NSA Commencement 2006
Last Wednesday night, we had our ninth commencement for New St. Andrews College. One of the features of the evening was that we honored my father, Jim Wilson, for the impact he has had throughout the course of his long and fruitful life. Among some others, I was asked to make some comments, and here they are.
Greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus. To all of you, graduates, parents, friends, staff, faculty, alumni—greetings in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Grace and peace to you. I have a three-fold task in the few minutes I have here with you.
The first is to anticipate and preempt anything my father, Jim Wilson, might want to say in response to all of this. The second is to acknowledge and honor the work that God has accomplished through him, and to mark and acknowledge the debt we here at NSA owe to him. And the third task is to do this in a way that fits with the nature of this occasion—a commencement at which we have gathered to honor the hard work of all those who are gathered here on the stage, prepared to graduate.
The first task is really the simplest. One of the foundational virtues I have seen my father embody is a genuine refusal, on numerous occasions, to try to climb the greasy pole of personal ambitions. Throughout the course of his life in the evangelical world, he was present on the ground floor of many ventures that later made the “big time.” Because of principled stands he took, and/or because of a well-grounded suspicion that the “way of all flesh” is not absent from movements and ministries just because they are conducted in the name of Jesus, he on more than one occasion showed the same kind of disposition that let Lot have first pick. God has honored this in numerous ways. But that humble disposition of his, cultivated over many years, means that he would be extremely wary about receiving any kind of honor that we would like to give him.
So I have tried to think of his possible responses—anything from “thanks a lot everybody; there’s goes my treasure in heaven,” to “this was very nice of you, but not necessary,” to “I hope nobody thinks this means I agree with your Calvinism,” to “what will Bessie say about it?” And having thought of these responses, I wanted to touch on each of them in some way. And, speaking of my mother, let me say that everything I say here about my father goes double for her.
While I was in junior high school, my father decided to conduct an after-school Bible study for many of my friends and classmates. This had to have been the near equivalent of trying to lead a group of adolescent orangutans through the gospel of Mark, and yet still viewing the possible outcomes optimistically. I recall us all sitting there one time, open Bibles on our laps, and my father asked us all a question. We, of course, sat there agape, looking at him like so many show poodles waiting for the treat. And he said something which I remember vividly to this day, and which I never want to forget. He said, “The answer’s not on my forehead.” Over the course of many years, he has consistently exhibited this central truth—the authority and sufficiency of all Scripture for all of life. And fortunately, this principle, learned from him, actually helps me to address my first task.
We are honoring someone who has labored faithfully for many years in our midst. The Scriptures require this honor from us. The apostle Paul said it this way: “And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labour among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you; And to esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake. And be at peace among yourselves” (1 Thess. 5:12-13).
Now we know that the Scriptures also call my father to refrain from all vainglorious attempts to earn the applause of men, and this is something which he has consistently done for over half a century. But they also call us to honor him for not trying to get us to honor him. This is not a contradiction in Scripture. We are called to honor him, “esteem him highly” in the words of Paul to the Thessalonians. He is not required to like it. And if I may anticipate him in this, he is the kind of man who will greatly appreciate what we are doing while not necessarily approving of it. But that is all right because he has his verses, and we have ours.
The second point I have to make is related to the first. Ronald Reagan had a plaque on his desk that said “there is no limit to what a man can do if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.” The reason we are here today, the reason numerous Christian ministries are growing and flourishing here in our town, is the result of this one man’s vision, and is a testimony to the truth of Reagan’s adage. If you really don’t care who gets the credit—so long as the mission is accomplished—the impact of your labors is genuinely potent.
In the sixties, my father wrote a book called Principles of War, in which he took the principles of physical warfare and applied them to evangelism and spiritual warfare. As a result of his careful thinking and shrewd application of these principles, the ministries here have had an impact that is quite disproportionate to our numbers. But let me hasten to add (because there may be some onlookers who may want to file a zoning complaint because we have no permit for this “spiritual warfare” of ours) that we are talking about the spiritual authority of the gospel, the lordship of Jesus Christ, and the realm of the soul and spirit. It is political, yes, but not what our adversaries mean by political at all. We are preaching the kingdom of Christ, the polis of God. We are not talking about worldly or carnal approaches at all, but rather a robust embrace of the gospel, a deep love of God and His Christ, and a zeal to worship Him rightly.
Nevertheless, we are doing all this here on the Palouse, and it is having quite an impact here, and all this is true because of some decisions that Jim Wilson made in the early seventies. These decisions, if run through the calculus of worldly wisdom, would have to be reckoned as certifiably insane. But when a kernel of corn dies in such a way, and goes into the ground, it bears much fruit. Jesus promised this, and He is the one who has made it come to pass.
My third task brings us to our graduates. We are gathered here to honor you, and all the hard work you have done. I know—the faculty may have sometimes pretended that the work load we assigned you was somehow normal or reasonable, but we all know better than that. Your accomplishment that we are honoring this evening is a significant accomplishment. In a day of declining standards, you have cheerfully embraced the considerable work assigned to you, and have completed it with distinction. Well done, to each one of you.
As we have honored Jim Wilson here this evening, this was not done as an intrusion—as though we were combining someone’s surprise birthday party with your graduation in order to save some money on the cake. That being the case, what are we up to then?
If I might swipe a phrase from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, I would like to refer to the potency of a “long obedience in the same direction.” Because the phrase comes from a book with that particular title, I have no qualms of conscience whatever over stealing it. I intend to employ his words to advance the Christian faith, a faith that this philosopher detested. But if we really are beyond good and evil, this must be all right, and besides, even though we are not beyond good and evil, it is all there in the gospels. First you bind the strong man, and then you take all his uber-stuff. Nietzsche, for all his problems, was a shrewd observer of human behavior, and the impact of certain forms of behavior. He said this: “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”
That phrase is an important one, a good one. I have taken it, and I want to give it to you. A long obedience in the same direction. You graduates have made a good beginning, an honorable beginning. But as we mark this achievement, we want to deliver a charge to you as well. We not only want you to begin well, we also want you to finish well. Our God, who has begun a good work in you, will bring it to completion. When you are my father’s age, the year of our Lord will be somewhere in the mid 2060s, on the downhill slope toward the twenty-second century. You may come back to visit NSA then in order to watch your grandchildren graduate, and they, when they are my father’s age, will be living in the year of our Lord 2122. A long obedience in the same direction. Watching covenantal righteousness and mercy come to your children’s children is not an abstraction, a dry datum out of your catechism or doctrine class. This is one of God’s great promises, and it tastes just like honey made by celestial bees allowed to forage in heaven’s clover. This is such a precious promise—a long obedience in the same direction. And no, this is not “works.” Obedience, like everything else that is good, is the gift of God, lest any should boast.
If you want to learn this grace of God down in your bones, the Scriptures say you must learn to imitate it. And when you imitate it, you must imitate personal faith and consider the outcome of particular lives. And that is, in part, why we have done what we have done here this evening. The Scriptures call us to this.
“Remember those who rule over you, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering the outcome of their conduct” (Heb. 13:7).