This short speech was delivered to the 2025 graduating class of the Classical Conversation South Durham Community homeschool co-op.
Hi everyone,
Most of you know me. My name is Dr. Neil Shenvi and I had the pleasure of serving as the Challenge III director for this year’s graduating class. Our theme for Challenge III was “All Choices Bring Consequences.” This was not an exclusively Christian theme. In fact, it’s not even an exclusively religious theme. We saw this theme in the plays we read, in the history we learned, and in the philosophers we studied. “All Choices Bring Consequences.”
But you, as new high school graduates, now have the opportunity to learn this lesson first-hand because you are entering the world of adulthood. You will have more freedom than ever before. You will face more temptation than ever before. You will have more opportunities to sin than ever before. And your parents will no longer be able to shield you from the consequences of that sin.
So when you suffer those consequences, let me offer you two admonitions.
First, when (not if) you suffer because of your own sin, don’t blame other people. Yes, you will sometimes suffer because of other people’s sin or simply because you live in a fallen world. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the suffering you experience because of your own choices, your own actions, your own sin.
When that happens, don’t be a fool. Don’t shift the blame. Don’t make excuses. God is graciously trying to wake you up. As C.S. Lewis said: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” God is showing you who you are. God is holding a mirror up to your heart. Don’t hide from it.
Second, when you experience the consequences of your sin, don’t just start making resolutions to try harder. Of course you should repent. Of course you should learn. But if you don’t allow your sin to drive you to Jesus, you have missed the main point of what God is teaching you.
You need to learn these truths: you are more wicked than you know. You need rescue. You need forgiveness. You need a new heart. You need the daily, hourly, presence of the Holy Spirit. You might nod along in theological agreement with these statements or you might quietly roll your eyes in disbelief, but you’re still young. You haven’t yet fully experienced what I’m talking about. But sometime in the future, you will. You will be lying on your bed one night asking yourself in horror and misery “My God, what have I done? How can I fix this?” And the answer will be “You can’t.”
When that happens, I want you to remember this verse from Col. 1:14 “in [him] we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Sin has a consequence and that consequence is death, eternal death. That is an ironclad law in a moral universe. You can’t escape it any more than you can escape entropy or gravity. But the gospel is that God sent Jesus to bear the consequences of our sin on the cross and to rise from the dead so that in him, you could have redemption, the forgiveness of sin.
This truth will carry you through your education, through your life, and through your death, but nothing else will. Cling to it.
Thank you and God bless you.
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