SHIFTING CONTAINERS – Stamina Capacity
“Step one to running a marathon: You run. There is no step two.” – Barney Stinson on How I met your mother
The key question to answer as we approach the final chapter in SHIFTING CONTAINERS is HOW to build capacity in order to respond to the challenges and opportunities in this season of harvest. The answer is simple; there has to be an increase in our CAPACITY TO ENDURE if we want to grow and mature as believers. We must build a ministry toughness if we hope to become agents of change. This will however not be obtained at Bible schools or during Sunday morning services. An increase in stamina, endurance, and perseverance can only be “caught”, and cannot be “taught”.
Building our capacity in endurance and building spiritual stamina will involve three principles:
- From pruning — to prosperous
- From victim — to victorious
- From haste — to heart
FROM PRUNING — TO PROSPEROUS
Before looking at the HOW of building stamina, we need to look at the WHEN of building stamina.
One of the main obstacles to capacity building is the fact that we often seek favourable “seasons” to build capacity. We attend conference after conference with an admirable desire to get to know God more and to understand Scripture more deeply, but often lack the stamina to apply those lessons when “life happens”. We love hearing about the persecuted Church and are inspired by testimonies of those who gave all for the glory of God, and yet we protect our freedom and rights with equal religious zeal. These are all important components in growing as believers but also present the risk of becoming obese believers with lots of nutrition but little stamina.
In John 15:2[1] the Lord teaches His disciples a contradistinctive lesson in capacity building. This hard lesson explains the principle that the worst of times are very often the best of times. The promise Jesus made to His followers, is that further growth is the blessed reward of forward growth and that to ensure capacity we will need pruning, pain and purpose, not safety, security and sanctuary.
I remember walking through a vineyard with a wine farmer just after the grapes were harvested when he took his secateurs and started describing the process and the need for pruning. “Pruning is not only to get rid of dead branches and a cleaning process, it is to stimulate and initiate new growth,” he said. “New growth occurs right where you make the cut. The more buds that are pruned, the greater the capacity for new growth.” He then referred to John 15 and explained that a fruitful harvest is completely dependent on the painful process of pruning. It is about growth, capacity and stamina. It is about stimulating vision for future harvests.
Make no mistake, pruning is painful. And even though we as Christians do not pursue hardships and pain, we can never shy away from it or ignore it. This is where capacity is impregnated.
The irony is that where most religions see hardship as a curse or a result of sin, Christians see it an act of love and a discipline to grow[2]. Hardship is a time where Christ invests His care into those He loves by stimulating growth and building endurance. We should never ignore the seasons of pruning, although it will involve pain and happen in our spiritual seasons of winter.
So, understanding the WHEN of stamina building helps us to pursue the HOW of stamina building.
FROM VICTIM — TO VICTORIOUS
It never ceases to amaze me how often well-meant words of encouragement, even prophesies that so often limit capacity building and hinder endurance, are spoken to people in need. We seem to proclaim release more than endurance. When friends are sick it is so easy to speak prophesies of healing instead of words of perseverance. When times are tough it takes little effort to speak promises of release, instead of encouraging endurance. Capacity building will never come in times of comfort and every challenge should be seen as divine moments of growth, and should be advocated as such by friends and family.
Theodore Roosevelt once said the following:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
“…those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” These are challenging words for those who seek to practice a safe and risk-free religion. I remember meeting a Christian in a restricted country and as we departed he asked if he could pray for me. I always value the prayers of those who carry the cross and eagerly accepted the blessing. The brother prayed and then ended with these short and uncomfortable words: “May the Lord deny you peace and grant you victory.”
As I opened my eyes and he saw the questions in my eyes, he responded as follows: “My brother, how will you ever experience victory if you only live in peace.”
Our mandate as believers is to live lives that will reflect a victory rooted in the inner peace of the cross that Christ secured, not in the comforts of the peace that the world offers. That was the reason why Jesus looked at His disciples and rebuked Peter in the harshest possible way. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” (Mark 8:33)
The ability to persevere in times of hardship will ironically both require endurance and at the same time also build endurance. It is the contradistinctive nature of trials that they not only build character, but also reveal character. The ability to endure in difficult times does not only depend on how we deal with hardships at the time but on how we dealt with them in the past. Every hardship therefore becomes a conduit to build a new capacity of endurance for future hardships.
FROM HASTE — TO HEART
Grant Lovejoy[3] compares the approach of some Christians to ministry to that of a Cheetah. He writes as follows:
A recent television documentary pointed out that the cheetah survives on the African plains by running down its prey. The big cat can sprint seventy miles per hour. But the cheetah cannot sustain that pace for long. Within its long, sleek body is a disproportionately small heart, which causes the cheetah to tire quickly. Unless the cheetah catches its prey in the first flurry, it must abandon the chase. Sometimes Christians seem to have the cheetah’s approach to ministry. We speed into projects with great energy. But lacking the heart for sustained effort, we fizzle before we finish. We vow to start faster and run harder, when what we need may be not more speed but more staying power–stamina that comes only from a bigger heart. Motion and busyness, no matter how great, yield nothing unless we allow God to give us the heart.
As post-modern Christians we all have evolved from the early days of normal-Christian-martyrdom to live an inevitable “double-life” where we still believe in the theology of sacrifice but do everything in our power to avoid it. Within the safe walls of our religion, we often “faint” at the thought of losing our freedom and our rights to worship. We try to escape the harsh realities of the “outside” world and this often manifests itself in newfound theologies that promote a Gospel of wealth, health and prosperity rather than a Gospel of substance and stamina. Modern-day believers have become masters in finding Scriptures that justify a sacrifice-free lifestyle. Or even worse, we have become masters in applying Scriptures of persecution to our own circumstances of comfort to somehow justify a lifestyle of ease and abundance and still feel connected to Scripture.
It has become a dangerous trend in Western theology that everything is measured relative to our own circumstances. There is the growing view that while Christians are persecuted elsewhere, we suffer in the West too. Some suggest it can be more difficult to be a faithful Christian in the developed world with all its freedoms and wealth than in a poor country with persecution.
To argue that materialism and wealth somehow make it more difficult to follow Christ than living in grinding poverty is deeply problematic both theologically and ethically. It dismisses or diminishes the actual sufferings of our fellow believers and turns us into victims. This results in apathy towards the suffering of the global Church and encourages us to be insular and self-obsessed. It is empirically wrong, (no, following Christ is not normally difficult here in the West) and ethically corrupt (they, not we, are being victimised and we are the ones in a position to help).
These theologies of relativism lull us into a sense of comfort and, together with a life-style that so easily conforms to the patterns of the world, create a toxic combination of spiritual obesity and a lack of stamina.
James Emery White gives a personal exhortation on his blog Church and Culture[4]:
“When I was a boy, I was given a piece of paper that moulded my thinking. I had it on my bedroom wall for years until it finally just fell apart with age. It was the words of Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States, that he delivered in a speech on January 17, 1925. It was titled, “Press On.” He said: ‘Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
“What marks the life of someone who lives a consequential life for Christ? When you read the lives of the great men and women in the Bible, what marked their lives? Courage? No, they were often afraid. The absence of failure? No, they made more than their fair share of mistakes and many were repeated moral failures.
“What marked their lives was an internal drive that was based on one thing: a hunger for God and the things of God. A desire to forget what is behind and strain toward what is ahead. They were marked by persistence and determination. … but up.”
Perhaps the best description in Scripture to “press on” and “to take heart” is found in Galatians 6:9[5] where we are encouraged to “faint not”.
“Faint not” requires stamina and spiritual toughness, two traits that come through exercise and determination.
Next week, in our final devition, we will look at a list of EIGHT certainties in life, things we can expect to face in one form or another, and how we can use them as capacity builders for stamina.
[1] John 15:2 He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.
[2] Revelation 3:19 Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent.
[3] http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/s/stamina.htm
[4] http://www.churchandculture.org/
[5] Galatians 6:9-10 KJV And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.
You are most welcome to order the book CAPACITY from Mike at thirdwayinfo@gmail.com