Giving Your All

This past Monday at camp, Aaron Hanrick delivered a short message on giving your best for God. He started the message with instructions to make things right with our loved ones. He then proceeded to show this video clip from “Facing the Giants”

The Death Crawl

I wanted to take another step in this direction. Immediately after Aaron was finished with his great message, several illustrations and pop culture references came to mind.

Staying with the sports theme, I immediately thought of my favorite runner of all-time: Steve “Pre” Prefontaine. Pre ran one way: hard. He ran as fast as he could, for as long as he could. Here are two quotations from him:
“Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.”
“The only good race pace is a suicide pace, and today looks like a good day to die.”
His most pertinent quotation is this one, written on the poster:

For the next reference, we have this classic song by the Foo Fighters:

The Best of You

Looking into the meaning of the song, I came across this awesome explanation by user rooied1:
"To me this song juxtaposes the dichotomy of the human spirit. Getting the best of someone of course can mean two entirely different things. This song describes a relationship where a person feels emotionally, mentally and sometimes even physically spent; on someone who's essentially robbed everything from them. (Especially their dignity). These types of relationships are stepping stones and prepare you for someone else who will truly get the best/best of you. We've all been there and only after do we realize these people never deserved any of you, let alone the best."
Have we been there? I have been in relationships where somebody has gotten “the best of me”. And what did I learn from these relationships? I learned that only one person worthy of getting the best of me: my savior, Jesus Christ.

Taking this another step, listen to this awesome worship song by Misty Edwards:

You Won't Relent


This song describes the relentless pursuit of our Father in Heaven. He will keep pursuing us until we give him our best. He is not okay with a feeble effort. He is not okay with us being “Sunday Christians”. He keeps chasing after us until we surrender everything we have for Him. It seems intimidating to be pursued by the all-powerful Creator who can take us down at any second, doesn’t it? But in the end, isn’t giving God glory our chief goal as humans? Therefore our response should be like Isaiah’s in Isaiah 6:8: “Here am I. Send me!”

Shalom.

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