A journey to maturity

Around fifty Waseca students participated in the annual baccalaureate service in the Performing Arts Center Wednesday, May 31. The event brought together several Waseca students of various churches to be both honored and encouraged to continue their faith journey after high school.

Pastor Andrew Isker of Fourth Street Evangelical Church led the service. He focused on two passages of scripture: Proverbs 2:1-22, which encourages Christians to uphold and keep the faith, and 1 Corinthians 16:13-14, where the prophet Paul says, “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.”

After that, Isker shared a hard-hitting message for the baccalaureate students. “One of my favorite questions is, if you only had one word to describe the Bible, what would it be?”

Some of the answers thrown out by the audience were “love,” “faith,” and “truth.” However, the word Isker was thinking of was “maturity.”

“If it were about love or faith, it would be a very short book,” he said. “But it’s a very long book. Salvation is important of course, but the whole theme of the book, the bible, is the story of the maturation of humanity. It begins in the garden, and the Bible ends with the fully mature man — Jesus and his bride — reigning over the garden city. We go from a garden to a garden city.

“It’s about God maturing humanity from a baby, to a child, to an adolescent, to a fully grown and mature man. He is maturing His people. The plan was always for man to grow to full maturity. Jesus’s death on the cross not only saves us from sin, but it saves us to maturity and become heirs of the entire world.”

He then directed his message to the Waseca seniors in the audience. “The young people here…God has brought you to a new stage of maturity,” he said. “You’ve been instilled with virtues by your parents and others.

“Years ago, I graduated from Waseca and had the same teachers as you did,” Isker continued. “Jesus said that a student shall be like his teacher. This is true. But to all the teachers here, feel free to not listen for the next 30 seconds — I don’t remember a single lesson from any of my teachers from Mr. Hansen or Mr. Nelson’s class. But the curriculum didn’t really matter, because the actual lesson was Mr. Hansen. I remember more than two decades later the many virtues that these teachers demonstrated every day, from patience to kindness.”

Isker said that God had placed people to “cultivate virtue within you,” which he claimed was the point of maturity. “Those who will be faithful in little will be faithful in much,” he said.

He then told students that their faith will be tested in the world. “C.S. Lewis once said that courage isn’t simply one of the virtues, but a form of every virtue at the testing point, which means the highest point of reality.

“You’re coming of age in an era of moral insanity,” he continued. “It’s the world you are inheriting. Your Christian virtue will be tested in a way my generation or any others before me did not have to experience. You’ll enter a world where actually being a Christian — not just in name, but one who believes the entire Bible — that is something that can be very costly.”

He reminded them that their faith in Christianity is not their parents’, but their own. “You will have to ask yourself, ‘Do I want the easy, comfortable life that I feel entitled to as the birthright of an American? Or will I choose to devote the one life that God has given me to fight the evils before us to build the great kingdom of God?’ You’re out of the frying pan and into the fire. The time to choose is now.”

The congregation was invited to sing two hymns, “Amazing Grace” and “It Is Well With My Soul,” with accompaniment provided by Susan Poepping of the Waseca Christian Assembly.

The local Gideons, led by Robert Steen, then offered an “answer book” containing the New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs. “Every day of your life will be a learning experience,” he said. “But at times, we encounter situations or questions in the more personal areas of life. Sometimes, there are times we reach outside of ourselves.”

Special thanks were given to members of the Waseca Ministerial Association, high school principal Dr. Jason Miller, the Waseca High School staff, and Susan Poepping for helping make the service possible.