Centuries ago, as students came to the end of their academic careers at a particular school, they would appear before their teachers at the time of graduation. The teachers would pose a question to each student. The students would provide both an answer to the question and a defense of why their answer was correct. Graduation depended not only on knowing the right answer but on knowing why the right answer was the right answer.
Today’s graduates have begun to master the art of answering questions. They’ve answered history questions and science questions. They’ve probably answered literature questions about Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; math questions on fractions, quadratic equations; questions about the names of state capitals, former presidents, and the three branches of government. They have, I’m sure, answered questions, answered them often, and answered them well enough to be named for graduation.
There is, however, one more question, one essential question I would pose to anyone standing at the edge of a new beginning. It is not a hard question, but it is so important, and so life changing, that many people today prefer to avoid the question rather than face it.
I pose this one essential question, on the eve of graduation, because in my experience, no one else may ask you. Some will not ask you this question because they will assume you already know the answer. Some will not ask you this question because they do not yet know the answer themselves. Some will not ask you because they either think the question is not as important as it is or they think you’ll figure out for yourself eventually. But, because I know what an amazing difference having the answer to this essential question has made in my life, I pose the question now to you: I ask you, “What about Jesus?”
The Bible tells us that a day will come when, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Whether a person bows that day because they have to or because they want to; whether it is an act of humiliating submission or an expression of infinite joy depends entirely on how you answer the question, “What about Jesus?”
Graduates today go on from here to learn nursing, and medicine, and computer systems, and heavy equipment operations, and architecture, and accounting, and how to handle a career and a family, and thousand, and ten thousand and a million more things and make a billion contributions, good and bad, into the lives of others. Every one of them—and each and every one of you—has been made by God for a reason. You have a purpose today, a purpose designed by God for his infinite glory and for your eternal joy.
The Bible tells us that God created us to bear his image in the world, to put his character on display in our lives, so everyone would know how amazing and wonderful he is. But, we’re not so good at fulfilling this purpose for which God created us. God makes us to know joy and peace and love as we learn to know him better, but we choose hatred and violence and selfishness instead. The Bible calls our refusal to live up to God’s purpose for us sin and says that every single one of us are entangled in it. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” the Bible says. “There is none righteous, no not one,” we’re told in another place. And at one point, one Bible writer says, “We all like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
By nature and by choice we reject God and his purpose for us. And that puts us in a very unhappy predicament, opposed to God, rejecting our Creator the way a criminal rejects the law. And because we reject God and his will for us, preferring our own will over his, we are subject to his judgment.
But we are not without hope. God loves us so much, with such an infinite desire for us to know how immeasurably we are loved, that he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to live the life of love and obedience we cannot live, and to die upon the cross the death we all must die for our sin, to pay the penalty for sin that we ourselves can never pay. And to prove that Jesus accomplished that mission on the cross God raised him from the dead and proclaimed that if we would but become followers of Jesus, and put our faith in him, and live for him, God will forgive us on Christ’s account. God will not hold us guilty of our sins if we put our faith in Jesus.
The Bible tells us that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ. No one enters into forgiveness and eternal life except through Jesus and his death on the cross. So, I pose to you this question, “What about Jesus?” Will you seek him out and discover what Jesus has to offer? Will you learn of him and follow him and find the God-honoring life you were meant for? Will you ask more questions until you find you’re ready to answer this question, this one, all important essential question: what about Jesus?
Pastor Dale McIntire has served as pastor of the Cornerstone Community Church in Grand Marais since April of 1995.
Leave a Reply