Running with purpose

All athletes are disciplined in their training. They do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize. So I run with purpose in every step. I am not just shadowboxing. I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified. (I Corinthians 9:25-27)

This walk with Jesus might intimidate some, but you don't need to be afraid to really 'get into it'. God never asked us to just 'show up' - he always asked for our best and our first. You and I may have been 'trying' to walk as we should for way too long - 'trying' but not really hitting the mark. Just doing our 'best' hasn't proven to be enough to get us to the goal line. We need to stop trying and really just put some effort into training!

Trying is where we start, but a 'trial period' doesn't produce consistent results, does it? We must invest in the 'training' that is required in order to grow up in Jesus. Half-hearted attempts may get us moving in the right direction, but they lack the commitment that will get us 'all the way' to the finish line. The difference between trying and training is simple - when only trying, we give up when we no longer feel the motivation! An athlete trains with intention and intensity. Emotions may tell us to quit, but the athlete, being committed to his training, will 'train on' even when the emotions are drained.

Fight for what truly matters. Training is for a purpose - to be all that God calls us to be. Our mindset must change from just trying to training for the long haul. When we train, we find we do some things today, but those 'things' actually are helping us develop what we will need for our training tomorrow. If you want to think of this in a spiritual sense, training is merely what scripture refers to as 'faithfulness'. An athlete sets goals and then takes the steps toward each goal. It isn't to run a marathon today - it is to run a block, then two, then a mile, until he is able to run the half-marathon. As he trains, he develops the strength and stamina for the race. 

Remember this - trying is something we do for the short term; training is what we do when we want to go all the way with Jesus. Training is actually helping you and I become more of what we already are - redeemed, whole, and living with a purpose in mind. Just sayin!

Win/Loss Ratio a bit low?

Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it. (George Halas)

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12:1-2)

Do we live with regrets? Yes, sadly, many of us do live with regrets - things we wished we would have said, done, or pursued. There is no place for regrets in this walk with Jesus, though. Jesus doesn't 'set us up' for regrets - he sets us up for victory. We may fail to keep our promises to him on occasion, but that doesn't mean we have to form an 'attachment' to the failure by stashing it away as a regret. It means we have the opportunity to take it to him, lay it down at his feet, and allow him to 'remold' the regret into the next steps we should take. It is commonplace to actually 'fail' and dwell upon the failure. God asks us to not live 'commonplace' lives, but to live 'extra-ordinary' lives - IN HIM. There is absolutely no room for regrets when we walk with Jesus - only redeeming moments. 

Do we sometimes think we have given our best and still don't do as well as we had hoped? Yes, of course that happens, but it must not be our stopping place. We might 'give it our all' and still not quite make it as far as we imagined. If we stop there, we give into the idea that we are incapable of ever achieving the goal. That may very well be true! Sometimes we need our goal adjusted a bit - because WE chose the goal, not God. At other times, we gave our all, but God is showing us he wants to be there to make up for what our 'all' is not capable of producing. We might need to lean in a bit closer and hold on a bit tighter to achieve the goal. Either way, God has the power to redeem the moment - it is not all a failure!

Do we want the best, but have no idea how to achieve it? It is possible we have some idea of what the 'best' will look like, but there are times when we have no clue. We just see that big hurdle in the middle of our path and know there is absolutely no way we are going to make it around it, over it, or even under it! We imagine the worst even before we take the first step toward it. George Halas was a baseball player, football player, and eventually a football coach, and team owner, nicknamed "Papa Bear" by his friends in the sport. Do you know what his regular season win stats were? In 47 years, his wins amounted to 67.1% of the games his teams played. Did he give up after the first loss? No, he pursued the win - for 47 years. The win may evade us on occasion, but it never suggests we just stop pursuing it, my friends. Just sayin!

I've tried that before...

A long time ago, a friend gave me an illustration which has stuck with me through the years. He held out a beautiful Montblanc pen, (since I am a writer, pens are kind of a passion of mine), and asked me to "try" to take the pen away from him. Seeing this as an easy thing, I reached out to his outstretched hand to take the pen. Now the pen was in my possession, or so I thought. He then corrected me with the following: He told me to only "try" to take the pen! When I responded with a quizzical look on my face, he used this illustration to speak a life-lesson. Knowing my passion for words, he was showing me the very first definition of the word "try" is really something quite different than we might suppose. In fact, it means to "attempt" to accomplish something. It does not imply actually "doing" it - just attempting it! We talked for a while about "trying" versus "doing". We go through life doing a whole lot of "trying" - attempting to accomplish whatever we set our minds toward. Yet, in the end, when we look back at the "attempts" we may find most of them are actually only marginally successful, if not totally unsuccessful and unrealistic!

We Jews know that we have no advantage of birth over "non-Jewish sinners." We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. How do we know? We tried it—and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believed in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be set right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not by trying to be good. 

(Galatians 2:15-16)

There is a definite difference between "doing" and "trying". What I did when he offered his pen is an action which accomplished the intended result. If I was simply trying, I might only have looked at the pen, imagining in my mind how I could swoop in, grasp the object and be off with it. One produced a result, the other produced a whole lot of "mind effort", but no real change in the pen's location or possession. There are many times we look back over our decisions only to find our "efforts" of "trying" to change a particular habit, or break free of a particularly annoying sin never really accomplished the change we desired. When we examine this further, we might just find we actually are doing what the dictionary offers as the second definition of "try" - we have "experimented" with various "options" to see which one might just work. Unfortunately, in our walk with Christ, no amount of "experimenting" with things we could "try" on our own will ever work to bring lasting change!

Lasting change comes not in merely changing the rules we keep. It comes in the changing of the company we keep! The company we keep in our thought life influences the decisions we make. If the company we are keeping in our minds is a confluence of all kinds of input - some spiritual, some worldly, some of our own twisted imaginations - we are often confused as to the actions we should take to accomplish change. This is why we are warned to not focus so much on the input, but the source of the input! Grace is the method of change God uses each and every time. It is by grace our thoughts are changed. It is through grace our choices are refined. In the movement of grace in our lives, we see what we imagine IN CHRIST accomplished in our lives. When we finally admit the "trying" efforts of our own "experiments" at change as riddled with self-failure, we begin to invite the influence of the Spirit of God into the midst of our desired change. We move from a position of "trying" into a place of "doing" by embracing the method of change that really works - Christ IN us, the hope of glory! Just sayin!