Jumping in God’s Arena
By Todd Janssen
Have you ever experienced God’s timing?
How do you engage with the world and share how Christ has changed your life?
Three recent experiences I’ve had have revealed this to me.
I recently celebrated 15 years of sobriety from alcohol addiction. As I continue to work on my character and healing my past, I have been struggling with two distinct items:
Remaining completely surrendered to God’s care and control
While also growing and impacting the world around me through the works planned by God in advance for me.
I have been wrestling with these for a very long time. Prior to entering into recovery, I always tried to do everything on my own, my sinful nature saw that those works were always poisoned. As I went into recovery, I continued to try and do things on my own while God continuously asked me to just rely on him.
There was a strange back and forth of receiving God’s grace and blessings in completely different ways than how I was working towards a goal and vision from God. No matter how hard I worked, it was always God’s blessing that took care of me, never my own understanding or work.
So this brings me to my other two experiences.
Have you ever heard or read the “Man in the Arena” speech given by Theodore Roosevelt?
“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 the 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.”
This idea of being in an arena deeply appeals to me, but with caution, as I know the result of jumping in the wrong arena, doing things under my own power, always results in feeling restless, irritable, and discontent.
At nearly the same time, I came across this scripture from Paul in the book of Romans 4:4-5 MSG:
“If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.”
It was a long struggle of tying these three experiences together, but just like God always does, things clicked together. God is calling me to the arena, every moment of the day. The arena is the same as it always has been. Reach people with the hope that is our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.
Two things will happen whenever I jump in the arena:
The task in the arena will be far more than I can bear
And I will have to trust that God will work it out
My question to you is this. WIll you jump into the arena with me? Openly and honestly share what God has done for you and share how God is still doing for you?
If you are in that arena everyday with me, let me know. I need the prayer of my fellow contenders, for only we will know the anguish of bitter defeat and the joys of God given victory.