“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”

(Hebrews 12: 1-2)

You graduates of the University of Tennessee’s great medical division are ready to take off.  That’s why you are here this morning. You have finished the requirements for your degrees. The road ahead beckons. Perhaps you are already packed up. No doubt, for many of you the family car has come with Mother and Father here to fetch you home. All this commotion of commencement is just a jostling at the starting line for the real race of your life.

When I was a small boy we used to begin our sidewalk races with a bit of old English doggerel, or it may have been Mother Goose:

One for the money,

Two for the show,

Three to make ready,

And four to go.

As you stand poised for your takeoff, may I suggest as a commencement thought this line: “Three to make ready,” and invite you to let your thoughts linger for a few minutes on “the Three” you have to make ready — the three big relationships to be readied in your life if you are to run a good race: First, the one ahead of you; second, the one beside you; and third, the One above you.

First, think of the one ahead of you. A mystery detective story a number of years ago pictured a man trailing another. To Paris the chase took them. The hunter believed the hunted one was staying in a certain Paris hotel. But he wasn’t sure. How could he find out? He hit upon this scheme: he would go up to the room clerk ask if he, himself, were registered — giving his own right name — then while the clerk was checking the hotel register, he would have the opportunity to glance at the book and see if his quarry were staying there. The man carried out what seemed to have a very good plan, but received the shock of his life. To his surprise the clerk said: “Yes, he has been waiting for you. He is in room 40.” There was nothing else to do but carry out the plan. The stunned pursuer stumbled up the steps, knocked at the door of the room number 40 and was greeted by a man who remarkably resembled him, who looked very much like he might look some 10, 15 or 20 years hence.

Of course, this is just a story but the fact is that out there ahead of you, down the road of life twenty to twenty-five years from now, there is someone waiting for you. He has your name and looks something like you. It is yourself as you will be then. How are you going to like the looks and the personality of that individual?

That depends on you right now. You can control to a remarkable measure the looks and the likes of that one ahead of you. That is the reason it is so important for you to make ready your relationship to that one ahead of you now. How?

First, by taking care of your dreams and prayers of what you want out of life. You are going to discover that your plans and ideals, however preposterous and fantastic they may seem, will solidify into reality before you. The story of Aladdin’s lamp is really true. Your wishes life is going to grant you.

As I look back over the last twenty-five years of my life, it is positively spooky the number of dreams I’ve dreamed and prayers I’ve prayed which have been actualized and materialized. This is partly good and partly bad. For you see, all my dreams, wishes, and prayers have not been pure and beautiful. Some of my dreams were unworthy ambitions. Some of my prayers have been for self more than for God’s Kingdom. And where I’ve sought to get my will, my success, my profit — though often, so often, the wish has been fulfilled, it has turned out to be a gilded hollowness, an unsatisfying success. But on some rare occasion when I’ve really dreamed dreams along the lines of God’s eternal purposes of love, courage, breaking the bonds of oppression and servitude for others of his children, then my soul has thrilled with unspeakable enjoyment at the achievement of a permanently satisfying goal.

Must I remind you that the highest fame of service professions is subject to the most subtle of evil possessions? Clergy, physicians, the healing arts, the social services are beset by awful temptations to do others good for selfish motives, to achieve objectives of personal fame or material gain. I heard a man recently commend a physician for his unselfish community service in these words: “Allow me to compliment you on your interest and activity in civic affairs. Too few from your profession in my city will assume community responsibilities or will give generously of their comfortable incomes for charitable causes.”

Yes, be careful what you dream. Take care how you pray. The Bible is full of answered prayers which ruined people. So is life. The power of dominant desire in human life is terrific.

But it is not only your dreams and prayers which are readying that one ahead of you, but also your work day by day will make ready that man or woman which will be you on your road of discovery ahead. The chief of one of our nation’s largest advertising agencies has characterized contemporary America as, “the era of the goof-off, the age of the half-done job.” This business executive, Mr. Charles Bower, says that our nation from coast to coast has been running away from responsibility. “It is populated with laundrymen who won’t iron shirts, with waiters who won’t serve, with carpenters who will come around someday maybe, with executives whose mind is on the golf course, with teachers who demand a single salary schedule so achievement cannot be rewarded, with students who take cinch courses.” (United Press, Washington, May 20, 1958)

We may succeed in carving out a new culture in America which executes initiative and expels responsibility and guarantees a living wage with retirement at sixty-five on shoddy work done, but we cannot repeal the spiritual laws of the universe which proclaim that man never becomes a saint in his sleep, that personal inner satisfaction with one’s self is achieved only through self-discipline, that when the self sits in judgment on the use one has made of his God-given talents and the amazing opportunities to serve one’s day and age that have paraded before him, there can be no earthly reward comparable to that which the courageous warrior and indefatigable worker can say in his own soul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept faith.”

“Three to make ready,” and the first to make ready is that one ahead of you — the you of 20 to 25 years hence — and you can make ready now a satisfying and blessed one only if you watch how you work and pray.

But there is a second one to be readied for winning the highest stakes in life: the one beside you. Yes, I’m talking about the girl of your dreams or the man in you life. You won’t mind thinking about him or her for a few minutes will you, even if I can’t furnish the accompanying soft music? This is so very important.

Rufus Jones, the great Quaker philosopher, said there were three major events in everyone’s life: “Getting born in the right place, of the right parents at the right moment of time; selecting and attending the right college; and getting married to the right companion for the voyage of life.” I can see all of you have managed quite handily the first two major events, and some of you may have arranged a good start of the third.

Right motives and a touch of intelligence are very important even in love. Don’t park your head outside when you go a’ courting. A weeping Jane Carlyle wrote in her letters: “I married Tom Carlyle for ambition, and he has fulfilled my ambitions beyond my fondest hopes and I am utterly miserable.” How many times have we heard it said that such and such a one would have been somebody really great if he had married someone else. But on the other hand how often we are impressed with the wonderful way in which a husband and wife complement each other and really achieve a team status in family, community and business life.

A recent discovery of old letters in a French Chateau reveals something of the beautiful relationship which existed between Lafayette and his wife. That noble friend of American independence and his wife realized a wonderful togetherness of personal devotion and of common commitment to grand causes. Once during the French Revolution when Lafayette was in prison and his wife struggling for his release and carrying on in the cause of freedom to which they both had given their lives, Lafayette wrote her: “My dear heart, I am so satisfied with all that you do, with all that you say, with all that you are.”

Ask yourself now, my friends: “Am I all that one who now or some day will claim my dearest devotion would want me to be?” One of the most horrible forms of retribution the unfaithful person suffers is that he who has broken faith with others finds it difficult ever to believe that another will or can be true to him. Infidelities inevitably fashion a suspicious heart.

On the starting line which commencement time is, the second sacred relationship to be readied is that one beside you.

And the third to make ready is your relationship to the One above you. I cannot put it better than did the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “Seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:1-2)

It is this third relationship made ready and secure which guarantees and safeguards the other two. When your deepest, truest, inmost self is bound in indissoluble union of faith and trust and obedience to Jesus Christ, then you can rest safely about the perfect acceptability of that one ahead of you 25 years hence and you can know that the love which binds you and the one beside you is safeguarded in His perfect love.

Arnold Toynbee in his trenchant analysis of Western man’s epochal discoveries which produced the Technological Revolution and gave the West its great edge of advantage over the rest of the world, lists as the world’s most crucial inventions: the water wheel, the wind-mill, the heavy plow, and then, rather surprisingly to me, the “discovery of new harness for donkeys, mules, and horses that at last enabled these draught animals to put their full power into traction.” (An Historian’s Approach to Religion — Arnold Toynbee, Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 220f)

For centuries, the yoke, which had been the first used method for working oxen, was used invariably also with other animals. But the yoke was not best suited for harnessing their maximum pulling power. Only after suitable harness was invented could they put fully into traction their resources of power.

So also for man, the personal discovery which opens up a revolutionary new world for man and puts his full power in traction is the discovery of Jesus Christ as his own divine Lord and Savior. Oh, the lost motion, the pitiable waste of power in human life! Of course, the major purpose of university training for you graduates has been that by means of the disciplines of study and the development of professional skills you might harness and put in traction your talents and powers for the practical use of society. But this academic proficiency is not enough. Man is not only mind and body. He is an immortal soul, a free emotional and volitional agent. Some of the most empty, useless lives I’ve known have been university graduates. I knew of a carefully trained professional man who recently died in a house of charity following a life of unproductivity. His family and friends deserted him because he was determined to live in selfish dissipation. In the worst of his drunken stupors he would stagger to his feet, throw out his chest, and mumble: “I am a graduate of Harvard University.”

Man must have some sort of built in spiritual disciplines or he will never pull his own weight. What sort of harness best fits man, allowing him to put the whole power of his personality into traction? Why, the yoke of Christian discipleship! Look now to that one about you. Ready that relationship with Him who says to you: “Take my yoke upon you for I am meek and lowly in heart and you shall find rest unto your souls.”