Retirement is
a wonderful reward after years of hard work.
And graduation is the joyful completion of years of study. They are both blessings, but we run into
problems when we think that the retirement or graduation applies to other parts
of our lives. You don’t graduate from
parenthood, for example. Even when your
children are full grown adults with children of their own, they still need you
to be their mother and father. You can’t
retire from being a loving and faithful husband or wife. And you better not retire from housekeeping
and lawn care!
There’s one
other thing you can’t retire or graduate from: being a disciple of Jesus
Christ. When you claim him as your Lord
and Savior, it’s forever. You never “graduate”
from learning about God and his plan for your life: how could we ever know
everything about the One who is infinite?
And there’s no retirement from faithful service to God.
It’s not
unusual, when I invite someone to take part in an activity or ministry of our
church, for them to reply, “Oh, I’ve done that for years already. Let someone
else take a turn at it.” Apparently they
believe that they’ve already done their fair share of service to the Lord through
the church, and it’s time to “retire.” Not
only does an attitude like this deprive the church of the service of someone’s experienced,
but it deprives the person of the joy that comes from partnering with God in
his plans for the world.
Plus, it’s just plain un-Biblical. Nobody in Scripture “retired” from serving God, regardless of how old they were. For example, Abraham was 75 years old when God called him to begin a new adventure (Genesis 12:4). To my knowledge, the only person in Scripture who claimed to have completed his work in God’s name is Paul, who wrote to his friend Timothy that he had “fought the good fight” and “finished the race” (2 Timothy 4:7). But the only reason Paul thought that he was finished was because he knew that his life was about to be over. And even then, he was still offering instruction and encouragement to others.
To say that
we never retire or graduate from serving the Lord does not, however, mean that
you have to continue to serve him in the same way. As Ecclessiastes 3:1 puts it, “There is a
time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” When one “season” of service has ended, it’s
time to look for a new “season.” Maybe
you can’t pick strawberries for the Strawberry Festival anymore. But can you sing in the choir, or teach
Sunday School, or visit the shut-ins? And
you can always do the most powerful, most important thing of all: pray.
Violet
Johnston served God through Old Union for many years. Even when she was wheelchair-bound, she
continued to serve any way she could.
Eventually, her disability was so severe that all she could do was tear
up day-old bread to make breadcrumbs to feed to the birds. But she did it up until the time that she
finished her own race. Like Abraham and
Paul, she knew there was no retirement from service to our Lord.
