Commence!

Commencement. Often described as graduation. The end of school, the beginning of the work-a-day world. Commencement. The day you “go forth” and find your way in the world.

If I could give you each a single gift today, it would be a Bible and a habit of reading and re-reading it thoroughly over your lifetime.

Why, if the Scripture were lost and our world descended into a dark age of a thousand years; if cynics and selfishness ruled so long; still, if the Bible were rediscovered and people began to read it, I tell you, it would ignite the world once more with the quest to know God in Jesus Christ, to live decently, and to learn.

Here is a book that spawned morality and the dignity of persons, that birthed science, inspired a government with a balance of power; inspired poetry, novels, paintings, classical music; stopped a plague, founded universities, hospitals, and orphanages; comforted the dying and challenged the living to better love.

This Bible has shaped culture; changed the course of history from Rome to the German Reformation to the America’s Great Awakening.

And it can do it again.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings, “Things were forgotten that should not have been.”

Indeed, you are commencing into a world that has forgotten God and left the Bible unread. Academia largely pokes fun at the Holy Scriptures and tries to impress itself with autonomy and reason.

Do not be fooled.

History proves, as Bauvard wrote in The Darkness of Nature, that “In an age of faith, reason is a rocket to the heavens. In an age of reason, it is a manhole cover to the sewers.”   Witness Nazi Germany…the Warsaw ghetto…Auschwitz.

So, take and read this book, my young friends. Commence. The Bible is not only a book about God, it is the place we meet Him, the very place we are made human.

Commence to read. Commence to grow. Commence to think outside the box of your present education. Commence to be curious. Commence to know the God who is there. Commence to do more than buy food so you can get the energy to go to work to get money to buy food.

Commence to live.

The book shows one how.

The Reverend Stephen Crotts is pastor of Village Presbyterian Church in Charlotte Court House, VA. He is also the director of the Carolina Study Center, Inc., a campus ministry, located in Chapel Hill, NC. Pastor Crotts may be reached at carolinastudycenter@msn.com.