They Call You Coach- The Fourth Quarter- MONDAY

"Fatigue makes cowards of us all."  Those were words of the great Vince Lombardi when he made his case to his team for their conditioning to be a championship team.  They became the first Super Bowl Champions.  Although he was talking about the physical body of his players, his thought has other far reaching aspects, from the physical to the mental, from the emotional to the spiritual, and as well from the burn-out we feel in our jobs to the worn out condition we feel as we age.  Since football season is just around the corner, I would like to present our devotional series this week around football metaphors.  You do not have to have played the game or coached to understand the parallels I will make.  Just go with me and allow me to present the real life challenges we face at every sector of life as if we are players in development, and then later transition to being a player/coach to help develop other players.  Let me be clear with my message this week.  I see a lot of needs and opportunities with men who are struggling in life.  Therefore, my purpose this week is about raising the awareness of this need and for you to be part of God's reach in bringing God's help to them.

If you are a Man of God and you are not actively serving your King's cause, my mission is to get you out of the stands and into the game, for you are greatly needed.  I see so many middle aged and older men who feel that the only contribution they need to make to serve Christ's cause is to show up for some sort of gathering and support someone else's ministry.  That incorrect point of view has created a large number of fans who applaud and critique ministry leaders, but neglect their own personal ministry to be "players or coaches" who are in the game.  I can see nothing in this view that obeys Christ's leadership to go and make disciples.  In this day and time we cannot afford to be passive.  As older men, we cannot let up and coast this late in the game.  Men, regardless of your age, we are in the fourth quarter on God's scoreboard clock and we need more fans from the stands going to the field as players to take seriously their roles in serving.  So here goes with my football metaphors.

When I was a freshman football player at Ole Miss, we were not eligible for the varsity team.  No freshman player was in any Division 1 school.   Schools could also give unlimited scholarships then, if they could afford it.  Ole Miss could.  If you were a top high school player in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana, or other places in the country, Ole Miss would recruit you and provide you a scholarship.  My freshman year there were about 50 or more such guys on my freshman team.  To give you just a little idea as to how hard that year was, we had only 30 scholarship players that returned the next year.  Those other players could not meet the demand asked of them and gave up their scholarship for various reasons.

My freshman head coach was a scary guy who I will discuss more about later.  A former Marine who served in WW2, he felt his job was to prepare us for battle in the games as if we were going to war.  He did a great job, for those of us who endured.  Some of the things he taught about football would become stepping-stones for many of us into maturity after football.  In some instances, some of his coaching points became an instinct within us for surviving in business, building a family, processing through life, and in my case finishing strong in my Christian race.  It is one of those things he taught that I would like to use as a football metaphor.

As with most football teams, we ran our 50-yard wind sprints at the end of a grueling practice.  We were tired, beat up, and thirsty from no fluids all practice (the way they did it then).  When the coach lined us up he always said the same things.  "Run through the finish line.  Do not coast before you cross it.  Give it all you've got.  Do not let up."  Now understand that we all wanted our practice to end.  Our instinct was to drop to the ground and lay there after drinking as much water as we could safely hold.  So running like he demanded was the last thing we wanted to do.  But some of us wanted to be players in our freshman games and to play on the varsity team the next three years.  This was more important to us than the rest we wanted.  Little wonder it was the 30 out of the 50 men who always ran through the finish line and who came back the next year.  I did not know it at the time, but it was through this plan that our varsity coaches were grooming the players of the future.

I didn't understand why this freshman coach demanded so much of us inrunning all the way through the finish line ... that is until the next year when we were tied going into the 4^th quarter of an important game.  You see, the game in the 4^th quarter is lost by people who give up when they get tired and aren't properly trained, and won by people whose instinct it is to never give up and endure to the end.  As a team, we knew that a close game in the 4^th quarter would be ours, for we had been trained to finish strong by running all the way through the finish line.  It was in our hearts to finish strong and never coast until the game was over.

I mentioned how this practice routine became an instinct for me, and how it now serves me with finishing strong in my race for Christ.  Here's how:

I believe that I am in my 4^th quarter of life, and likely the Church is in the last quarter as well.  It is too obvious to see it any other way.  Either way, I think the goal line is not many yards ahead for all followers of Christ.  Some of us might even be at the two-minute warning in this game called life.  I was there last year, but God added some time back to my clock.  I rolled past 71 years of age about 6 months ago.  But I feel that there is still a game to be contested, and game in me.  I want to be in the game and I am blessed to be in it.  Now that I am older, I want to be a coach to help other players.  Jesus has led me to see that I need to transition into this role, for it is much needed.  I think it is a natural evolution of God's man to track this way, from player to coach, for I cannot look at the life God has given to me and not see a stewardship responsibility to reinvest my life with other young men who serve my King.  It is because God has graciously allowed me to become a spiritual coach for a lot of guys that I will tell you that I have never enjoyed the game more than I do now.  Therefore, I want to encourage you guys who have lost your vision of your worth, who have forgotten the need for you that the Church has, and the sacred responsibility you have to get out of the stands to where the game is really played, to wake up.  This week I hope to get you to suit up and head for the field to play for Jesus.