which was brought on by his own foolishness say with such conviction, "God has never let me down."
In the last days of his life, my friend had finally learned how to live. he had developed a relationship with God. He was drinking from the foundation of living water, and his soul was being satisfied.
If we want to know how to live, we must make loving God the number one priority in our lives and learn to run to Him first and drink deeply when we feel thirst in our souls.
How Shall We Then Live? Part One
The following is my address to a small group of homeschooled high school graduates (minus my introductions). Because of it's length, I will post in series over a few days.
The 1960s and 1970s were a time of upheaval, civil unrest and change. It's the world in which I grew up. We faced the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, drugs, the crumbling of society, the decay of the church, the breakdown of public education, race riots, the assassination of Kennedy, and Woodstock. I can remember as a small child driving into Chicago with my parents for a visit to the doctor and having to take a detour around a certain part of town because Martin Luther King, Jr. was speaking, and there were open riots in the streets. My sister, in her freshman year of high school had to keep her lunch under lock and key and guard it while she ate, because students were dropping LSD into other student's food. One summer, construction workers arrived at the public elementary school I attended and smashed down the interior walls. The next fall students were subjected to the new experiment of "open classrooms". In 5th grade, I was chosen to be an experiment for "individualized math" which was nothing more than a free hour to goof off in school every day while my fellow students actually learned something.
Even so, as a child and a teen, I was almost oblivious to what was going on around me. My parents pulled me out of the public school system when I was 12 years old and put me and my sisters in a private Christian school. Ours was one of the first Christian (protestant) schools in Illinois. My mother and father, who loved God first above all things, were willing to do what they believed was the right thing for their children in the face of opposition...and there was great opposition to private Christian schools in those days. The graduates of my high school and other schools like it became the pioneers of the home school movement. Some of the parents sitting in this room are part of my generation, and they, like my parents, in the face of opposition, forged forward and choose the education they believed to be the best for their children. If it were not for their efforts, we would not be here tonight.
Each era has its challenges, but some seem to be worse than others. Again, we are staring in the face of an evil age, and one far worse in many ways than what my generation faced, because the restraints of evil which were securely in place when I was a child have been thrown off, and men and women seem to feel no shame at doing whatever they please no matter how wicked it is. Goodness seems to be dying. Where are the righteous?
Tonight, you will walk out that door and officially being your life as an adult. Soon you will make choices about your career, your education, your politics and your relationships. You will decide where to live, where to go to church; but none of these decisions will make any difference in the long run if you haven't answered the question: "How Shall We Then Live?"
This question is the title of a book by Francis Schaeffer written during the great upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. I have to admit, I've never read it completely, but the title haunted me for years. As I faced the world around me, as I faced the decisions of life: who to marry, where to go to school, where to live, where to work, it was a question for which I needed an answer. And it is the question for which you need an answer. Because the Word of God teaches us that this world and all that is in it, is nothing more than place to hang our hats for a little while. It is who we are and what we do while we are here that matters.
The 1960s and 1970s were a time of upheaval, civil unrest and change. It's the world in which I grew up. We faced the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, drugs, the crumbling of society, the decay of the church, the breakdown of public education, race riots, the assassination of Kennedy, and Woodstock. I can remember as a small child driving into Chicago with my parents for a visit to the doctor and having to take a detour around a certain part of town because Martin Luther King, Jr. was speaking, and there were open riots in the streets. My sister, in her freshman year of high school had to keep her lunch under lock and key and guard it while she ate, because students were dropping LSD into other student's food. One summer, construction workers arrived at the public elementary school I attended and smashed down the interior walls. The next fall students were subjected to the new experiment of "open classrooms". In 5th grade, I was chosen to be an experiment for "individualized math" which was nothing more than a free hour to goof off in school every day while my fellow students actually learned something.
Even so, as a child and a teen, I was almost oblivious to what was going on around me. My parents pulled me out of the public school system when I was 12 years old and put me and my sisters in a private Christian school. Ours was one of the first Christian (protestant) schools in Illinois. My mother and father, who loved God first above all things, were willing to do what they believed was the right thing for their children in the face of opposition...and there was great opposition to private Christian schools in those days. The graduates of my high school and other schools like it became the pioneers of the home school movement. Some of the parents sitting in this room are part of my generation, and they, like my parents, in the face of opposition, forged forward and choose the education they believed to be the best for their children. If it were not for their efforts, we would not be here tonight.
Each era has its challenges, but some seem to be worse than others. Again, we are staring in the face of an evil age, and one far worse in many ways than what my generation faced, because the restraints of evil which were securely in place when I was a child have been thrown off, and men and women seem to feel no shame at doing whatever they please no matter how wicked it is. Goodness seems to be dying. Where are the righteous?
Tonight, you will walk out that door and officially being your life as an adult. Soon you will make choices about your career, your education, your politics and your relationships. You will decide where to live, where to go to church; but none of these decisions will make any difference in the long run if you haven't answered the question: "How Shall We Then Live?"
This question is the title of a book by Francis Schaeffer written during the great upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. I have to admit, I've never read it completely, but the title haunted me for years. As I faced the world around me, as I faced the decisions of life: who to marry, where to go to school, where to live, where to work, it was a question for which I needed an answer. And it is the question for which you need an answer. Because the Word of God teaches us that this world and all that is in it, is nothing more than place to hang our hats for a little while. It is who we are and what we do while we are here that matters.
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