Author: Mark Batterson
Chapters Read Thus Far: One
My Thoughts: This Is Gonna Be A Good Book
Page Number Quote Is Found On: Fifteen
Recommended By: Daniel Cox
Title: In a Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day
Quote -- I think the church has fixated on sins of commission for far too long. We have a long list of don'ts. Think of it as holiness by subtraction. We think holiness is the byproduct of subtracting something from our lives that shouldn’t be there. And holiness certainly involves subtraction. But I think God is more concerned about sins of omission – those things we could have and should have done. It’s holiness by multiplication. Goodness is not the absence of badness. You can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right. Those who simply run away from sin are half-Christians. Our calling is much higher than simply running away from what’s wrong. We’re called to chase lions.
Okay so here’s the “break it down into real life so that I can understand it” parallel:
So you may or may not know.. but I am not a health nut by any means! When given the choice I will gladly eat white bread over wheat bread. I snub my nose at whole grain pasta. And will not for the life of me eat bran anything.
I have tried every so often to eat healthier.. but always to my disappointment, a bucket of fruit didn’t give me the great happiness a whole box of chocolate cake could!
So I’d eat a box of cake, and feel like a sloth for the next 14 days.
And so the cycle continued, try fruit.. get bored, eat cake. Fruit, boredom, cake.. blah blagh blob.
I wanted to get in shape, but I couldn’t get the right foods in me to get moving.
So I sat there, unchanging and discouraged.
Likewise, I’m sure we all have sin in our lives we are failing to blow off. We take those sins and hold tight to them, because they are too difficult to release. But as we choose to hold tight to those sins, we may also choose to feel guilty about them. So we try to release our grip on them, and like fly paper they just keep sticking to our greedy palms. We see nothing but our sins and decided that since we are covered in fly glue, we won’t do anything. We’ll likely sticky up anything we touch.
Well, Batterson invites us to look beyond the sticky mess, beyond the sins, beyond the blobs we feel we are. He invites us instead to look at what we aren’t doing that God is also displeased with.
Recently, a friend invited me to run a half marathon with her. As she stood there with her invitation, I wondered if she could see that I was nothing more than a puddle of a person, eyeballs staring out from the box of cake holding me together.
I figured she was blind and accepted anyways.
I ate my captain crunch and met up with her.
As we would wake up early mornings to train, I began to desire the healthier foods I had once snubbed my nose at. As I consumed these foods, my performance improved. My endurance improved and I began to crave the runs. However, not once since I began training have I been burdened with the choice of choosing the “right food”. The “right food” has just made sense. It fuels me, I feel better, and that allows me to enjoy the run even more!
I think the idea I am attempting to parallel is this: Setting your sights on the bigger run is not overambitious; it’s smart. It forces the hand to feed you food instead of play with fly paper. So stop trying to stop. Just go.