Head-Heart-Hands — The Intellectual Side of Christianity - Friday
Today’s Verse
Hebrews 10:23
Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. (NLT)
Emmitt Smith may be the greatest running back of all time and statistics support that claim. Among other accolades, he’s the only runner in NFL history to lead the league in rushing yards and touchdowns. But when Smith was a freshman in high school, he had a problem; he was constantly fumbling the ball. One day, his coach came to him, got in his face, and screamed, “You will never be a good running back unless you hold on to the ball, and if you don’t hold on to the ball, you won’t stay on this team!”
Smith says, “That was the day I decided to do whatever it took to hold on to the ball! Great men and women throughout history have become great because they held tightly to things that mattered.” Yesterday, we discussed the necessity of holding tightly to the Bible, our most reliable truth source. If anyone has ever done that, it was a missionary named Frank Laubach. Let’s peek into his life for a moment.
In 1930, on an island in the Philippines, he climbed to the top of Signal Hill. His spirit was crushed, and he was disappointed in how his life was turning out. He had missed his dream job (being a college president) by one vote. Three of his children had died from malaria…and his wife and their last remaining child lived 900 miles away. To make matters worse, the people he was trying to help were categorically rejecting him.
So, he sat on top of Signal Hill and talked to God about everything. Then, the strangest thing happened: Jesus came shining through. Frank had long been a Christian but said, “I hadn’t really known Jesus. So, on that hill, I decided to live the rest of my life in daily, moment-by-moment communion with Him.” Subsequently, his life had an amazing impact on the world until his death in June 1970.
His book, Letters by a Modern Mystic, chronicles his remarkable life story. In His own words, he wrote, “The most wonderful discovery I ever made was the realization that I didn’t have to wait until some future hour to experience God’s presence; that hour is now. Heaven is now, and every hour can be rich with God.”
REFLECTION
And that’s the crux of the matter, right? Not whether or not God exists, but whether or not we’ll develop a deep and abiding relationship with Jesus and follow Him until the end. I’m all in. Are you?
