When God's People Care Series

Most of us are familiar with football, and with how it is played today, but in its early days it was a very different game. In football's early years, yardage was tough to acquire; points were even scarcer. Wearing little padding and protective equipment, players who used their bodies as battering rams suffered not just kicks, bites and eye gouges but wrenched spines and cracked skulls.

But football wasn’t just extremely violent. It was deadly. The Chicago Tribune reported 18 football-related fatalities in 1904, mostly among prep school players. After another 19 died the following year, universities such as Stanford, Northwestern and Duke dropped football. Others threatened to do the same unless changes were made.

Prodded by President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid football fan who worried that the game could be outlawed if not made safer, more than 60 schools met after the 1905 season and approved rulebook revisions. Among them were the abolition of dangerous mass formations, the creation of a neutral zone between offenses and defenses, the doubling of the first-down distance to 10 yards and legalization of the forward pass.

The problem was, many of the old school believed the introduction of the pass would sissify the game, make it less physical and manly, and would cause people to lose interest.

Those who feared the forward pass would immediately ruin football needn’t have worried because old-school coaches of the East’s top colleges viewed it as a risky gimmick. Yale tried only three passes in its season opener. All failed.

“Well executed they are undoubtedly highly spectacular, but the risk of dropping the ball is so great as to make the practice extremely hazardous and its desirability doubtful,” the New York Times editorialized.

Unlike the Eastern elites, Saint Louis University coach Eddie Cochems gave the new rule the old college try. Before the start of the 1906 season, he cloistered his team in a Jesuit retreat in Wisconsin, as he later wrote, for “the sole purpose of studying and developing the pass.”

In the opener for Saint Louis against Carroll College on September 5, 1906, Bradbury Robinson threw football’s first legal forward pass. The toss hit the ground untouched, resulting in a turnover. But Robinson later connected on a 20-yard touchdown pass. Thanks in part to the forward pass, undefeated Saint Louis outscored its 1906 opponents, 407-11. (How the Forward Pass Saved Football, Christopher Klein, June 1, 2023, history.com).

Sometimes, in order to change the game, one must be so overwhelmed by the pain of the current situation, that you are willing to put everything on the line.

In the book of Nehemiah we find such a man.

- Read Nehemiah 1:11b - 2:8

I. IF YOU CARE, YOU PRAY AND WAIT

If you remember, last week we saw that there was somewhere between 3 months and 5 months between when Nehemiah heard about things in Jerusalem, and when he approached the king. What did he do during that time? What did he do during those months? He prayed and waited. He prayed and he waited.

Yale’s heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. That quote’s been attributed to a lot of people over the years, but the earliest it can be definitively found was from a Knoxville, TN newspaper article from October 1981, reporting on a recent Al-Anon meeting.

While in some cases that may be true, but when God is involved and we are praying, we continue to pray until He words.

When Joshua and the Israelites marched around Jericho, the first 6 days they marched and nothing happened. Can you imagine the people?

On day 1 the people ask, “Joshua, what are we doing today?” “We’re marching around the wall.” On day 2 the people ask, “Joshua, what are we doing today?” “We’re marching around the wall. They did that 6 times with nothing happening, until the 7th day changed everything.

In 2 Kings 5, Elisha told Naaman, dip in the river 7 times. He did and he was cured of his leprosy. What if he had quit after only 4 or 5? He never would have been cured.

I wonder how often we see our prayers unanswered because we don’t give God time to work?

There are times, like when Peter tried walking on water and began to sink that we cry out, “Lord save me, I’m sinking,” and God answers immediately. There are other times when we pray and pray and pray, and we give God time to work the way He wants to. That’s why Jesus told the parables about the guy who went to his neighbor and asked for bread and didn’t quit knocking until his neighbor got up and gave it to him. That’s why Jesus told us to parable about the widow who kept returning to the judge asking for justice, until the judge finally gave her what she requested.