“‘When people fall down, do they not get up? When someone turns away, do they not return?’” (Jeremiah 8:4, NIV)
John Eades is a businessman before he is a golfer. Still, he is a golfer, and a very good one. At 36, Eades recently outlasted a strong contingent of collegiate players over four stroke-play rounds to win the North Carolina Amateur Championship.
Eades made it clear: He did not win because he out-practiced the younger players. You cannot run a company and raise children and spend timeless hours on the range. Life doesn’t work that way. Instead, Eades credited his win to perspective. “To them,” he told Global Golf Post’s Ron Green Jr. of his competitors, “it’s like the biggest tournament of their lives. For me, it’s not. I use that as an advantage.”
OK, but Eades has skills you and I don’t. We’re probably not going to win our state am this summer. So it was something else Eades said that caught my attention: “It’s not a one-hole tournament. You don’t have to be perfect.” This is something we can all remember.
The foolishness of religion is that it tempts us with the notion that we can be perfect. If we follow the rituals and talk through the prayers and do enough nice things for others, we’ll be in good with God. What about those other times, when we stumble in sin and speak loudly with knowledge we do not have? No need to reckon with God then? Just keep marching on with our best moral plan?
Humble people know that sin is its own error, but the dismissal of sin is all the worse. The former ignores God; the latter rejects him.
We will fall down. We will have our one-hole disasters. To think otherwise is to declare God blind.Notice the words of the Lord through the prophet Isaiah: “When people fall down…” It’s not an if, but a when. We will fall down. We will have our one-hole disasters. To think otherwise is to declare God blind. But he already sees, he already knows.
Religion says, “You have to be perfect.” God says, “Are you kidding me? Far too late for that!”
So the question in the wake of sin is never, “Did anyone see that?” The question is, “Will I get up from this? Will I return to the Lord?”
Read on in Jeremiah 8 and you’ll find that God was deeply disappointed with his people. They simply would not recognize their sin. Instead, they set their own standard and pretended to be perfect according to it.
Like par, we violated God’s standard long ago. Maybe we’ve never fessed up to this. Or maybe not in far too long a time. We’ve lived by religion, by the wisdom of self, pretending God does not see. He sees and he weeps. Will we rise in confession and turn to him?
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Jeff Hopper
July 10, 2019
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
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