Serving Others

Serving Others

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by Alan Williams from his book Walk On, and the Scripture is Mark 10:45  For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The one glitch about the Wake Forest basketball team meeting room was that there were not enough seats on the sofas and chairs for all 16 players to sit.  Consequently, there were three or four stools directly behind the sofas-and this is where I always sat.  On days we met, I naturally passed over the sofas and sat on the steel stools.

For whatever reason, this particular day was different.  I walked into the locker room, got a Gatorade out of the cooler, and sat down in one of the big leather chairs.  It was an ambitious move, but I was tired of sitting on the stools.  As I sat down, one of the members of the basketball staff immediately confronted me and said, Come on man, let Josh and those guys sit in those chairs.

I conformingly nodded my head, got up from my seat, and made my way back to my stool.  I did not know it at the time, but Josh Howard happened to be right behind me and had heard my exchange with the coach.  He said, No, go back and sit down.  Alan is sitting there today, Coach.  I will sit on one of the stools back here.  The assistant coach, of course, could not say anything to Josh.  On that day, for the first time, I listened to the scouting report from the big leather chair.  Josh made me forget that I was a walk-on.

Josh Howard was the star of our team and probably does not even remember what he did, but I do.  He played all of the minutes and scored most of the points.  Conversely, I was the walk-on, who rarely got minutes and hardly ever scored points.  To this day, whenever I think of Josh Howard, I never think about the fact that he was the ACC player of the year or that he was a first-round NBA draft pick.  Instead, I think about the one day that he cared enough to give up his chair for a walk-on.

Josh in many ways reminds me of what Jesus did for me.  Jesus had a throne in heaven at the right hand of God, yet willingly and humbly gave up his seat to come to earth to save sinners like me.  And because of this undeserved grace, I am confident that even walk-ons like myself will one day have a seat in heaven-the greatest seat of all.

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

Our Home is in Heaven!

Dear Champions,

The Scripture is in the excerpt, and the excerpt is by Tim Keller.  This is a repeat for some, but some excerpts are worthy to be said again and again.

C.S. Lewis said the following in his chapter on Hope.  If most people really learned how to look into their own hearts they would know that they want something that this world can never give them.  There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never keep their promise. The longings that first arise in us when we first fall in love or first think of some foreign country or first pick up some subject that excites us, these are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning will ever satisfy. I am not speaking about what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages or trips and so on, I am speaking of the very best possible ones.  There is always something that we have grasped at in that first moment of longing that just fades away into reality.  The spouse may be a good spouse, the scenery has been excellent, it has turned out to be a good job, but it, the thing that we thought was going to be in the center of it, always evades us.
 
When you finally see that nothing in this world will ever satisfy you (and you will eventually see this), there are only four ways to possibly respond.  You're going to have to choose one of them, and it will totally shape the rest of your life.  You will either blame the things that you have and say that I have got to get better ones (better woman, better man, better job), or you will blame yourself and hate yourself, or you will blame life and harden yourself so that you will never hope for anything at all, or you can blame your theory of reality.  You can say, If there is nothing in this world that ever satisfies me, then it must mean that I am made for something beyond this world.  One response makes you a fool, one makes you a self-hater, one makes you an utterly hard cynic, and one makes you a Christian.

We are not made from this world; and Philippians 3:20 tells us that our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

 

God is Bigger Than Your Problems

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by Max Lucado and the Scripture is Numbers 13:30-32 Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it. But the men who had gone up with him said, We can't attack those people; they are stronger than we are. And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored.

It helps for us to see God as the one in whom all the affairs of our life fit.  For instance, when the twelve spies went up from Kadesh Barnea to check out the Promised Land, ten of them saw only the size of the giants in the land. They did not see God looming larger than the giants. David, on the other hand, when he saw the giant Goliath, was not afraid of being smaller than the giant because he saw the giant as being smaller than God. If we look hard enough in this life, we will always find a problem bigger than our current one. But if we look with spiritual eyes, we will always see that God is bigger than them all. If you are facing a problem right now that is bigger than you are, look again. That problem nests inside Gods purposes for your life. The problem is larger than you, but God is larger than the problem.

Keep stepping back until God, not your problem, fills your vision.

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining