How I Included The Gospel In My Leaving Speech by Sam Hight
After being at Hillcrest High School for ten years, I am leaving to go to Hamilton Christian School. The following is an excerpt from my leaving speech to the staff there.
I began by sharing some memories of my involvement, then some personal things about myself that they might not know, leading in to why I was leaving if I thought Hillcrest was so great. I shared that it was for faith reasons and simplifying my life by merging two strands of involvement (faith/ministry and work) into one.
Then I said this. Some parts are not full sentences but bullet points which I expanded upon:
“Many of you come from faith backgrounds yourselves, so I’d like to quickly share a little about how my own faith adds into this:
As I said, I don’t come from a Christian family.
– Converted as an adult
– At a Christian friends prompting, I pretty much just read the NT of the Bible and believed it.
– What I read didn’t seem that nice to me, for instance finding out that I wasn’t as good a person as I thought I was, and that I was in need of Jesus to take the eternal punishment that I deserve.
– But even though I didn’t totally like what I read, I couldn’t ignore the growing conviction that it was truth, and the longer I’ve studied the Bible, alongside science, philosophy, observations of the world, human nature, etc. the stronger that conviction has grown. I’ve made it a habit to engage with the strongest arguments against my faith to be sure that what I believe is grounded in truth.
I think, every person needs to make a reasoned choice about two very important things regarding spirituality:
The first is whether God exists or not – and I want to emphasise that it needs to be a reasoned choice, not just what feels right or tickles our emotions in a particular way – there is a true reality one way or another, and what we believe with regard to this will affect our lives in some profound ways…
The second is that, if God exists, what is He saying to you and how can you trust it as truth? And I’m talking about why a religious text, such as the Bible or Koran, or a self proclaimed prophet should be trusted as speaking for God.”
I then moved on to thanking a bunch of people for specific things during my time there and wished everyone all the best for the future.