[Earlier this week I was privileged to speak to several hundred middle school and high school students. This is what I said.]
Three years ago I had the chance to give a TED talk from this stage. That night I asked the question: “What is the most important machine in the world?” You can find my TED talk on the internet if you’re curious about it.
Tonight I'm going to ask a different question: “What is the biggest decision you'll ever make?”
Let me ask that again – “What is the biggest decision you’ll will ever make?”
For a group of middle school and high school students, some of the easy answers that immediately come to mind are things like these:
What high school classes should I take? If I'm in middle school I'm looking ahead to that question. Even if I’m in high school I'm probably thinking about that too.
Should I go to college or tech school?
What college should I attend?
What should I study in college?
How am I going to find a partner in my life?
Should I buy a car? If I already have a car, should I buy a different car?
Should I live at home or move?
iOS or Android?
(Actually, that's a decision probably all of you have made already!)
Those are some of the obvious decisions that come to mind.
But, if I ask this question to students one-on-one, and when I read about the pressures that you are really facing, and when I sit down with students like you and get to know you, there are bigger and more difficult and more private and more personal decisions you're facing.
How far do I go with my partner sexually?
What do I do with my guilt feelings about viewing pornography?
What do I do about my friend who’s hooked on oxycodone or some other opioid or some other drug?
Who do I tell about my eating disorder?
I killed someone with my car when I was texting. How do I even go on with my life? (I heard that one last year)
What do I do with my worries about my own drinking problem?
How do I deal with my friend’s suicide?
Who do I tell that I've been cutting since my parents' divorce? (I heard that one last week)
Do I keep going to church? Why?
Who do I tell that I'm questioning my gender identity?
If we are honest, these are the harder questions and bigger decisions that are being faced by students right now in this room.
Tonight we’re going to think bit about the decisions that you are facing and how some of them are pretty big. Then I'm going to look back over my life, because I'm quite a bit older than you, and I am going to reflect on many of the decisions I have faced. Then I'm going to tell you about the biggest decision I ever made.
I'm going to challenge you that you probably face that same big decision.
These are pictures of me from when I was your age.
When I was in middle school and high school there was no Internet and there were no cell phones so we had to create fun in old-school ways – things like finding out how many rice krispie bars I could fit in my mouth at once.
I also faced some big decisions when I was in high school. I had to decide if I wanted to be a professional musician in my life – I was both a classical musician and a rock musician and I love music.
I also had to think about whether I wanted to be an actor because I love drama and I love performing. Should I be an actor or musician or a scientist or doctor?
I also faced a big decision when I was a freshman in high school and had a large cancer operation. I had to decide how to manage the challenges of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and all the questions of my friends. How to go on as a cancer patient?
I also had a big decision because when I was a senior I met a girl who was a sophomore, and fell in love with her. Just three years later we were engaged and that was a big decision for both of us.
After a few years we faced decisions about starting a family and raising two daughters.
When they were little the decisions were challenging, but when I look back decades later I realize that the biggest decisions were about how to raise our girls so that we could eventually let them go. Those are big decisions that your parents are thinking about right now.
Now imagine all the decisions that I face every day as a research scientist. My research group has students and professional scientists and each day we have to decide how to study the problems that interest us in my lab. I have to decide how to raise the money we need for our science projects. I have to decide how to approach our science questions.
And I now have other big decisions all the time as a leader in science. I am the Principal (they call it the Dean) of the graduate school at Mayo Clinic. That means I am always facing decisions about who should be our new graduate students, and how to serve them.
There have been other big decisions in my life. I think of decisions that I have faced when serving in the community. I was fortunate to lead the committee that discussed the idea of the name for this church when it moved to this location 15 years ago. We wanted a name that would be welcoming to everyone. Not far from here is a street sign and that sign gave me the idea that maybe our new church should be named for its neighborhood rather than for a denomination. That's why the church is now called Autumn Ridge Church. That was a big decision.
Then I was the leader of the committee that designed and built this church. $25 million were raised and we had to decide how to invest in this facility – every detail, every room, every function. Our committee had more than 90 meetings to make all those big decisions.
Then I had the chance to lead the committee that designed the gymnasium addition you were just enjoying. We had to decide how to make it into a space that could serve as a gym for recreation,
but also a flexible space to be transformed, like it was tonight, into a beautiful event center. Those were big decisions.
And I had the idea that in our new building we might be able to host new activities and functions for the community. I decided on an arts series so that every year there are two big concerts where we invite national performing artists and welcome people from all over the region to come and enjoy music. Imagine all of the decisions that are needed to hire artists for concerts and organize volunteers and publicity for two big arts events every year! Those are a lot of big decisions.
So that is a look back at the many many big decisions I have faced in my life.
But what is the biggest decision I ever made…what is the biggest decision you’ll ever make?
That's what I want to talk about now.
To understand the biggest decision I ever made, we need to think about my family when I was in high school. I was a very successful student. I had straight A's and was co-valedictorian of my high school class. I was a National Merit Scholar and was constantly involved in many exciting activities in high school.
But my life was not perfect.
I remember that I was lonely. I had friends, but I really wanted a girlfriend. I wanted a girlfriend more than just about anything else. So I was lonely, but I also had other problems and concerns. For one thing, I felt guilty about the way that I had treated my little sister through much of her life. She was vulnerable but I would make fun of my sister in many ways, and I acted like a bully toward her. This made me feel guilty.
I had been raised in a church and had been going to church every week of my life.
I had come to my own theology about God. In thinking about my desire for a girlfriend, but also my feelings of guilt about my behavior, I had the idea that God was a judge of my life. If I wanted something good, like a girlfriend, I thought that meant I needed to act better and please God so he would reward me. If I was bad and felt guilty about what I was doing wrong, I assumed that was why God was not rewarding me with a girlfriend in my life.
It was a simple idea that God was the judge, and my job was to be as good as I could be to be rewarded.
The story of the biggest decision I ever made is because of a friend of mine named Tom.
Tom and I played high school basketball together when we were juniors. We were on the basketball team together and would often talk after practice. We lived near each other and would ride our bicycles home together after basketball.
One night in the fall of my junior year our practice was done and as we walked out to our bikes we began to talk about life. My friend Tom had been thinking more about God, and his relationship to God. He asked me that night – “Tell me about your relationship with God, and tell me who Jesus Christ is in your life?”
I was a little annoyed by this question because I had a simple relationship with God and didn’t want to talk about it. I told my friend Tom – “I don't need to think about Jesus Christ. I have a simple relationship with God. I try to do the best I can so God will reward me if I’m good. If I'm bad I expect that God will punish me or withhold good things from me. Jesus was a good teacher, but he died tragically. I don't need any special relationship with Jesus. I just have a relationship with God. Fanatics and Jesus freaks and fundamentalists talk about relationships with Jesus. Maybe you should just have a relationship with God like I do.”
My friend Tom was curious and persistent and he offered to give me two little booklets that explained Christianity more clearly. I didn't really want to read the booklets because I was annoyed about Tom’s question. I was afraid he was some kind of born-again Christian who was pushing some weird fanatical kind of Christianity on me. I was suspicious.
I did finally take the little booklets and started to read them. One was by a famous teacher named Billy Graham. The other was called Born Again. I wasn't very interested in the booklets at first and I didn't really want to read them, but I was a bit curious and they were short and easy to study. I was wondering if there could be more to my relationship with God than what I was experiencing.
As I read the booklets I was very surprised. The booklets explained teachings from the New Testament of the Bible. Even though I had gone to church all my life, I had never heard about how to experience a personal relationship with God.
Here are some of the examples of Bible verses that changed my thinking and led to the biggest decision of my life.
Some of these are statements from St. Paul. Paul had never met Jesus personally, but he was a Jew who understood how important the new principles of Christianity were. In his letter to the church at Rome, St. Paul taught these important principles. In the third chapter of Paul's letter he wrote “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
All have sinned.
This was a surprise to me because I was hoping that I could be good enough so that God would reward me with a girlfriend.
Here I learned that everyone falls short of God’s glory.
In the sixth chapter of Paul's letter he wrote “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
This passage really surprised me.
Paul says that what I deserve in my life is separation from God. I don't deserve good things, like a girlfriend. Because of who I am, and how I behave, I deserve nothing from God. “But” is the next word. “But the gift of God… the gift of God… is eternal life, and it's through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
This passage taught me that God has a gift for me. It's not something that I can earn or deserve.
It's not because I am good.
It's because he is good.
I didn't want to think about a relationship with Jesus Christ, but this passage says that the gift is through Jesus Christ.
In Chapter 5 of Paul’s letter to the Roman church Paul goes on to write that “God showed his love for us in this – while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”
I was amazed. Even though I am intrinsically bad and don't deserve anything from God, Christ died for me even while I was bad.
God gave me a gift. Jesus paid for my sins.
One of the booklets shared a verse from the New Testament Gospel of John – a verse that most of us have heard about, even at football games. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not die but have everlasting life.”
What an amazing promise and gift.
Jesus has already paid for me and for all of my sins. My job isn't to try to be perfect and live well. It is to accept the gift of Jesus, and live my life thankfully.
What amazes me as I think back is that all of my life I had been going to a church where there was a breathtaking symbol of Jesus dying for me. I had not recognized the symbol or thought about it.
At my church in the front, above the alter, was a large wooden cross. On the cross was a beautiful and terrible larger-than-life wooden sculpture of my savior, Jesus Christ, dying for me. How could I have missed the huge implication of the sculpture?
I was trying to earn God's blessings.
Right in front of me was a sculpture showing my savior dying for me. He died in my place to pay for me.
When Jesus died on the cross, he paid for every sin and every act of failure and evil that I had ever committed.
He paid for every mistake and sin I will ever commit.
He paid for my whole life once and for all when he died.
What's more amazing – in that act he also paid for every sin you have ever committed. He paid for every sin you will ever commit.
More than that, Jesus paid for every sin that has ever been committed by anyone in the world.
And he paid for every sin that will ever be committed by anyone who ever lives.
Jesus's death was so amazing that it paid for everything and for everyone to start fresh.
Jesus' death redeemed the entire world forever.
That is the most amazing idea I have ever heard.
So what is the biggest decision you will ever make?
For me it was deciding that I would stop trying to earn God’s favor and accept that Jesus had already paid the price for me.
My biggest decision was to surrender my life to Jesus Christ.
My biggest decision was to ask Jesus Christ to be my savior and pay for me.
My biggest decision was to live the rest of my life being thankful for what God has done for me in Jesus.
I made that decision when I was a junior in high school. That night I got down on my knees in my room and I prayed a prayer of surrender to God. I'm going to pray a prayer like that again right now, and I ask you to close your eyes and listen as I pray. As I pray, if my words are touching you and you feel that they’re words that you want to make true in your own life, then pray them along with me and let your heart be changed. After I am finished praying, please keep your eyes closed as I’ll say a few more words.
Here is what I prayed that night.
Dear God, I have lived my whole life thinking that I can be good enough to earn things from you. I now know that that is not true. I have learned that you love me so much that you have paid for me through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Thank you Jesus for dying for me. Thank you Jesus for paying with your life for all the sins of my life. Thank you for offering me your life to pay for me forever. I now accept you as my savior and I accept your life as payment for me. I want to surrender to you and let you live in me for the rest of my life. I want to live with you in heaven forever and I ask you to be my savior. Thank you for coming into my life now.
I prayed that simple prayer that night and gave up trying to be good enough for God. He changed my life that night.
It was the biggest decision of my life.
If you prayed along with me just now and feel that tonight you've come to understand that Jesus offered his life as payment for you, and if you would like to accept the gift of Jesus tonight, then with all eyes closed in this room, raise your hand for a moment to symbolize before God your acceptance of his love and gift for you tonight.
If this was your choice tonight then please let someone know this evening. Talk to a leader or tell a friend or mention it to a parent.
I will also be here in front so come and chat or ask questions about life with Jesus as your savior.
3.15.19
