Don't Stop On Six!

Don’t Stop On Six

In my second year of college,

I had a good friend of mine

who had joined the lightweight crew team.

The crew team was the guys who rowed

those long skinny boats

that look kind of like a cigar with 8 legs.

And my friend talked me into joining the crew team.

Now, I'd never rowed before,

so when I started I was way behind everyone else.

We'd take out 4 or 5 boats each day,

with 8 oarsmen in each,

and I was the guy nobody wanted in their boat,

because I was still trying to learn how to row.

In fact I only had one advantage.

I'd run long distance all through high school,

so I had great endurance and leg muscles.

And crew is all about endurance and leg muscles.

So anyway I stunk at rowing,

but I refused to quit,

and I slowly throughout the fall I started to improve,

And then when the winter came, I really shone,

because we couldn’t do any rowing in the winter,

it was all running and weight training,

and that was my forte,

I'd come in first on all the 10 mile runs.

And then we got to the Spring

and we're back to rowing again,

and I still stunk, but I kept with it,

and slowly, slowly I was improving.

and Spring is the big racing season, for crew,

so we started racing against

Princeton, and Harvard, and Penn,

And I wasn’t in a Varsity boat, no surprise,

because this was my first year rowing,

and I wasn’t near as experienced as the other guys.

But I kept with it, I persevered.

And then came the breakthrough.

The number 2 varsity boat had a guy in it,

that was way better at rowing than me,

he was a junior with lots more experience,

but he didn’t have near the endurance I did,

I'd come in first on all the runs and he came in last,

and the coach decided

that boat needed somebody who would be strong

at the end of the race,

and still have endurance left,

and so he took that guy out of the boat,

and put me in for the last few races of the season,

and I ended up being one of the first sophomores at the Naval Academy to earn a varsity letter,

in the very first year I ever rowed.

I was shocked,

everybody else was even more shocked,

my friend who talked me into joining the team was even more shocked,

because he didn’t make it into a varsity boat.

But that was one more lesson for my life…

If you persevere

even when its not going very well,

even when you're working hard and its not happening,

if you persevere,

you may attain more than you ever expected.

Hebrews 10:36

You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.

Notice, you need to persevere

why?

So you will receive what he has promised.

Did you know that God can make you a promise,

that you will never possess,

if you don’t learn how to persevere.

When I was in the Navy, we had a saying called the 7 p's.

Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

You might say, Ken that's only 6 p's.

There was a 7th one in the middle that I edited out because we're in church.

But anyway, I thought of the 7 p's

when I was writing this message,

because there's 3 p's right here.

God can make you a promise,

that you will never possess,

if you don’t learn how to persevere.

And that's true in relationships,

Its true in families,

it's true in churches and in businesses,

it's certainly true in our spiritual growth,

And I believe there are people here this morning,

and you know that you have stopped short

or else you're on the verge of stopping short,

of something that God put inside you,

something that he spoke to you,

or maybe a dream or goal he gave you.

You're ready to give up,

you're ready to give in,

but you need to persevere,

or you may lose out on the promise of God.

I want to look at a story from the OT.

So turn to the book of Joshua,

it’s the 6th book in the bible,

and turn to the 6th chapter.

This story takes place when

the people of Israel had left Egypt,

wandered in the desert for 40 years,

and now have finally entered the land

God promised them,

but the only problem is

there's a bunch of enemies there,

so now Israel has to figure out how to take the land.

And I think a lot of our Christian life is like that,