When
The Goin Gets Tough…..
Will you excuse me if for the next few devotionals we talk about football sayings? After all, I am a football coach…again. And after all, it is approaching football season. And what else do coaches do during football season except talk about football. As teacher of a Sunday school class, I will admit to you I have used about 10,000 football illustrations in the last few lessons.
One saying that I heard in high school while playing football was “when the
going get tough, the tough get going.” My
high school football coach, Tom Calvin, was a tough guy so that saying coming
from him held special significance.
One thing for sure…sometime during the stretch of a football season, there
are going to be tough times…real tough. The belief is that when these
difficult times come, certain players are going to rise up…usually the ones
who have either prepared for those tough times or they have some sort of inner
qualities that enables them to give that little extra it takes to win.
By the same token, when the going gets tough, the coach may also find
out who is not willing to rise up.
Now coaches try to find out which players they can count on in practice, not
in games. In other words, you hate
to learn that important lesson of whose tough and whose not when the game in
on the line. I can truthfully say
that when I played, the games were a breeze…mainly because the practices
were so hard. Coach Calvin
definitely knew who his tough guys were before they hit the field.
He had us prepared.
There are going to be tough times in life, too…real tough.
And like football, some people will rise up and others will quit.
Only thing, life just keeps coming, with its own set of rules and
standards and sooner or later, it will win if all we have to rely on is
ourselves.
Jesus said tough times are coming, too. Some
of those times are coming just because we have chosen to follow Him.
Only unlike football, we don’t have to rely on ourselves to rise up.
Jesus said the world is coming, but “fear not, I have overcome the
world.”
The joy of this day is not that life is not tough.
It is and sometimes it’s easy to think we are all alone.
The joy of this day is that through Christ, we have the inner strength
to overcome. Let me throw out a
new phrase with more truth…”when the going get tough, Jesus gets us
going!”
The world would win the game of life if we’re on our own.
But, praise God, we are not on our own.
We are not alone. He is
with us. Thanks be to God through
Christ who gives us strength to be tough!