Orig: 1/2/03
19for I know that through your prayers and the help given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance. 20I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. Philippians 1:19-20
We must have been one site to see: My dad at over 260 pounds, Dan Puett at over 270 pounds, and me at a measly 230 pounds trying to tow a 12-foot low profile duck boat through the four inch deep channel at a minus tide in Morro Bay. Imagine three big guys up to their chest waders in mud pushing an empty duck boat; we didn’t even have a duck, through the empty “channel” desperately trying to get into deep enough water to row to the dock!
To make a painfully long story short we got caught on a minus tide in the Back (Morro) Bay duck hunting and the only way to get to our rig was to jump into the waste deep Back Bay silt and literally pull the boat through the tragically shallow channel. To make it more humiliating, a group of bird watchers/lovers was on shore laughing at us the entire time!
And I couldn‘t blame them.
It was quite a sight for them and quite a nightmare for us. If it wasn’t for the boat dock a few hundred yards away we may have sat tight and waited for the tide to come in six hours later!
Our story reminds me of Paul who had an “earnest expectation and hope” (NASB) that God would deliver him. Like pulling a boat through the mud, Paul knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that God would pull through for him. Even though the New International Version translates the word “eager”, I love New American Standard’s translation of “earnest”. We never use it anymore. To translate “earnest” into modern language we could say that Paul was passionate, excited or pumped in his expectation that God would pull him through the mud in his life.
It was Paul’s earnest, or eager, expectation that led to his courage.
The problem with many of us as men is that we expect and hope that we will pull ourselves through the mud. We are Americans right? We are self-made men. We are rugged individualists. We are so wrong!
We believe in Jesus but trust in ourselves. In our heads we pull for Jesus but in our lives we try to pull ourselves through the tough times.
We seek Christ but place our hope in our own strength (Philippians 4:13, Zechariah 4: 6). The problem, you can see, is we get weary. We get worn down and worn out by trying to pull ourselves and by mid-life we have a crisis moment when we realize we have been pulling the wrong boat through the mud! Subsequently, our passion gets replaced with temporal things from below and not the eternal from above (2 Corinthians 4: 18) turning our passionate flame of courage into a flicker of cowardice.
Here is the bottom line.
When we place our hope in ourselves failure is inevitable. This failure on our part leads away from trusting God and into fear. Fear is simply an inability to move forward because lack of trust. Antithesis to this thinking; God cannot and will not fail us. Knowing this gives a man the courage he needs to move forward because of the “hope that (he) will in no way be ashamed!”(20)
