The Experience Spring 2019_WEB

Pressing Forward

BY DAVE WYRTZEN

I f you’re a short, undersized ex- football player like me, then the only redeeming factor in one of the most boring Super Bowls ever was to see Julian Edelman become Super Bowl LIII’s MVP. Using whip routes, double moves and pivots, option ins and outs, and seam routes from either the right or left side, Edelman gave the best quarterback in history a foot of clearance. His performance took his career stats past Michael Irvin and right behind Jerry Rice in all-time receiving yards. The guy is only 5’10”, weighs under 200, wasn’t drafted until the 7th round, and then spent his first four seasons in Boston as a backup. Now many are predicting he’s headed for the Hall of Fame. But it’s not the way he plants his foot and then goes 180 degrees in the opposite direction in the twinkling of an eye or the fact that he returned to play in the playoffs after breaking his left foot in November. It’s how after he catches the ball, knowing that he’s going to get clobbered, he lowers his head and with all of his might presses forward. I don’t know whether the Apostle Paul was small in stature, but I do know that, like Edelman, he knew what it meant to keep pressing forward. Near the end of his life, enduring a Roman imprisonment, he still writes these words to the Philippian believers. “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:12-14 Earlier in the chapter, Paul warned the Philippians against the legalists of his

day, Jewish religious opponents who were attacking his spiritual children. They insisted that in order to be called God’s chosen people, one had to be physically circumcised and then had to obey the Jewish regulations (Philippians 3:2). Paul gets passionate when he encounters these enemies seeking to destroy the spiritual lives of his Philippian church family. He makes the counter claim that if anyone wants to start comparing Jewish credentials and the right to be called one of God’s chosen people, he has boasting rights (Philippians 3:4). He starts out with the fact that he was a blue-blood Jew, born an Israelite of Hebrew parents and circumcised the eighth day. He knew he was from the tribe of Benjamin and that he was a member of the party in Judaism, the Pharisees, who practically lived out all the ceremonial laws of the Torah in every aspect of their daily lives. He didn’t just live his convictions in pious solitude, isolated from the pressing issues of his day. As a young man he zealously sought to stamp out those whom he believed were blaspheming the God of Israel by proclaiming that Jesus of Nazareth was the Jewish Messiah (Acts 9:1-3). Pride of birth, scrupulous religious observance, intelligence, and engaged activism—Paul had all these in his early life, but he called it all “excrement,” “garbage”, and he gladly lost it all (Philippians 3:8). IT’S FOOLISH TO PRESS THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR NAME, EVEN IF IT’S A GOOD NAME. I need to allow the Holy Spirit to expose how all my prideful dependence upon human credentials, acceptance in my in- group, and pride in my achievements can infect my daily life. As the son of Jack Wyrtzen, I had blue-blood evangelical

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