Grad Sunday | 5/17/26

• Reflection Questions

  1. What does it mean to you to have “strong roots in love,” and who has helped create those roots in your life?

  2. What transitions are you walking through right now, and how might God be present with you in the middle of them?

  3. Is there someone in your life who could use a word of encouragement, a prayer, or a reminder that they are loved?

  4. How have difficult seasons shaped your faith or strengthened your compassion for others?

Transcript:

Let’s pray.

Lord, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the scriptures are read and your Word is proclaimed, that we may hear with joy what you have for us today. Amen.

Good morning, friends. It is my great privilege to be sharing the message today on this Sunday as we celebrate these remarkable young people. I am so glad that we have all ten of these graduates here, and their families, with us in worship.

My family and I just marked our eighth year here at Trinity. Isn’t that awesome? Yay! Thank you, thank you. This is the longest place that I’ve ever served in ministry, or really the longest place I’ve stayed anywhere as an adult. And this church has become such a family for us. This has become our home.

And so it is even more special that today I get to pray blessings over these students that I have walked alongside for all of their middle and high school years. It’s pretty cool.

So today I want to share some scripture, and I want us to pray some prayers over these students as we send them forth with prayers and blessings, asking God to give them strength, discernment, and compassion as they step out into the world.

So, thinking of prayers and blessings to share with these grads today, I was drawn to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Honestly, this spark of inspiration came in a church council meeting a few weeks ago when Steve Price shared this piece of scripture as a devotion with us. And it was interesting because this will probably be his last church council meeting with us before he retires this summer as our lead pastor.

So when Steve shared this scripture, I was struck with the correlation between him, one of our spiritual leaders, praying over us as we enter into this time of transition with a new senior pastor. So it made sense that graduating and starting this next phase of their lives, these graduates are definitely entering into a time of similar transition.

So as a church, we will be celebrating Steve as he leaves to retire and as we welcome in our new pastor, Pastor Charlie and his family, into this next season of their lives here with our church. So we all have some transitions going on. It’s exciting.

And so I offer this prayer for us from Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 21:

“This is why I kneel before the Father. Every ethnic group in heaven or on earth is recognized by him. I ask that he will strengthen you in your inner selves from the riches of his glory through the Spirit. I ask that Christ will live in your hearts through faith. As a result, having strong roots in love, I ask that you’ll have the power to grasp love’s width and length, height and depth, together with all believers. I ask that you’ll know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge, so that you will be filled entirely with the fullness of God.

Glory to God, who is able to do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine, by his power at work within us. Glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus for all generations, forever and always. Amen.”

Y’all, that’s powerful. I feel like I could just say another word: that’s powerful.

But our scripture today is a prayer. It’s a small piece of this letter that Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus. Paul had been a part of the Ephesian church, having been there for over three years, working in their midst. During his time in Ephesus, he was welcomed into their homes and into their lives. He worked alongside them as they built their community of faith together — this community of faith that would change their area of the world.

Paul writes this letter to the Ephesians that we read today, years later, when he was in prison. He was writing from prison, a place of intense limitation. But his message to them is one of unlimited hope, asking the church to focus on inner strength rather than external circumstances, praying that God would move in them, would strengthen them not in a way of physical or political prowess, but with an inner strength to be awakened to the deep dimensions of God’s love — a love that he says is beyond knowledge.

This prayer hits me in a real place. It feels extremely relatable for us today, doesn’t it? I feel that plea for God to move in our lives, to move in our community, to give us strength. And it shows us just how powerful God’s love is for our grads who are stepping out into new situations, and for the rest of us who are dealing with so much in our lives — situations that can feel uncertain or limiting.

This prayer calls to God from a deep place.

Paul continues on to pray that Christ will live in our hearts, and that as a result of having strong roots in love, that we will have the power to realize and grasp all dimensions of God’s love. This idea of being empowered by God through our strong roots in love makes the uncertainty of life feel a little less scary.

Strong roots in love.

These strong roots — y’all, look around. This is this church family. We have these strong roots that have grown for each of us. As a church family, we have watched each other grow up. We’ve walked alongside each other. We’ve cheered each other on, challenged each other, and prayed for each other — specifically these graduates throughout their years.

We all have the privilege of having strong roots in love because of God’s work in this church and through the people here that make up this church family.

This Sunday is always one of my favorites of the year. I mean, it is constant celebration, and that’s kind of my thing. But it’s also really special that we have a chance each year for us to be reminded that God is working in our lives, that we can see the way that God is moving in these young people. It gives you hope for a future in uncertain times.

We get to celebrate, and we get to mark the milestones together. Together, we get to help equip each other for the road ahead and shower each other with prayers.

So, like I mentioned earlier, I’ve had the privilege to have been here for all seven years of these grads’ time in middle and high school. We’ve walked together through a lot — the early days of middle school through confirmation. We have grads here who have been in three different confirmation classes, which is really cool.

One of those classes, we were on our confirmation retreat together on Saint Simons Island, Georgia, in March 2020. Does that sound familiar? When we heard together about this weird thing that had come to the U.S., called the coronavirus.

So those were interesting days.

So we also walked through COVID together, figuring out how it is to live life and go to school and have youth group during a pandemic as their church family, as this group, deeply rooted in love.

We’ve watched these students grow from children who participated in Cheers and Rejoice, who were at Cross Trainers sports camp as kids, and now have grown into counselors at the camp. We’ve seen them as youth and now as young adults ready to go out into the world.

We’ve been able to see firsthand as they find themselves in their callings, and we get to be a part of that.

Being their youth ministry, we’ve celebrated these achievements in the classroom and on the sports fields, seeing them challenge themselves. We’ve sat together at Bagel Bakery on Friday mornings and shared about the great and not-so-great stuff going on in their lives, and sometimes about the Taylor Swift album that dropped the night before.

We’ve had the opportunity to serve our community here in Gainesville and all over. We’ve traveled on mission trips to Louisiana, Fort Myers, and Asheville to do hurricane relief work, and we traveled to Detroit to learn about food and housing insecurity and urban farming.

Together, we’ve been able to learn a lot about ourselves and how others live, and how we are called as people of faith to respond in God’s love.

I could go on and on about how great these students are and how many games of Moose Moose, Sardines, and Underground Church we’ve played all over this church and all over this country, but instead of going on and on, I want to keep praying for them.

I want us to pray for each other as a church, to lift up blessings for God to do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine by his power at work within us.

After this service, you’ll have an opportunity to wish them well, to tell them that you’re proud of them, and to leave them with a note or an encouragement for the days ahead.

You can see in the very back of the worship space, there are three tables with, of course, balloons on each side, and these clear boxes with their names and some things that represent them. And in front of each of those boxes is a Bible for each of the students.

And I invite you to take a moment to write them a note in the margins or highlight a Bible verse that’s meaningful to you, so that we can continue to show them that they have a place here. They have a family that’s loving them and praying for them and lifting them up through all the days ahead.

So our hope is that as they go to college and they take this Bible with them, they might read one of those notes on a day that they really need it, and they can be reminded that they are not alone.

So, all this to say, I’m not going to go on and on. We can talk during the reception, and I can go on and on about them, but I won’t from the pulpit.

What I do want us to do is to pray. I want us to pray some more, to lift up these students with blessing upon blessing upon blessing. I want us to keep these words of Ephesians 3 running through our minds and through our hearts. Because God is moving. God is with us, and we are not alone, friends.

So let’s hear one more time this verse from Ephesians 3, and let’s offer this up to God:

“I ask that God will strengthen you in your inner selves from the riches of his glory through the Spirit, that Christ will live in your hearts through faith. As a result of having strong roots in love, I ask that you’ll have the power to grasp love’s width and length, height and depth together with all believers. I ask that you’ll know the love of Christ that is beyond all knowledge, so that you will be filled entirely with the fullness of God.

Glory to God, who is able to do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine by his power at work within us. Glory to God in the church and in Christ Jesus for all generations, forever and always.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.