Original: December 19, 2007
McMinnville, OR
4 For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Romans 15: 4
There have been many times in my life that I wanted to quit. I hated basketball because of my wrestler body type. There is not much room on a varsity basketball team for a six-foot, 220 pound forward. I guess I gave power forward a whole new meaning! To this day not wrestling is one of my biggest high school regrets. Our high school wrestling team was back to back league champs while the basketball team struggled to win a handful of games each of my three years on the varsity team.
The reason why I did not cross over is almost comical. I never quit basketball to wrestle because I did not want to let my teammates down. I threw myself a party the day my basketball career ended but was pleased to have stuck it out to the bitter end, and trust me, it was bitter. I am a finisher to a fault at times.
Quitters have many disguises and just as many excuses but the end the product of quitting always looks the same-the premature departure from a commitment.
We live in a culture of quitters.
The best is not the most talented one standing, but the last one standing. A man does not have to be the best; he simply has to outlast the rest. There is a stench of the perennial quitter that a finisher can smell through his whines and useless excuses. A finisher can handle many types of sin and different types of people, but the one person that makes the finisher choke down his vomit is the person who does not finish what he starts. The greatest temptation for the finisher is tact when ministering to a quitter.
Listen to the apostle Paul, a consummate finisher, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).
It is far too easy for a man to quit his job, his marriage, his promises, and his biblical mandate to lead. A man’s adult life is spent pursuing trophies, trophies that are elusive to the quitter but rewarded to those committed to finishing at all costs-the greatest trophy of all being God. Like the sign I read in a middle school locker room 30 years ago, “A quitter never wins but a winner never quits.”
Boys start well and finish poorly. Men may start small but finish big.
Success is found on the other side of endurance (2 Timothy 4:6-7). Romans 15:4 reinforces that knowledge means little to the quitter. The “encouragement of the Scriptures” without the ability to endure or finish is a void check. It does not count. It is useless.
It doesn’t matter what a man knows if he does not have the endurance to finish what he starts. The Scriptures give him the “encouragement”, or knowledge, to get their but only endurance (perseverance-NASB) can take him there.
Knowledge without endurance is a gun without the bullets, an engine without the fuel, a fishing pole without line and reel. We need both the knowledge to understand what to do and the endurance to finish what knowledge is set in motion.
