For Easter: Is that all you’ve got?

Diane and I, along with our good friends, watched, then jumped to our feet screaming as John Norwood sent the 97 MPH fastball over the left field fence to give our beloved Vanderbilt Commodore baseball team a 3-2 lead over Virginia in the 8th inning. We then jubilantly celebrated after Adam Ravenelle sat Virginia down in the eighth and ninth to clinch the 2014 NCAA College Baseball National Championship. I will never ever forget Wednesday, June 25, 2014, in Omaha, NE.  It was the ultimate satisfaction for a college baseball fanatic.

 

As a lifelong Commodore fan, the National Championship was the culmination of years of wishing, hoping, dreaming, and cheering. We were ecstatic…overjoyed that we had reached the top. But, funny thing … after we lost in the finals of the College World Series the following year, there was disappointment. An empty feeling betrayed the unrealistic expectation that we should have repeated … mostly erasing the extreme satisfaction I had experienced just 12 months before.

But it’s always that way, isn’t it? I remember thinking that if I were ever running a business, I would have made it. Hmmm … I remember when I first met my goal of making a certain amount of money in a single year … I was super charged … until the next year came and I just “had” to make even more. I once made a hole-in-one. The thrill lasted only until the old guys in the clubhouse disparagingly asked if that was the only one I ever made.  My biggest fish? Ever?   I once caught a twenty-five pound King Salmon.  But my son-in-law caught a twenty-nine pound one later the same day.  I could hardly wait to get back out there and catch a bigger one. Remember when you moved into your “dream” home? Remember two years later starting to look for one a little larger? And, if you could just get that next promotion, you would change your priorities. Did you?

It happens to us all … the things we think are going to satisfy us never really do. How many movie stars do you see that are really satisfied after they achieve a high level of fame…that can be gone in an instance? How many cosmetic surgeries do they have trying to keep up the look that made them famous? How many rich people’s children find that the wealth creates more problems than they can handle?

We’re not the only ones.  James and John, Jesus’s disciples, were right there with Jesus and could have asked for anything. But they wanted to be given preferential seats in glory. Mark 10: 35-41.  Really?  The Samaritan woman at the well at first did not ask for anything.  John 4:7-15.  But when she knew who she was with, she did ask for the “living water.”

Sometimes we, like James and John, are just seeking the vain things that we think will satisfy, but they never do.  Sometimes, we are just busy doing things … maybe good, worthwhile things, like the Samaritan woman going for water … without recognizing that we should be spending our time and energy seeking the living water that will quench our thirst for good.

In sports competition, a recently popular phrase is actually a way of taunting the competition when they give their effort which falls short. “Is that all you’ve got?”  is a way to say that what was done was not enough, was weak, was disappointing,  was less that it needed to be.

As our Pastor Mike Glenn once suggested, perhaps Jesus wanted to say to James and John … “Come on guys, is that all you’ve got?”  “I can give you all that makes for life; the living water that keeps you from thirsting again, and all you ask for is to sit in a seat that would make others envious?”

I hope that when I pass from this earth, no one ever even thinks about my business, whatever money I have made, the fact that I’m a huge Commodore fan, my hole-in-one trophy, or the property that I might own.  If that’s what I leave them, they will have the right to ask “Skip … Daddy … Pop…is that all you’ve got?”  And when I meet my Maker, He would likely say “I had so much more for you, if you had only sought Me.”

Instead, I hope to move toward the paradigm of Paul as he told us in Philippians 3:7-9…that all he had previously considered gains, he now considers garbage when compared to gaining Christ and being found in Him.

Are you seeking the right things?  Your heart will tell you if you are truly being satisfied. Listen to it.  Don’t let your family or your creator end up saying “is that all you’ve got?”

As I prepare … this Easter week … I long for my mind and heart to discard the desire for the vain things, and seek Christ in his crucifixion and resurrection. And every day this week I will sing (probably silently so as not to scare anyone) the Isaac Watts hymn:

“When I Survey the Wondrus Cross” (emphasis mine)

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.