Welcome Home
During our Homecoming Chapel, our Director of Alumni Relations, Dr. Abe Thompson, shared with our students the blessing of coming home. All the competitions and activities surrounding our high school Homecoming Week are fun. It knits us together in community and builds comradery among the student body. But it is just a small taste of the “already, not yet” Homecoming we experience through Christ.
1 John says, “If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” At CSCS, we enjoy the benefits of Christian community. Our students get to pray with one another and with their teachers. We include Bible as a core class. We get worship and chapel every week. But they pale in comparison to the joy of engaging with the millions of Christians here on earth and the vast host of saints we look forward to joining for eternity. If we are in Christ, we are a part of a never-ending community that starts right here.
Because we are in Christ, we have a common foundation. 1 Corinthians 3:11 says, “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.” Our culture wants to claim our identityand divide us accordingly. It would love to divide us from one another and conquer us all, to pit us against one another as “us” versus “them.” But Ephesians 2 says:
“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”
Our school building has many memories. We hang pictures and trophies to remind us of some of the good times in our history as a school. But that’s not what makes CSCS great. It’s the Spirit of God moving in his people, educating and training up our students in the way they should go, and sending them out to be ambassadors for Christ in this world.
Many other high schools are focused on graduation and making sure their students are college and career ready. But at CSCS, we’re aiming much higher. Of course we want our students and alumni to go on to successful lives, but we are much more concerned about their eternity. It’s not about looking forward to getting a good job. It’s about having a eternal, permanent hope. 1 Peter 1 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you...” The spiritual foundation we build here at CSCS isn’t just to get our students through graduation. It’s forever.
We constantly hear stories from alumni who go off after graduation, get distracted by other things, try to build their lives on those shaky foundations that ultimately fail. Then they come back to Christ and realize that he is the only foundation worth building upon. The Prodigal Son in Luke 15 goes off and squanders his wealth, realizes where he has ended up, expects to come home as a servant, but instead comes home to his father running out to meet him. Our heavenly Father did, does, and will do the same for each of us. Jesus Christ left the perfect holiness and splendor of heaven, stepped into the physical and spiritual filth of our world, suffered on the cross, and came back to life so that we could be welcomed home as sons and daughters. The Father’s love can never be taken away from you. No matter what you did in high school or what you’ve done since. He gives us hope and sustenance daily, mercies new every morning. When we reach the end of our time here on Earth, we will be welcomed into His glory. We always have a safe place to come home to, now and forever.
Welcome home, Lions.
