Graduation From Hebrew High

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you will say, “I have no delight in them.”

–Ecclesiastes 12:1

I want you to use your imagination and travel back to the day of your high school graduation. Imagine the master of ceremonies saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, honored graduates, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our commencement speaker. He is a man of incomparable wisdom, of unequalled wealth, of unparalleled power. I give you King Solomon!” If Solomon were facing a group of adolescents on the threshold of adulthood, what do you think he would say? What advice would the wisest man who ever lived have to offer?

In fact, we do not have to wonder what Solomon would say, because the answer is found in Ecclesiastes 12. Look at verse 1: “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no delight in them.’”

That word “remember” is not just a cognitive action. In Hebrew, it means “to act decisively on behalf of another person.” For example, when Noah and his family had been bobbing up and down in the ark for almost six months, the Bible says, “God remembered Noah” (Genesis 8:1). Did God say, “I almost forgot that guy! Boy, I’m glad I remembered him”? No. The verse goes on to say, “God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water subsided.” God did not just think of Noah; He acted on Noah’s behalf. To remember means to do something. When Solomon said, “Remember your Creator,” he was saying, “Make God central in your life.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote, “For the religious mind and soul, the issue has never been the existence of God but the importance of God, the difference that God makes in the way we live. To believe that God exists the way you believe that the South Pole exists, though you have never seen either one, to believe in the reality of God the way you believe in the Pythagorean theorem, as an accurate abstract statement that does not really affect your daily life, is not a religious stance. A God who exists but does not matter, who does not make a difference in the way you live, might as well not exist.”

Are you allowing God to rule in every part of your life? When you make God central in your life, it gives you the spiritual foundation to withstand the storms of life that beat against you. This week, we are going to look at three reasons to make God central in the days of your youth.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Graduation from Hebrew High” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2009.

Harold Kushner, “Who Needs God” (New York: Fireside, 2002), 17-18.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.