Holding on loosely 'til end

In his parting message to Timothy, Paul writes in II Timothy 4: “For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

Paul tells what his course is in Acts 20: "But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God."

“You know, when you read Paul’s life, that verse helps you understand it; he lived like he had a suicide mania," says Jordan. “If you look at Acts 14, he goes into a city and they drag him outside of town, stone him and leave him for dead. But he gets right back up and you know what he does? He goes right back into the city.

“You say, ‘What kind of deal is that?!’ You check the record; up until that point every time a city rejected Paul he shook the dust off his feet and went on to the next one.

“But now here’s one where he goes in, they drag him out, stone him and leave him for dead and God resurrects him. I believe he died and God resurrected him. That’s the experience he talks about in II Corinthians 12.

“Paul gets up and says, ‘You know, I’ve been up there in paradise and seen some things that I can’t even tell people about. It was so wonderful I’d like to go back. I’ll go back into the city and maybe they’ll . . . ’

“From then on he lived like he had a suicide mania. He would just go right into the mouths of the lions. In fact, here he talks about being delivered out of the mouth of the lion.

“The guy had this concept of holding on loosely to earth. When he says, ‘Neither count I my life dear to myself,’ he didn’t say he didn’t love his family, or that he was trying to die tomorrow. He said, ‘I’m holding it loose. The most precious things to me are not what I possess here.’

“When you talk about persecution, or someone coming along and taking what I’ve got, beating me up, putting me in jail, or being shipwrecked time and time again . . .

“Read II Corinthians about all the stuff he went through. They did all that stuff to Paul and you think, ‘Goodnight, I’d have quit about the second verse!’

“But he says, ‘I’m not just going to finish the job, I’m going to do it WITH JOY.’ Those two words changed that verse for me. He’s saying, ‘I’m not just going to endure, I’ve got a joy in this!’

*****

“Where do you get the joy? I’ve told people for years that a verse of Scripture that changed my whole life and my whole ministry many years ago was the last verse in II Corinthians 1: ‘Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand.’

“I can remember like it was this morning the Sunday morning when that verse changed my life. I saw that my job is to help you rejoice in the Lord. How do you do that?

“When you get a gift, do you go, ‘Aghhh, I got another gift. I don’t know what to do with this. Pffft.’

“If I can communicate to you the gift grace has provided, it’ll produce the joy. In Colossians 2:7, Paul talks about  being ‘rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.’

“Thanksgiving comes as a natural response to being grounded in an understanding of what it means to be rooted and built up in Christ. The Christian life is a lifelong growing in maturity in Christlikeness, where the character of the Lord Jesus Christ reveals itself out through us over a lifetime of spiritual growth.

“Folks, if it isn’t your faith . . .  if you’re going to ‘walk by faith and not be sight,’ it has to be that. So when Paul says, ‘I kept the faith,’ that’s what he’s talking about.

“He says, ‘I finished my course,’ meaning, ‘I took the job God gave me and I finished it.’ The course was the ministry God had given him. When you finish the course, you keep the faith.

*****

“I Corinthians 16:13 is a verse people like to complain about that to me has always been kind of helpful.  It says, ‘Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.’

“People say, ‘Well, what does it mean to quit you like men?’ How does a man quit? A man quits when the job’s done.

“I ran track when I was in high school. You know the race was never finished until the finish line? I ran a 440 relay. You’d run your leg, pass the baton to the next guy. My leg was done but the race wasn’t done. You know how a man quits? When he passes the finish line.

“ ‘The greatest ability is dependability,’ some wise man said. When you finish . . . Did you see Alabama win the national championship the other day? That was as good a game as you’re ever going to see.

“If you watched the Alabama players, they had headbands with the word ‘FINISH’ on them. The coach, Nick Saban, his whole philosophy is ‘FINISH.’ Finish every play, every assignment, every game.

“If you just go do your job and finish, win, lose, or draw, you did what you were supposed to do. ‘Quit ye like men.’ Don’t quit with two minutes left in the game. That’s quitting like a girly-man. The MAN is the one who quits at the end.”

(new article tomorrow)