Sunday, March 13, 2016

To students: The greatest scholastic advice I've ever heard

Students, as you enter the home stretch, getting closer and closer to putting another year of school behind you, I pray that you finish this year strong. As the weather gets warmer and the year seems to have gone on forever, it can be tempting to let up or slow up, and coast on in. Do your best...

In keeping with that tradition, I'm going to give you the greatest piece of scholastic advice that I've ever heard. This piece of advice is one, that if you incorporate it into your life, can make all the difference, not just with your grades, but in your job performance and successes afterwards.

It comes from my mother-in-law. (It's also something my mother practiced in our home as well.) Katye has told me several times that in the later years of high school, when school work started to pile up and their church services met on Sunday evenings, there was always a temptation to put off the paper, or the studying until Sunday night, and use that as an excuse to stay home from church, because "school work" is more important...God will always be there.

But that was never an option...Jon and Marie would have none of that. They would always say that an "A" or a "B" might soon be forgotten, but teaching a child who was most important in their home would never go away, and being consistent with that value was important. Marie would refer to 1 Samuel 2:30, where the Lord spoke to man and said "...But I will honor those who honor me, and I will despise those who think lightly of me." That's the Message Version, but you get the point.

If you put your schoolwork ahead of God and think lightly of Him, that will not have Him on your side when the time of the test or the paper comes....and honestly, if I want ANYONE on my side at that point, it's the Lord.

The truth is that most of the time it isn't really schoolwork that nudges God out at all. We prioritize our activities on Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, a couple of hours of sleep and a myriad of other things that we are actually putting ahead of God...we just find it easier to justify in our own minds by saying it's "school work". If you really want to look for the priority, skip the soccer game or the afternoon at the lake, or leave an hour early, and study on the way home. It's VERY easy to find the hour and a half of travel-time and worship that we think is impossible to overcome, when we get real with ourselves and put priorities in order.

Don't forget Proverbs 21:2 which reminds us of our own "endless capacity to justify" our actions, but how God is never fooled for a millisecond by things that we even try to fool ourselves with.

How did that strategy fair? Shouldn't Katye and I have failed out and been last in our class, underachieved and such, because of the 2 hours of Sunday night church (that most people don't even have anymore)...actually we both had full ride academic scholarships to head into college with. I don't trot that out to brag, but to say that it is important to honor the Lord and those lessons are still teaching me long after the grades from Calculus are long gone.

I don't know if that's how it will show up for you, but it will always be more beneficial than establishing any sort of home system that puts God second or third. When your very home system is setup to fail at honoring the Lord, you just preach hypocrisy when you try to sing about how there's no one greater than God in your life to your children...believe you me, their "genuine" meter is on wide open in the teenage years looking for things to challenge, whether they tell you or not. Consistency and integrity on your part is huge, Christian parents. "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will NOT depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6)...because if there is one thing you do want, it is the Lord in your corner to honor you, because you are honoring Him.