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God As Our Thesis Statement

Printer for Thinkers Inc post God as our thesisThough Hillsdale College pledges to uphold the Constitution, it still sees fit to continually inflict cruel and unusual punishment upon its long-suffering student body in the form of the academic essay. We scholars who sojourn far and wide to pay our respects to Western culture and perhaps even help its continuity are forced to compose our thoughts upon the subject again and again. The faculty has seen fit to not only require that these compositions be written, but also that they be written well. Thus, the students must take care to fulfill all of the criteria for a well-organized essay. A paper worth the, well, paper that it is written on must make a specific argument. Any good argument can be termed in one sentence, a thesis statement. If the paper provides no particular thesis, then it is simply useless words strung together with no unique purpose.

My current English professor, widely considered to be the most difficult professor of any subject on campus, began the semester by telling us about his policy on students receiving “A”s in his course. Needless to say, the bar was set pretty high. He emphasized over and over how important good writing was. Of course, in talking about good writing, he hammered on the all-mighty thesis again and again. To demonstrate how difficult this professor is, he remembers each of the students who got A’s in his 22 years of teaching. He told us how one of them had managed this feat. This fellow, with each paper he wrote, would write out his thesis statement for his work and place it directly in front of him while he wrote the body of his essay. Whenever a new sentence was written, he would check it with his thesis, to ensure that it was consistent. A royal pain? Sure. But it was obviously effective.

In discussing this subject with another student, we both hit upon the same conclusion simultaneously: As Christians, God is our thesis statement. If our lives were papers, we would want each one of our actions to reflect God. 1 Peter 3:15 tells us that we must always be prepared to give an answer to the hope that we have. When giving our personal testimonies, the stories of our lives, they should boil down to one central factor: God. Like the student in my English professor’s story, we should constantly be examining our lives, and checking them against our thesis.

1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” Each good paper will be thesis-centered. Its quality will live and die with both the quality of the thesis and the degree to which it adheres to it. The same is true of our lives. At the end of the day, anything that does not reflect God doesn’t matter, and simply serves to confuse our ultimate message. Therefore, to make life as meaningful as possible, as the above scripture commands, we should make God our thesis statement and hold fast to Him.

 

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