Your Obedient Servant
LCU Commencement 2023 Keynote Address

 

[May 08, 2023] 

In 1966, I met Dr. Bell for the first time. Dr. R. M. Bell was the imposing president of Johnson Bible College, and I was a freshman, newly arrived from Belgium. The American immigration office required that I get his signature to validate my presence in the United States as a legitimate student at an American school. Without his signature, I could be deported!

I stood before him in his spacious office. As he slowly signed his name, he paused briefly and looked at me intently and asked me: “Do you understand how important a name is?” Totally out of the blue!

And then, as he handed me the important document I depended on to be able to stay, he said: “Receiving the name of Jesus Christ is the most important signature you’ll ever need.” I have never forgotten that penetrating question and that important challenge.

This morning, as you graduate from this Christ-centered school, I want to ask you a simple, oft repeated question: “what is your name?” You know what I mean: “What is your signature of who you currently are and of who you plan to be?”

Completing this milestone in your education is a great achievement! Congratulations. May you never forget the feeling of completion and satisfaction you have from a job well done!

But I would like you also to remember this important question: has our Lord Jesus Christ also signed off on your diploma, on your character, and on your intended mission in life?

Like many others in his day, President Abraham Lincoln ended many of his personal letters with this significant signature: “Your Obedient Servant, Abe.” Therefore the title of my testimony and challenge is this: “Your Obedient Servant.”

I hope that your heart this morning gives that signature to our Lord Jesus Christ!

*****

As we reflect on the unique signatures each of us are choosing in our lives, I want you tell you why and how being “the obedient servant of our Lord Jesus Christ” has become the signature of my life.

In fact, here is the signature for all my emails that I created soon after the death in 2022 of my beloved wife, Marie:

Committed to love everyone
Because life here is so precious
Because death here is so final
Because Christ is Lord always

I pray that my sharing the story behind my email signature will challenge you and inspire you so that you make being our Lord Jesus’ Christ’s obedient servant your signature that captures your name as well as the purpose of your life.

*****

Here is my story: Donald Castelein, my Belgian father, was converted by an American soldier he met in WWII. Having taken on the name of Christian, dad brought his family to Tennessee to study for the preaching ministry. My father graduated with highest honors from Johnson Bible College and in1956 became the first Christian Church missionary to the Dutch (Flemish) speaking part of Belgium. He baptized me in 1957, as his first convert.

Do you remember your baptism as well as I remember mine? John Donald Castelein had been baptized into the larger name of our Lord Jesus Christ as the Bible says. I had a “new name, written down in glory” as older Christians used to sing!

However, and here is some of you this morning can identify with me: as I slowly created my own way of signing my character, I experienced a profound intellectual, emotional, and spiritual contradiction that would affect me every day for the rest of my life.

If you can identify with this inner warfare, how I pray my words may bring you hope and comfort!

During my high school years in Belgium, on the one hand, there was my dad who preached weekly a conservative and devotionally inspiring sermon. But there was also my Protestant religion teacher in the Atheneum, the public school system, who weekly taught me a very liberal religion as part of a very secular, Post-Christian Belgian culture.

To varying degrees, some of you if not all, our graduates that we are honoring this morning, are experiencing this same tension to which I am confessing.

It is the tug of war between living in an increasingly secular culture and trying to serve in a biblical church. Whose obedient servant are you planning on being?

*****

My testimony is that even ten years of being a preacher in various churches, and thirty-seven years of studying the Bible, exploring religion, and teaching theology, did not make me immune to serious doubts and actual apostacy! I say this not with pride or arrogance but with deep shame and painful regret!!

As you leave this campus, graduates, you will be walking through “the valley of the shadow of death”—moral, intellectual, and spiritual death! Follow close to your Shepherd, your Lord, and let his rod discipline you and his staff comfort you and you will be part of the spiritual awakening God is bringing to this great country!

If you are hearing me as a Christian who has never wavered in your commitment to our Lord’s name, then share my concern about your children, your grandchildren, and some of your friend no longer serving our Lord.

*****

At three different times in my life, I felt like my personal integrity compelled me to change the basic signature of my life. To be explicit about it, I, John Castelein, Christian Church preacher for a total of 10 year, I, LCU professor in theology for 37 years, at three separate times rejected our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name I had been baptized in and into according to the Bible.

Listen, 2023 graduates of LCU, leaders of tomorrow’s churches and ministries, if Peter decided he had to deny even knowing the name of Jesus Christ our Lord three times, it can happen to you! I know this so painfully: it happened to me!

I. The first time I rejected the name of Christian, I was age 14. I was a rebellious juvenile. I turned away from the faith inwardly and secretly, in my heart, while still having to attend dad’s church in Genk, Belgium.

Do you remember if you rebelled against your parents, your church, your church, your Lord?

However, God used tragedy to reclaim me into His family and into His name! My father’s sudden death of a heart attack at age 44 resulted in me, as a 16-year-old, rededicating my life and entering Johnson Bible College myself in 1966.

How old were you when you for the first time wrestled with whether your name, your signature, your identity was that of someone who truly is “an obedient servant of our Lord Jesus Christ”?

*****

II. My second denial of Christ’s name occurred when I was 66, now as a mature thinking person. In May of 2014, the year I retired from teaching at LCU, I finally succumbed to all my critical questions, which had been significantly increased by my PhD studies in religion. I once again, at least inwardly, left the faith. I even joined an anonymous online community of doubting clergy, both active and retired.

And yet, I still continued to attend the church and my beloved Sunday School class here in Lincoln. And, during all these years of internal turmoil, I was extremely careful to honor my covenant with Lincoln Christian College, and later with LCU, not to undermine the faith of any of my undergraduate or graduate students!

But then, once again, another very serious incident occurred. I needed double bypass heart surgery in December of 2014 because stents would no longer fix my problem. This emergency surgery resulted in me experiencing an enormous sense of gratitude to be alive.

I desperately wanted to say “thank you” to Someone bigger than the doctors, the nurses, the therapists, or even Marie. Have you ever experienced a thankfulness so all-encompassing that you know there only God is big enough for you to say “thank you” to?

So, I firmly resolved to redouble my efforts at finding the living God, through daily devotions, earnest prayer, and regular worship and I did so--for seven months!

But even that second apostasy with its recommitment was not the end of my spiritual journey. So, I need to ask you right now: how is your own spiritual journey going so far? Have you seriously wrestled with intellectual doubts, painful family relationships, your own intellectual arrogance, irreconcilable church relationships, or some hidden kind of unrelenting temptation?

That is why my signature states that “life here is so precious.”

Your life also is infinitely precious even beyond the grave! And yet, have you yourself ever experienced traumatic crises--physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual—that may have even tempted to consider suicide?

If only you and I would never forget that immense gratitude for life and for love! To whom do you give that ultimate “thank you” to?

***

III. Totally unexpectedly, my third apostacy started in 2019. I had been doing well-intentioned devotions and I had worked hard in many church efforts. Graduates, please hear this,

I was not secure in my faith simply because I had started a successful college-age Sunday School at our church,
Or because I had worked for two years in our Alpha outreach program to the community.
Or because I had preached four times each Sunday morning for five years at Lincoln Christian Church.

All the while I had been teaching full-time at LCU but even that did not prevent me from eventually denying the Lord’s name a third time!

But Rom 8:28 promises you and me that “in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.” Something enormous happened in my life!

Early in 2020, Marie was diagnosed with the worst kind of ALS. Bulbar ALS is that form of Lou Gehrig’s disease that does not start at the bottom with the feet and legs, but at the top. It starts with slurring speech, soon making swallowing impossible, and finally suffocating the patient in saliva and weakened lung muscles.

Being Marie’s sole caregiver for the 22 months of her dying, I fed her by stomach tube four times each day. I made it possible for her to suction off the saliva that she could no longer swallow. Each night as I tucked her into bed, I told her what a privilege it was for me to serve her.

I almost daily bathed her from head to toe. It was one of those times when I was washing Marie’s feet that I recalled the statue that stood for many years in front of this chapel. It shows Jesus washing Peter’s feet as told in John 13. And I couldn’t help but wonder: who would invent a story like that--of a divine being, the Son of God, picking up a towel and washing our feet?

Finally, my head and my heart began to connect, both reaching out to each other!

At this time, Marie’s health demanded my constant attention. Because she had fallen several times, I felt I needed to empty my home office of all books since they were calling to me to be read. But my mind had no time to master those books because my heart was committed to serving Marie. So, I took all my books, except for two Bibles, to the Book Barn in Forsyth.

*****

A few months later, Marie died peacefully with a hospice nurse in attendance. And then one Saturday I recalled Phil 2:6-11 and reading it brought me to burning tears because it speaks of Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

7. but he emptied himself taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

8. And being found in appearance as a man,
   he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!

9. Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,

10. that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

11. and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father

Do you understand how important his name is?

Today, of all days, you seminarians will be given a very special towel, as it were, bringing Jesus’ towel into your life and ministry. As my beloved mentor, Dr. Wayne Shaw said, when he instituted this practice: “This towel signifies that when our students graduate, it is not for arrogance, honor, or prestige, but so that they might go out and wash the feet of the world. This is what we are about.”

Do you understand the mission this towel commits you to?

My email signature summarizes what I have learned in my journey: life here is so precious and death here is so final, but God has given Jesus the name of Lord! When I experienced how serving another emptied me of all arrogant pride and of everything of value that I owned, I identified deeply with Jesus Christ who emptied himself to serve me. I understood in my heart that he made himself a nobody for me. Miraculously and almost instantly, he became my Lord for now and eternity! The very next morning I returned to church to worship and to Bibe Study.

Graduates, if you remember nothing else that I have said, remember Saul, whose name was changed to Paul. Remember his changed signature in Gal 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me!” Not I, but Christ! Not I, but Christ!

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