Uncommon lives

July 10, 2007

By Randy Mantik

Herb Brooks coached the gold medal-winning 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. He understood the value of complete sacrifice, of giving your all. In preparation for the Olympics, his team played an exhibition game in Finland. It should have been an easy win. Brooks knew the Americans could beat the Finns, but the game ended in a tie. The U.S. players were happy enough with the outcome; Herb Brooks was not.

Brooks knew his team was capable of giving a lot more, and he knew the players needed to realize that. After the tie game, he ran the players through one of his famous backbreaking drills, sending them up and down the ice again and again. The arena janitor shut off the lights and still Brooks ran them. He pushed the team until his guys felt they couldn’t skate another inch. He wanted them to learn once and for all they needed to leave it all on the ice with nothing held back.

“You must be uncommon men,” he told his exhausted team.

Generation after generation, day after day, I believe God is saying the same thing to His people. He has called us to be uncommon men and women. He has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light to be a set-apart people, to be His sons and daughters (1 Peter 2:9; Romans 8:14). We are challenged. We are pushed. But God allows that pressure in our lives in order to teach us to “leave it all on the ice.”

We need to learn to hold nothing back from God. He wants our whole heart, our whole life, every bit of our ambition and effort. Only then can we accomplish what He has called us to do, to shine brightly and reach a world filled with darkness and despair. Herb Brooks’ players had to look for deep hidden strength in order to keep going beyond what they thought they could do. We as Christians must do the same, only in different ways and with a different Strength.

God knows what you can give and what you can bear. “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Corinthians 10:13, NIV). We tend to think of that verse only in the light of being tempted to sin. However, “temptation” there also means a test, as in an experiment. Through our daily experiences, tests and adversity we are learning the reality of our faith, the proof of it.

God desires you to live in the realm of the miraculous. Someone has said, “Make it hard on God.” Live in such faith only He can make happen the needed things happen. Like Hudson Taylor said of any task he tried for God: “Impossible, difficult, done!”

In Scripture, the Philippians were an example of people who lived at full throttle for God. The apostle Paul loved these dear folks and recognized their giving hearts. They did not hold back; they had learned to give it their all. Because of their sacrificial giving, Paul said to them and to all who live with that heart attitude, “And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

As spiritual people, we are called to push the limits. When we do, sometimes we seem to hit the wall. Runners use that term to describe the point in a long, punishing run when it seems they have reached the end of their endurance. But when they force themselves to push a little more they find their second wind — a new burst of energy enabling them to reach the finish line.

When we as God’s children are running the race of faith, pushing the limits of what we think we can bear or do or believe for, we’ll hit that wall at times. But when, by God’s grace, we press in and push just a little bit more, we find more than just a second wind, we find the Wind, the empowering Spirit of God! He fills up all the empty, drained places in our spirits and allows us to keep going and do what we were sure was impossible.

You may feel exhausted today and at the very end of yourself. You might be relating pretty well to Herb Brooks’ players when their legs felt like water and the only logical thing to do was collapse. But when you’re at that point, even long before you were at that point, Christ has been and is there. He knows the struggle you face today and He will not leave you to face it alone. He is turning you into an uncommon person.

Randy Mantik is senior pastor of Crossroads Church of the Assemblies of God in Pembine, Wis.