Life in professional sport can be a real
rollercoaster ride! One moment everything is going great. The world
of sport almost demands that you act large. If you don’t believe in
yourself, who will?
To succeed you've got to be large. You've got to be. No one survives
in this business unless there is something about them that's large.
I can do it! I can be a winner! When you are large what happens? You
get larger!
But it can all fall apart too! Loss of form, injury, a new boss who
doesn’t like you. Sometimes you feel lower than a snake’s belly.
Your confidence is shot and you think you're rubbish and you think
you're not good enough. You wonder if you can survive all the
pressure.
 The
answer is to learn to focus on God in your success or failure and
not on yourself. And you have to find times when you say, God
you're larger than I! You are God!
I am not.
Remember Jewish lads we focussed on a few weeks ago from the Book of
Daniel? Well, a bit later in the book three of the them - Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego – fall foul of the king and are ordered to
worship a statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s gods or face a rather nasty
execution. What would they do?
Daniel 3:16 Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the
king, "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before
you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the
God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from
your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O
king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold
you have set up."
You may know the story and, of course, God did save them. But that
is not really the point. They were ready to take their stand for
God, even if it cost them their job (and their lives).
Now we are unlikely in 21st century Britain to be asked to choose
between our faith in God and keeping our job, let alone saving our
life. But there is a cost to being a Christian! We are called to
live a holy life; to be different. It can involve being the butt of
the jokes because we try to give by God’s standards not the world’s.
There will be times when we have to say, “ I can’t do that. I'm
doing my best, but listen, don't bully me into things I can’t”.
You can reply with the same cool detachment that the Jewish boys did
when they said, “No, I can’t do that”. Because God is
sovereign and he will never let us down.
God is sovereign and as he was in control of these boys’ lives, he's
in control of yours.
Thought
“Holiness is about living differently for Jesus sake”. Ian
Coffey
Graham Daniels and Stuart Weir
See also the Alison Nicholas article
"Bad day
at the office"
Also in this series on Daniel
Drawing the line
Not getting carried away
Master yourself
The long haul
Things that last
Making a
difference
An audience of one
He
could never become a Christian
Does it matter?
Being there for
Christ Writing
on the wall |
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