Entries from March 2007 ↓

I gave a speech a couple days ago concerning how a Christian can compete in all forms of competition. I found the study to very beneficial because we face competition in just about every area of life, not just in athletics, and we often find ourselves competing in very banal things. So, I thought I would share some of my findings with you, going piece by piece. Each post I will answer a question regarding competition.

What is Competition?

Before we get anywhere on our discussion, we must first define our terms so that we are all on the same level of understanding as to what we are talking about. The Oxford American Dictionary defines competition as “a friendly contest in which people try to do better than their rivals.” And if we look of the definition of compete it says, “to strive to outdo another for acknowledgment, a prize, supremacy, or a profit.”

Those definitions reveal three required components of competition:

(a) two or more people

(b) a desired prize

(c) self-interest of each party involved

Try to keep those in perspective as we move ahead in the discussion, remembering the skeletal structure, if you will, of competition.

I am going through Acts right now for part of my Bible intake and one thing that came to my attention while reading today was the way that Luke, the author, purposely mentions the fact that in many of the cities that Paul went to, the first believers were women. And they weren’t simply housewives coming to hear Paul preach, but they were “women of high standing” (Acts 17:12) and “leading women” (Acts 17:4). In fact, after Paul and Barnabas split up at the end of chapter 15, every city that Paul goes to a group of women or an individual woman is mentioned to be first among the believers.

I also learned that Luke has more mentions of women than any of the gospels. I’m not sure why this doctor would include such details about women, but I do find it interesting.

The other day I saw that Ian had a book on his shelf by A.W. Tozer entitled Of God and Men. After flipping through it, I found this great chapter called “We Need Men of God Again”. Here is an excerpt:

    Yes, if evangelical Christianity is to stay alive she must have men again, the right kind of men. She must repudiate the weaklings who dare not speak out, and she must seek in prayer and much humility the coming again of men of the stuff prophets and martyrs are made of. God will hear the cries of His people as He heard the cries of Israel in Egypt. And He will send deliverance by sending deliverers. It is His way among men. And when the deliverers come - reformers, revivalists, prophets - they will be men of God and men of courage. They will have God on their side because they will be careful to stay on God’s side. They will be co-workers with Christ and instruments in the hand of the Holy Ghost. Such men will be baptized with the Spirit indeed, and through their labors He will baptize others and send the long delayed revival.

At the end of February, I started a new Bible reading program. I did this for two reasons

1. I have never read completely through the Bible.

2. I really liked the way that this new one is setup.

The basic structure of the plan is this: 10 lists of books, read one chapter from each list a day. So, ten chapters a day and it spans the whole of Scripture. Right now I am in Matthew, Genesis, Romans, 2 Timothy, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Joshua, Isaiah, and Acts.

I tell you this to encourage you to get more Bible. Find some way to increase your Bible intake each day. The more time I spend with my nose in The Book, the more I fall in love with our triune God. The point of all our reading, listening, and memorizing Scripture is to know and love the Lord. If you simply turn to your Bible to help your problems or to make you feel better, then you are going to walk away disappointed because God’s truth was given for that purpose. The Scriptures don’t necessarily make me feel good, but what they promise to do is convict me of my sin. They reveal a holy God to my sin-debauched, forgetful soul. They open my eyes to my worthlessness apart from Christ and His greatness apart from me.

Above all things, read the Book.

We are a forgetful people. We forget appointments, facts, birthdays and anniversaries, names, rules, and past events. On a spiritual level, we also are forgetful. We forget references, memory verses, prayer requests, to thank God, to pray, and we often forget that we are dead to sin. I often forget the past grace that the Lord has shown me and the past pain of sin. We forget all sorts of things and many times it can be very frustrating.

But we are not alone in our forgetfulness. God knows that we forget things and He put things in place for His people, Israel, to remember what He did in years past. In Joshua 4, God commanded the people to put up a memorial of rocks to remember that the Lord God took them over on dry ground and that He held back the waters of the Jordan. In Deuteronomy 6, after giving the greatest commandment and knowing that they would forget it unless they did something, He tells them to put “these things” everywhere. Write on your foreheads and doorposts. Have them with you wherever you go.

Then in Numbers 15:37-41, the LORD gives a seemingly simply and exclusively Jewish command, but I think there is much that we can draw from this. The initial command is to make tassels on their garments with a blue cord attached. We shrug that off because it was given to the Jewish nation, but pay attention to WHY God commanded them to do this.

vs. 39 - “And it shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after.”

God told His people to wear something everyday because they forget. They are a people who easily forget and God knew this, so He instituted the tassel. Notice that this forgetting is not a small issue. It stands as the difference between worship of God and worship of idols. This passage shows how we sin because we forget the Word of God. Why is it so easy to forget? Because our human hearts are naturally inclined to turn away from God. Not that in the text. Even the people of God are inclined to forget God and to whore after lesser things. What an amazing window in the human heart.

Based upon these examples and many more, I believe that we must put things up in our lives in order to remind us of the commandment of God. We are forgetful people and we need physical objects placed before our eyes, so that when we look at them, we remember what the Lord requires of us and we do not turn to the direction of our sinful hearts.

This can come in many different forms for different people. A very easy thing to do would be to put Scripture up in all your environments in which you live - a verse in your bedroom, a passage on the mirror in the bathroom, an index card in your pocket, or a verse on your dashboard - anywhere that you can remind yourself of the commands and promises of God.

I think that if I understood the inclination of my own heart more and my tendency to forget, then I would do a lot more to remind myself. O Lord, teach me how to use physical things to remind me of your commandments and to keep my heart from following after evil.