Other than being professional athletes, what do these three men have in common?
Michael Jordan Lance Armstrong Brett Favre
They retired and then unretired.
On March 4, 2008, Brett Favre retired. (This is quite long, so if you watch the first couple minutes and then forward to the end, you'll get the gist...)
On April 25, Brett spoke with David Letterman about retirement. (Also quite lengthy. There was a shorter version, but it's no longer available... but I think you'll find this amusing...)
On August 7, Brett was traded to the Jets and has been having a great season... (and now I'm a J-E-T-S fan as well as a Packers fan!)
Do we have the same love and passion for Christ and His Kingdom as Brett has for playing football? Do we have a magnificent obsession for our King so we wouldn't ever consider retiring?
THE GODLY EXAMPLE OF SAINTS WHO FINISHED WELL AND DID NOT RETIRE
Read below the examples of saints who finished (or are finishing) their lives well, who continued to run the race and persevered until the very end for the Gospel of Christ and the glory of God. Then prayerfully look at your life and see how it compares. Have you persevered in running the race with the same passion and zeal you had at the beginning of the race? Or have you all but retired and stopped running the race set before you?
And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, 12 so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. Hebrews 6:11-12
JOHN WESLEY: "I'll praise my Maker while I've breath..."
His last message in the open air was preached in the autumn of 1790. He was 87 years of age. He had become so feeble that each side of him a minister stood holding him up. His voice was weak, but his countenance was seraphic, his long white hair reaching to his shoulders. There he stood under a great tree in Winchelsea. A tree stands there today which was a cutting from the original tree. Wesley's text was, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand: repent and believe the gospel." When he reached the end and pronounced the benediction the congregation were aware that this was probably the last time they would hear him. The tears of the people flowed freely. John Wesley died four months later, three years after his brother Charles, twenty-one years after George Whitefield. John Wesley often repeated these words in his last illness, "I the chief of sinners am, but Jesus died for me." The hymn he sang on his deathbed (occasionally quite strongly) was not one of his own, nor his brother's. It was not even composed by a Methodist, but rather Isaac Watts' appropriate hymn of hope and expectation at the end,
"I'll praise my Maker while I've breath, And when my voice is closed in death Praise shall employ my nobler powers." His last words were, "The best of all is God is with us."[1]
GEORGE WHITEFIELD: "How willingly I would live for ever to preach Christ."
From 1739 to the year of his death, 1770, a period of thirty-one years, his life was one uniform employment. He was eminently a man of one thing, and always about his Master's business. From Sunday mornings to Saturday nights, from the 1st of January to the 31st of December, excepting when laid aside by illness, he was almost incessantly preaching Christ and going about the world entreating men to repent and come to Christ and be saved. There was hardly a considerable town in England, Scotland, or Wales, that he did not visit as an evangelist.
Never perhaps was there a man of whom it could be so truly said that he spent and was spent for Christ than George Whitfield.
The circumstances and particulars of this great evangelist's end are so deeply interesting, that I shall make no excuse for dwelling on them. It was an end in striking harmony with the tenor of his life. As he had lived for more than thirty years, so he died, preaching to the very last. He literally almost died in harness. `Sudden death', he had often said, `is sudden glory. Whether right or not, I cannot help wishing that I may go off in the same manner. To me it would be worse than death to live to be nursed, and to see friends weeping about me.' He had the desire of his heart granted. He was cut down in a single night by a spasmodic fit of asthma, almost before his friends knew that he was ill.
On the morning of Saturday, September 28th, the day before he died, Whitefield set out on horseback from Portsmouth in New Hampshire, in order to fulfil an engagement to preach at Newbury Port on Sunday. On the way, unfortunately, he was earnestly importuned to preach at a place called Exeter, and though feeling very ill, he had not the heart to refuse. A friend remarked before he preached that he looked more uneasy than usual, and said to him, "Sir, you are more fit to go to bed than to preach." To this Whitefield replied: "True, sir"; and then turning aside, he clasped his hands together, and looking up, said: "Lord Jesus, I am weary in thy work, but not of thy work. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for thee once more in the fields, seal thy truth, and come home and die." He then went and preached to a very great multitude in the fields from the text 2 Corinthians 13:5, for the space of nearly two hours. It was his last sermon, and a fitting conclusion to his whole career.
An eye-witness has given the following striking account of this closing scene of Whitefield's life: "He rose from his seat, and stood erect. His appearance alone was a powerful sermon. The thinness of his visage, the paleness of his countenance, the evident struggling of the heavenly spark in a decayed body for utterance, were all deeply interesting; the spirit was willing, but the flesh was dying. In this situation he remained several minutes, unable to speak. He then said: "I will wait for the gracious assistance of God, for He will, I am certain, assist me once more to speak in his name." He then delivered perhaps one of his best sermons. The latter part contained the following passage: "I go; I go to a rest prepared: my sun has given light to many, but now it is about to set--no, to rise to the zenith of immortal glory. I have outlived many on earth, but they cannot outlive me in heaven. Many shall outlive me on earth and live when this body is no more, but there--oh, thought divine!--I shall be in a world where time, age, sickness, and sorrow are unknown. My body fails, but my spirit expands. How willingly would I live for ever to preach Christ. But I die to be with him. How brief--comparatively brief has been my life compared to the vast labours which I see before me yet to be accomplished. But if I leave now, while so few care about heavenly things, the God of peace will surely visit you."
After the sermon was over, Whitefield dined with a friend, and then rode on to Newbury Port, though greatly fatigued. On arriving there he supped early, and retired to bed. Tradition says, that as he went up-stairs, with a lighted candle in his hand, he could not resist the inclination to turn around at the head of the stair, and speak to the friends who were assembled to meet him. As he spoke the fire kindled within him, and before he could conclude, the candle which he held in has hand had actually burned down to the socket. He retired to his bedroom, to come out no more alive. A violent fit of spasmodic asthma seized him soon after he got into bed, and before six o'clock the next morning the great preacher was dead. If ever man was ready for his change, Whitefield was that man. When his time came, he had nothing to do but die. Where he died there he was buried, in a vault beneath the pulpit of the church where he had engaged to preach; His sepulchre is shown to this very day; and nothing makes the little town where he died so famous as the fact that it contains the bones of George Whitefield.[2]
TOM CARSON (father of D.A. Carson): "Keep me from the sins of old men."
Scattered through the journals of his last two years of life are lines like these: "keep me from the sins of old men"––some of which he details: a tendency to gravitate toward watching television, the temptation to look backward instead of forward, sliding toward self-pity, easy resentment of young men. "Develop, as a senior, a prayer ministry: God has given you the time for it." "God had a plan to take Mum home and to leave me here."
[Carson lived for just over two and a half years after "Mum," his wife Elizabeth (Marg) died just over two and a half years before Carson died].[3]
(Of course, we can quickly see that those "sins of old men" are certainly not limited to old men, are they?)
JOHN PIPER: "I am hungry for Christ."
Piper, age 62, recently wrote:
God willing, this Fall I will begin a new extended series of sermons on the Gospel of John. When Jon Bloom, the Executive Director of Desiring God, heard this, he wrote me a note. He was both thrilled and curious:
I’m thrilled that you will be preaching through the Gospel of John! It is my favorite Gospel. Over the last two years, 2006-2007, I memorized it, and it was so rich. To have you preach through it will be a great joy! Hebrews has 303 verses: You preached 52 sermons. Romans has 433 verses: You preached 224 messages. John has 879 verses...
He left the sentence dangling. The curiosity is: How long will this series of messages on the Gospel of John last? Romans took eight years. John is twice as long.
The answer is: I don't know. Don Carson warns about preaching through this Gospel too slowly because its main point (John 20:30-31) is made over and over again, and a long series may be too repetitive (The Gospel According to John, 102). I will take that to heart. And as with Romans, we can always break into the series with some urgent issue or timely need demanding some other text.
I am 62 as we begin. So someone may ask, “Why start a series of messages on the fourth-longest book in the New Testament? Do you want to die in this book?” I cannot think of a better place to die....
Piper gave several reasons for preaching through the Gospel of John; here was the last one:
Finally, I am hungry for Christ. I feel the way John Owen did near the end of his life. When he died, he was writing a book called Meditations on the Glory of Christ. He wanted to be focused on the main reality of the universe in his last years. So do I. In this book Owen said,
The revelation...of Christ...deserves the severest of our thoughts, the best of our meditations and our utmost diligence in them.... [W]hat better preparation can there be for [our future enjoyment of the glory of Christ] than in a constant previous contemplation of that glory in the revelation that is made in the Gospel. (Works, I, p. 275)
Amen. How better can we be made useful for the world, or ready for heaven, than to give our “best meditations and our utmost diligence” to the revelation of the glory of Christ?[4]
HOW WE SHOULD NOT FINISH OUR LIVES
In his book "Don't Waste Your Life," Piper exhorts us not to waste our lives as many do.
An American Tragedy: How Not to Finish Your Own Life
I will tell you what tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader's Digest, which tells about a couple who "took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gordon, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells." At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn't. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life––your one and only precious, God-given life––and let the last great work of your life, before you give and account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: "Look, Lord. See my shells." That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don't buy it. Don't waste your life....
HOW WE SHOULD FINISH OUR LIVES
Piper continues to explain how we should be living our lives so we will not waste them:
You will be like the apostles Paul...when he said that he wanted to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified...He could say: "I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I have received from the Lord Jesus , to testify to the gospel of the grace of God" (Acts 20:24). One thing mattered: "I will not waste my life! I will finish my course and finish it well. I will display the Gospel of the grace of God in all I do. I will run my race to the end."
Or he could say, "Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ (Philippians 3;7-8). One thing matters: Know Christ, and gain Christ. Everything is rubbish in comparison to this.
What is the one passion of your life that makes everything else look like rubbish in comparison? Oh, that God would help me waken in you a single passion for the single great reality that would unleash you, and set you free from small dreams, and send you, for the glory of Christ, into all the spheres of secular life and to all the peoples of the earth.[5]
By the grace of God, may we, like Paul, press on, may we never retire nor waste a moment of our lives, so we might live all our days for the glory of Christ. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— 10 that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. 12 Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. 15 Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Philippians 3:7-15.
May we be like Enoch and keep walking with God until God takes us. There's no place for retirees in the Kingdom of God.
Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Genesis 5:24.
For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. 37 For, yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; 38 but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. 39 But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls. Hebrews 10:36-39. Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Ephesians 5:15-16.
Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; 4 even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save. Isaiah 46:3-4
The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. Numbers 6:24-26
Redeemed through the blood of Jesus Christ by the sovereign free grace of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, blogging to the glory of God through the power of the Holy Spirit, all for your upbuilding, dearly beloved brothers and sisters in Christ. I love God and I have a passion for His Church to be revived again, so my prayer is that He would rend the heavens and come down and breathe life into the dry bones, including my own.
If you do not know God through His Son Jesus Christ, I pray God might use my words here to draw you to know Him and Jesus Christ whom He sent. God offers His free gift of everlasting life to all who will receive it. I am praying He might cause you to seek Him and receive His gift of repentance and remission of sins by believing in His Son the Lord Jesus Christ.
Please feel free to explore here, and as you read, if you have any questions, please message me.
