Coach Shelton’s Top 10 Lessons that Lead to the Abundant Life

Coach Matt Shelton spoke to our high school students on Tuesday and left them with his ‘Top Ten’ List for an Abundant Life. This is a great message for all of us!

10. Never leave the details to someone else.  If you want something done right, you need to be involved!  Don’t let someone else do all the work and expect everything to go smoothly!

• Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.-Proverbs 10:4
• There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. -Roger Staubach

9. Lead, follow, or get out of the way!  Today everyone wants more leaders, and that’s not necessarily wrong, but we also need followers!  Sometimes it’s harder to be a follower than a leader.  The easiest thing to do is complain about the direction things are going, that’s when we need to get out of the way and quit being a stumbling block.  Then go find something you can lead or follow!

• We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.-George S. Patton

8. School isn’t all about grades, find something to pour your heart into besides academics!  Don’t get me wrong, your grades are EXTREMELY important, but your experiences are much more important.  God put you here for a reason, one thing I can promise is that it wasn’t ALL about your GPA.

• George Washington(little formal education), Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln (only one year of formal education of any kind), Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Harry Truman all didn’t attend college!

7. Be careful in your dating relationships!  First off, no one your age NEEDS a boyfriend or girlfriend, it’s not a necessity in high school!  But, a lot of you are in relationships, if so, you need to be careful to honor God in that just as you would in any other aspect of your life.

• ³ For this is the will of God, your sanctification:^[b] that you abstain from sexual immorality; ⁴ that each one of you know how to control his own body^[c] in holiness and honor, ⁵ not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; ⁶ that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. ⁷ For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. ⁸ Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.-I Thessalonians 4:3-8

6. If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans!  I never in my life thought I would be here today, especially not when I was your age.  I had my whole life figured out.  My family’s very stable business is the only thing I ever wanted to do, then I did it and found out I was born to do something else.  Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  It’s okay to have your plan, just remember, your plan isn’t necessarily THE PLAN!

• For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare^[a]and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.-Jeremiah 29:11

5. Learn HOW to have fun!I think the reason so many people make bad decisions about the way in which they have fun is because they don’t know how to have good clean fun.  I’m from the Seinfeld school of thought, I think life is most fun when you treat it like it’s a show about nothing!  Take some time today and just pay attention to what’s going on around you.  You won’t believe how funny it is!

• I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.-Jerry Seinfeld

4. Relax!Don’t take yourself and your reputation so seriously that you miss the important part of life!  Life isn’t about the next party or being noticed or anything like that at all.  Slow down and form some relationships with the people you are surrounded by.  I want to challenge all of you to go and find someone you don’t know very well in this room and get to know them.  Just relax a little and get to know someone with face to face interactions!  Put the cell phone up for a few minutes and form a relationship, it just may end up being one of the most important things you do here.

• I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one’s life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.-David Rockefeller

3. Learn to LOVE work!  Work is not some punishment that God “inflicted” on mankind because of sin.  God works: “And on the seventh day God finished His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all his work that He had done.” (Genesis 2:2)  Before the fall we were given work, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” (Genesis 2:15)  So don’t view work as drudgery, if you find yourself in a job or career that you can’t stand, maybe the problem is YOU, not the work!  Find your calling and learn to love to work!  Colossians 3:23-24 says, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”

• Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.-Theodore Roosevelt

2. Serve! God didn’t put you here to be waited on hand and foot, neither did your momma and daddy by the way!  You were made to serve.  How do I know this?  Jesus was a servant.  Who are we to complain about service to each other, our school, our church, our community, when Jesus literally serves the people responsible for His incredibly painful death here on earth?  You no longer have the excuse that you “don’t know how to get involved.”  Mrs. DeShazo is here to help you and point you in the right direction.  You all know we have a service requirement for graduation now.  10 hours per year.  Think about that, in one school year we are saying you have to serve something other than yourself for ten hours.  There are 24 hours in a day.  If you take just the Saturdays from the time school starts to the time it ends you have 40 Saturdays which means you have 960 hours, JUST ON SATURDAY to get your 10 hours in.  My hope and prayer is that you will learn to love to serve and that you’ll go beyond that 10 hour requirement.  We are called to serve, so let’s do it!

• We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.-Ronald Reagan
• ¹⁰ As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: -I Peter 4:10

1. Life is HARD, and that’s nearly impossible to handle if you think you’re special.  The truth is, you aren’t that special!  Neither am I!  We are all unique and different, but not “special.”  What I mean is we aren’t above anything happening to us, nothing makes you so special that bad things can’t happen to you.  In fact, studies have shown that 10/10 people die.  Things are going to happen to us all in life.  The best days are ahead of you, but more than likely, so are the worst days.  So how do you handle it if you aren’t “special?”  You go to Jesus Christ and invite someone who is special into your life!  Make no mistake, becoming a Christian doesn’t mean life is going to be easy, in many ways it’s harder.  You were made by the Creator for a calling, not a career.  God wants to use you to show His glory, and why He is special!  Find out what your part in the story is, you don’t want to miss it.

• ¹³ The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.-Ecclesiastes 12:13

Bonus Time:

 

1. When in doubt, go to a Mexican restaurant.
2. Read!  You won’t believe how much fun it is!
3. Listen to Mrs. DeShazo, you can’t put a price on wisdom.
4. Learn to write, it’ll get you through college, Mrs. Purcell gets credit for my degree.
5. Go give an elementary kid a high five, you won’t believe how it’ll make their day, which will make yours!