No, not the song by Coldplay. But seriously, what do you do when you, literally in my case, leave in all on the field and still fail? Tonight was the quarterfinals of the flag football playoffs. We were up by 4 with two minutes left when I let the guy I was guarding get behind me, who then got the pass and scored a touchdown. We failed to score again and it was game over. If you know me well enough you might guess that I don’t really care about losing personally. While that’s a correct assessment, the fact that my failure caused 10 other people to lose does bother me. Now this is my no means an unknown situation, professional teams and other organizations heavily dependent on teamwork have long spouted rhetoric about winning and losing as a team to avoid ostracizing the wide receiver who drops a pass in endzone, or the striker who misses a penalty kick.
But despite that, it’s natural to pinpoint the cause of the failure to an action, or inaction, of an individual. Now when that failure is caused by some degree of negligence, it may become easy to criticize, but what if it’s not? I didn’t fail to stop the pass because I wasn’t paying attention, but rather because the other guy was faster, stronger, and generally better at football. So what then? And to generalize this away from a sports game and into something that matters a little more, let's look at life. What do you do when you try your hardest at a given endeavor and fail? Let’s take a look at Colossians 3:23-24
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
Notice what this verse doesn’t say? Whatever you do, succeed. No, it says whatever you do, try your hardest. Why? Because as a steward you are working for the Lord, who will not fail to reward the faithful. Now immediately you might argue that success always followed the godly. The Bible is indeed replete with such examples: Abraham, Joseph, David, Daniel, just name a few. But something is in common with all of them. It was God granting the success. It was never by their own prowess, but by the grace of God, and they understood that. So what then is our responsibility? It is to succeed? No. Go back to Colossians. Our responsibility is to work with all our heart at jobs God sets out for us. Whether we succeed or not will be up to him. In addition we should be aware that our definition of success and God’s are probably not aligned. I’d be willing to bet that Stephen’s idea of success would have been to see the whole Sanhedrin repent at his message. But they didn’t, they killed him instead. Not much of an evangelist was he? But God knew what the purpose of Stephen’s death was to be, and it was successful in spreading the Gospel. And why was it that David’s success was conquering his enemies, while Hezekiah’s was simply survival? Was it because David was just that much godlier? Well he may have been, but in the end the results were determined by God’s purpose for the time in which they lived.
So what does this come down to? If you work with all your heart, if you leave it all on the field, you might lose, you might be maligned, you might be killed, but in the end you will never fail.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Wow, that pretty much hit home. Nice post man, I have to get Justin to read it.
On a completely different topic, I need to talk with you about how much freedom Blogspot gives you in formatting both the layout and the actual posts. I'd been thinking about starting a blog myself once I started Shell, but I didn't feel like learning PHP (or at least not enough of it to make a good-looking overall format).
Post a Comment