[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. -Proverbs 3:5-7


My oldest grandson just graduated from university. It was a big affair with the commencement speaker being former President Jimmy Carter and one of the other speakers, Dr. Ben Carson. This is the graduation season, most noticeably for high school or college/university. However, I also just attended one of my youngest grandson’s very-full-program-graduation from preschool, of all things. No kidding!
There are no verses in the Bible which specifically acknowledge “graduation as we know it so well today. Apparently, graduation, per say, has not been such a specific occasion in ages past, neither in the Old Testament nor New Testament eras. What graduation appears to signify most today is that it is a benchmark of the maturation of a young person; though at the university graduation I attended, there was actually one octogenarian who had missed that opportunity in younger years.
What you are hoping and wishing for in a graduation event is that your young person has reached a genuine benchmark, befitting their age, exhibiting maturity in wisdom and character. Such maturity depends so much on the nature of spiritual input into their lives in the days and years preceding this transition from youth to adulthood. Who is responsible for this?
Very obviously, their parents or guardians, those who reared and nurtured them from the cradle to this point in their life, have the greatest responsibility as stewards of God in the soul and life of this young man or woman. Spiritual input is primarily dependent on these parents; so much so that they must answer to God for their failure or accomplishment in this God-ordered task.
Secondary to parental stewards is the educational input of their high school and college years, as well as the formative influence of their chosen close friends and peers, with whom they spend most of their time after the earliest childhood years. These years are extremely formative on their current and future world- and life-views. They spend a lot of time with high school teachers and college professors, considerably more than with their parents during these years. If such input is spiritually suspect, it will greatly reflect on what their world- and life-views will be and who they will be as individuals.
Parents have failed majorly when they have given over their responsibility to rear and nurture their children to secular non-believers and errant instructors of the truth as it is in Jesus. High school teachers and especially university professors have been responsible for the shipwreck of the faith of many young people. Parents are largely accountable to God for this massive failure.
If graduation is a genuine benchmark of maturity into a wise and charactered person for life, then there absolutely must be quality and continuous spiritual input into their life before graduation is ever acknowledged. If you are the parents of children who are yet to pursue a graduation, commit now to their godly molding as individuals and to the spiritual input they absolutely require, ensuring such continues into the high school and college years. This is your preeminent responsibility, directing where they are taught and who their teachers are. Do not give their souls over to unbelieving instructors and worldly environments. Remember, it is you who must give account to God in this critical, eternal responsibility!


“More about Jesus let me learn, more of His holy will discern; Spirit of God, my teacher be, showing the things of Christ to me. More, more about Jesus, more, more about Jesus, more of His saving fullness see, more of His love who died for me.
(2nd verse of Eliza Hewitt’s hymn, “More About Jesus Would I Know, 1887)
 

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