KEEP GOING

     The Christian life is a challenge. At times it seems that the easiest thing to do is to quit. Quitting is just fine if you want to lose. Quitting is just fine if you want to be lost. Quitting is just fine if you want to let your precious life melt away into a teeming pool of despair.

     But, of course, quitting is not at all what God wants. He wants us to keep going. Anybody can quit. Anybody can decide to sit down and give up. There is plenty of pressure in life in that direction. If we let our guard down, that’s the route we’ll take. Right down the smooth road to the dark abyss.

     While evil whispers “quit,” God says, “keep going.”

     You remember the trials and pressures with which Paul lived. He felt them, he knew discouragement. But he kept going. He said, “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14).

     I imagine that Paul felt pretty old and physically worn out by the time he wrote this (Acts 28). The travel alone in those days could kill a man. Add to that his imprisonments, whippings, beatings, dangers, repeated bouts of hunger and thirst along with close calls of all kinds and you get an idea of how he had to have felt (2 Corinthians 11:21-33). But he did not quit. He just kept going.

     As with him, it is with us. We don’t live right now in Paul’s kind of time or place. Ours is much easier to deal with physically, but just as perilous spiritually. But we come out in the same place: we’ve just got to keep going.

     We remember what Jesus told the church at Smyrna. “Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life” (Revelation 2:10). I pray that we are not called upon to be tested like that. But the principle holds. What was Jesus telling them? Bottom line, just keep going.