This is the season when graduates
endure one more lecture that stands between them and their diploma. Students
march into the commencement ceremony preoccupied with closing this chapter of
life, opening up a new one, and plunging into a fuzzy future filled with great
expectations and disconcerting realities. Meanwhile, the commencement speaker
looks at the graduates and realizes that the words he or she has carefully crafted
and arranged to be memorable will, in all likelihood, soon be forgotten. In
fact one recent commencement speaker mused that most graduates will not even remember
who spoke at their ceremony.
If
I had been asked to speak to graduates this year, even knowing what I said
would likely be forgotten, I would encourage them to “be a mountain mover.”
That phrase is embedded in a quote from an unknown source that wisely said, “Don't
tell God how Big your storm is; tell the storm how Big your God is. Keep your
eyes on the Lord and see Him magnify His power in you. With faith in your
heart, you will move mountains. When fear fills your heart, mountains will move
you. Be a mountain mover.” Perhaps graduates will not remember a speech while clouded
by the emotion of the moment, but they might remember a phrase like “be a
mountain mover.”
This
year I see large “mountains” looming before our nation. Economically we are
operating by a financial delusion that supposes that our debts are never due.
Morally the nation functions without a spiritual compass and celebrates how
fast change is occurring while disregarding where the change is leading us.
Emotionally people are deluded into assuming that, since there is a pill to
mask discontentment and despair in life, then we must be happy regardless of
nagging suspicions that things are otherwise. Spiritually people hunger for
something to fill the God-shaped void in their lives and assume that by cramming
empty ritual and euphoric experimentalism into that chasm their souls will be
satiated. These mountains loom on the horizon of this year’s graduates as an imposing
wall. How will the mountains be faced?
In
1 Samuel 14 we see two men react to the “mountain” they faced called the
Philistines. The situation was desperate. The army of the Philistines was a massive
army of thousands (13:5), and Saul’s army had melted away to mere hundreds
(13:15). Compounding this was the fact that the ragtag army of Saul was ill
equipped to face the hostile forces with “neither sword nor spear found in the
hand of any of the people who were with Saul and Jonathan” except for the one
Saul and Jonathan had (13:22). By any measurement, Saul and his son, Jonathan
faced an enemy of “mountainous” proportions.
The
responses of Saul and Jonathan were vastly different. Saul was paralyzed into
almost a catatonic state of despair as he focused upon the well-equipped and
massive army of the Philistines. Thus, he sat down under a tree awaiting the
inevitable annihilation in battle. His son Jonathan, in contrast, advanced
toward the enemy with just one man and his sword (14:6). What made the
difference? It was a matter of focus. In contrast to Saul’s focus, Jonathan’s
is expressed in his words to his armor bearer, “Come, let us go over to the
garrison of these Philistines; it may be that the Lord will work for us. For
nothing restrains the Lord from saving us by many or by few” (14:6). To put it
another way, let’s see how God will move this “mountain.” Jonathan was
confident of how big his God really was. The outcome and the rest of the story are
summarized in (14:23), “So the Lord saved Israel that day.”
Graduates
of 2013 face looming “mountains” of challenge. The media daily adds layers of
gloom to already bleak prospects. The question that this year’s graduates and
indeed all of us must answer is what will we focus upon? If we limit our view
to our resources, abilities, power, and wisdom, then perhaps things are not too
hopeful. However, there is an alternate focus. What can the Lord do if we rely
upon His wisdom, power, and intervention? Moving out by faith as Jonathan did
may be the very catalyst God wants to use to “move a mountain” in our nation.
The
biggest mountain that needed to be moved has already been moved. On the cross
Jesus Christ took away the “mountain” of separation between God and man and
offered his work to be a gift we take by faith. The Apostle Paul concluded
confidently, “What
then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He
who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also
with him graciously give us all things?”
In other words, “If he has moved the
biggest mountain, can’t He move the rest?” This certainly should encourage us
to be mountain movers!
