Remember Who You Are, Remember Where You Come From

Remember Who You Are, Remember Where You Come From

6/20/2014 Esther 4:1-17 Romans 1:8-17

Today we are celebrating promotion and graduation Sunday to recognize the achievements some of you have made through the past year or years. As proud as we are of your accomplishments, we want you to know that even though you got the report card, or you got the award, or you walked across the stage, you didn’t get there by yourself and you did not do it alone.

You had parents or family members who saw to it that you got to school, you had cooks, security guards and janitors who made sure school was a good place to be. You had teachers, coadhes and administrators who made sure there was something for you to learn. You had friends who helped you with assignments, and you had church members who were praying for you.

There are a lot of people who believe in you and believe that you have the potential to make a difference in this world. You are going to face times when you are going to want to give up on yourself and settle for a lot less than you could have. In those moments, you will need to “Remember Who You Are, and Remember Where You Come From.”

As your pastors, we have told you over and over, that you are children of a God who loved you enough to send his Son Jesus Christ, to die for you because He wanted to use you to make a difference for the kingdom of God. That God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, so that you can have a resurrected power in your life to move you to the next place.

You didn’t get promoted just to go to another grade, or graduate just to go to college or graduate school or to land a job. God is a wise planner, and God places all of his children in various classrooms, high schools, colleges, and job locations in order to be a witness for him. You are to be a light of what God looks like working in the life of a young person.

You can do that in kindergarten and you can do it in graduate school. The temptation is going to be, to not do it all. You are going to be tempted to go along with the crowd and to forget who you are, and where you come from.

There was a test conducted by a university where 10 students were placed in a room. Three lines of varying length were drawn on a card. The students were told to raise their hands when the instructor pointed to the longest line. But 9 of the students had been instructed beforehand to raise their hands when the instructor pointed to the second longest line.

One student was the test student. The usual reaction of the test student was to put his hand up, look around, and realizing he was all alone, pull it back down. This happened 75% of the time, with students from grade school through high school.

This study showed that most of those involved would rather stand with the majority and be wrong, than stand alone even though they were right. Young people God is looking for people who will stand for what is right, even though the majority of the people is saying, “wrong is okay, and that wrong is even right.”

You have been taught the truth of the word of God. It’s up to you to remember who you are and remember where you are from. It’s going to hurt to stand alone, it may be embarrassing to stand alone, and it won’t be easy to stand alone, but be know in fact, you are not alone. Jesus has promised to stand with you. You don’t have to go along with the crowd. God can be with you in any circumstance.

In our Scripture reading today, there were two people who did not forget who they were or where they had come from. The first was a guy by the name of Mordecai. Mordecai was one of God’s people. He was a Jew. God’s people had started accepting doing the things of the people around them who did not know God. They rejected God’s laws as being old fashioned and out of date as our society tells us today.

But God told them, if they rejected him, their enemies would destroy the nation and carry them away as slaves and captives. The people would not listen to God and didn’t believe God’s word through the prophets. Well there was another great nation called Babylon which is where Iraq is today. The Babylonians came and conquered the people, and took them out of their nation and scattered them into other nations hundreds of miles away.