Extraordinary Endurance: Review and Re-launch

We covered so much this semester about what it means to have godly grit. It’s not easy to get it, but it’s necessary, and hopefully you’ve learned gained some principles and practices to grow in godly grit. And yet, there’s more we could’ve added but time wouldn’t allow it.

And so the rest is up to you.

How will you endure in continuing to grow in endurance?

First, what will you do during finals to help make sure you don’t just ‘gut it out’ with a godless grind? How will you steward the intellectual gifts God has given you so that your academic performance is an act of gratitude to God and worship of God?

Second, what will you do during the winter break to continue to grow in a Spirit-led endurance that’s motivated by God’s glory and fueled by God’s grace? In other words, what’s your spiritual workout going to look like from when finals end and the next semester begins?

Thinking about all of our Prime Times this semester, the most oft-quoted verses have been probably been Hebrews 12:1-2, and rightly so! It’s a phenomenal passage, one worth memorizing immediately:

“…since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

While it’s true God is calling us to endure, don’t miss the bigger point that it’s JESUS who already endured the death we deserved to die, thus enabling us to now endure by the strength He provides.

This is what it means to be athletes in action: it is to put our faith, our trust, in the person, works, and words of Jesus.

Then we’re on His team—even better, we’re adopted into God’s family.

Now, we live and love like Jesus, empowered to faithfully endure hardship because our lives are no longer our own, we’ve been bought with a price, and now we’re called and empowered to glorify God with our bodies and souls. (1st Corinthians 6:19-20)

This is how we put our faith into action, hence, athletes in action.