Tim Scott Commencement transcript:
Good afternoon! Y’all are graduating, this is a good day, they told me I only have three to five minutes which is almost impossible for a politician, but we’ll try anyways.
I want to just give you one clear piece of advice. Live your faith and do it in a practical way. An example for you: when I first got out of college, my second job was an insurance business. And after a few years hanging out at the insurance business, the owner came to me and said, “Tim, you ought to be an entrepreneur.” Yep, I got fired. It turns out that going to movies in the middle of your workday and inviting your coworkers to go with you – not as smart as I thought it was at the time. Had I remembered the scripture Colossians 3:22 and 23, to work unto God and not unto man, I may have been able to keep my job.
So, making our faith practical is not just reading the Bible, it’s actually living it in a way that others want to have more people like you come into their business.
Now, I was a slow learner, I want you to know. I had to have another lesson. My mother taught me this practical lesson. Many of us are familiar with John 15. The second verse talks about the necessity of pruning a branch so that it will grow more. This is a good thing. I would recommend that you figure out how to do it yourself and not have someone help you figure that out. One day when my priorities were a little mixed up, my mother introduced me to John 15. She wanted me to understand the importance of pruning. So, she walked me out to a tree, and she said, “Pick a little branch for yourself.” Some of y’all are from the South – I see that, this is good. So, I broke the little branch off, and I did not realize that while the story is about pruning, that there is an important opportunity with the little branch that comes off the tree. My mother introduced me to the psychology of the switch. So, for those of you not from South Carolina, I heard that some of you graduates are from Michigan and you may be familiar a little bit more with “time out.” But, let me tell you, let me tell you, a switch is a Southern apparatus of encouragement. She applied it from my belt to my ankles, and I was thoroughly encouraged.
My final piece of practical advice is to keep it simple. Every single day make sure that your daily disciplines start with the Word of God, a little praise and worship music and then a daily journal. In 2012, as a new member of Congress, I thought that learning about the country’s problems was a little more important than spending time in God’s Word and I found myself challenged. And it took me about two weeks to figure out that what was wrong was not the amazing responsibility of being a member of Congress; it was forgetting whose son I was, and that the only way that I could serve other people was to spend the first portion of my day worshiping a living Savior.
