Daily Devotionals

Chip Shots from the Ruff of Life

Devotional: November 15th

New Years are all about resolutions. That's what a friend of mine concluded as we were talking the other day. His succinct statement was something along the lines of, "Yep, everybody makes their resolutions and then nobody follows them." I guess the appropriate question to raise here is to ask how many of you have ever made a resolution and not kept it? Raise your hands. C'mon, Frank, you know you blew last year's resolution in the first day. For some reason, resolutions are a lot like promises for many people; they just simply aren't kept.

Ever wonder why? (insert guffaw, chuckle, giggle, laugh or whoop here) That's a no-brainer, right? We're just not wired that way. We are, after all, only human. Humans just can't hang in there. Humans are going to fail. It's our nature, right? I mean, we are supposed to miss the mark, fall short of the glory of God, mess up, right? Sadly, when it comes to missing the mark we usually exceed all previous expectations. Oddly enough there is a phenomena in golf that pretty much sums up our attitude of low balling expectations.

I don't know how many times in the thirty years I've been playing golf that I have been with someone who arrives at a hole where they have to hit across water and the person says, "Better get out a water ball." So what is his expectation? He's going to hit the ball in the water. This is the same guy that has been fighting a slice his entire life and yet still aims straight down the fairway hoping that this time he'll actually hit it right down the middle. Yet, at a water hole he pulls out a ball that he expects to hit into the water.

Many people begin their day wondering how they're going to mess things up today. There is a dichotomy at work. Ask any person if they would rather have a job making eight dollars an hour or eighteen dollars an hour and they'll tell you eighteen every time. They believe that they can do the work worthy of higher pay but don't think they can follow simple life plans. Work and life aren't a whole lot different. The important thing is they both begin with the proper expectations.

Here's something that probably no one has ever told you. God does not expect you to sin after you become a Christian. How would you feel if you were that golfer who just arrived at the water hole and your playing partner handed you a brand new, just out of the sleeve, bright white Titleist Pro V1x forty-eight dollar a dozen golf ball and said, "Hit this." Do you think he expects you to lose his golf ball? No. He expects you to hit it over the water. So explain to me why we should believe that God expects us to sin after we come to Him? "Then Peter said to them, 'Repent, and let every one of you be baptized for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.' " Acts 2:38 Why would God place His own divine presence in someone if He expected them to fail?