God & Golf (Encouragement from the Truthinator part deux)

If your Christian life could be spoken of in terms of golf analogies, what do you do most often when faced with an excellent opportunity to represent God and His word? Do you hit it long and straight? Do you sink the 20 footer? Do you shank it into the woods or yip the 3 foot putt?

When your friends talk about you behind your back (and you know they do) do they refer to you as the Palmer or Nicklaus of the faith? Or could you better be compared to Scott Hoch or John Daly who were both on the verge of greatness but could not get there.

I see myself as the Roy McAvoy of Christianity. Who is Roy? He is the minimum-wage golf range pro in the movie Tin Cup who lives in a Winnebago at the range. Roy can never seem to finish anything and he shanks life whenever he can. Roy was known as one of the best ball strikers ever in college yet in life he could never amount to anything because his mind was chocked full of inner emotional turmoil.

I am afraid if we knew the heroes of the faith a little better than we do we would find more McAvoys than Palmers. None of us are perfect nor do any of us approach perfection. God has a tendency to qualify the called instead of call the qualified into service. Why?

I believe it is because the self-impressed are beyond the point of having any real value. Their tank is full of myopic mist. Any apparent accomplishment is of their doing. Any failure is someone else’s fault.

God uses people who know and proclaim that only God could have accomplished anything in their lives. God is due all glory and praise. Romans 1:18-32 talks about what happens to people who live in vanity refusing to honor God and give Him His due praise and worth.

Are you saved? If so, then God began a good work in you and will see it through until its completion (Philippians 1:6). The load of responsibility for making that 3 footer under immense pressure has shifted from your back to His. We certainly give effort to our sanctification but not to earn it for ourselves. We go through the God-directed motions as we journey to become like Christ. His plan not ours. His power not ours. His guarantee not ours.

Now tee it up and hit it down the middle. The pressure of performance belongs to God. Ours is to obey; His is to accomplish.

 

Remember who is in control… (read on)

A note of encouragement from the Truthinator…

 I don’t know about you but I get discouraged sometimes. People desperately need the message we carry yet they are often less than concerned about the severity of their eternal state.   Then I remember the prophet Jeremiah who was told by God that the very people to whom he was to take God’s message would fight against him rather than listen.

 We must take the message of God’s grace found only via Jesus to the world. God will determine and deliver the results. We were never told to deliver results to God. He charged us with being faithful to Him in carrying His message and caring for the truly needy. 

 I exchanged emails with a Cambridge University Theology professor a while back. This man was doubtlessly very much learned in many subjects but unfortunately theology was not one of them. He was a proponent of the Emergent Church concept where anything goes and all roads lead to heaven (or to nowhere if one preferred it that way). We had several cordial discussions about what he believes vs. what the Bible teaches. To my surprise, he ended up admitting that his belief system had many holes in it and that the Emergent Church was a “work in progress”. I challenged him not to go into eternity hanging onto the hopes and hubris of the human ego but to trust in what the Bible plainly states. Afterall, the Bible has been attacked for thousands of years only to continue to stand. Hundreds of prophecies written long before the birth of Christ were fulfilled by that very birth… man’s hopes and dreams have no such record of success. 

 Do what God says to do. The responsibility for the results rests squarely upon Him.