There’s no vitality without reality.
One of the greatest ids in the coaching world is film. Film don’t lie. Players can have all sorts of perceptions about what just happened, but we can look at it on film and it will tell us exactly what happened. The sooner we get to reality, the sooner we can coach you up to take things on in a different way. But if we can’t get to reality, we can’t fix anything.
The Bible speaks plainly about the human condition. Society wants to argue the point, but watch any newscast and see if Paul’s repeat of Psalm 14 statement isn’t true…
10 “There is none righteous, not even one;
11 There is none who understands,
There is none who seeks for God;
12 All have turned aside, together they have become useless;
There is none who does good,
There is not even one.”
13 “Their throat is an open grave,
With their tongues they keep deceiving,”
“The poison of asps is under their lips”;
14 “Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”;
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood,
16 Destruction and misery are in their paths,
17 And the path of peace they have not known.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Romans 3:10-18
Humanism says the human heart is basically good and just needs a little instruction from time to time. But how many four years olds need to be instructed on behaving badly. Every good trait that I wanted for my children had to be guided, reinforced and sometimes forced. I never had to teach them how to be selfish, how to be sneaky, how to be mean to their sister, those things we come by naturally because as Jeremiah said…
“The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick: who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9
WE live in a day where people can’t hear anything honest, just positive puffery. I’m all for encouragement, but the intro message to any improvement is that there needs to be something different going on. In the case of my players, as long as they string together a series of excuses for why they can’t seem to get a job done, there will never be any improvement. At some point coaching them becomes futile. You just trust that one day they will come around and ask you, “what can I do to get better?” When we get to that point players grow by leaps and bounds, it’s a beautiful thing.
The same is true in our walk of faith, the good news starts off with acknowledging the bad news. I pray that reality will bring us to the vitality that God intends for His people!!
Truth, Grace, and Time 