Ben Patterson - Muscular Faith: How to Strengthen Your Heart, Soul, and Mind for the Only Challenge That Matters

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Muscular Faith: How to Strengthen Your Heart, Soul, and Mind for the Only Challenge That Matters

Copyright 2011 by Ben Patterson. All rights reserved.

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Published in association with the literary agency of Credo Communications, LLC, Grand Rapids, MI 49525; www.credocommunications.net.

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Scripture quotations marked The Message are taken from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Patterson, Ben, date.

Muscular faith : how to strengthen your heart, soul, and mind for the only challenge that matters / Ben Patterson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 978-1-4143-1666-6 (sc)

1. Christian life. I. Title.

BV4501.3.P383 2011

248.4dc22 2011016088

Dedicated to the memory of

James Stewart Evans

Introduction

A Faith Worth Fighting for

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

C. S. Lewis, Christian Apologetics

You take over. Im about to die, my life an offering on Gods altar. This is the only race worth running. Ive run hard right to the finish, believed all the way. All thats left now is the shoutingGods applause! Depend on it, hes an honest judge. Hell do right not only by me, but by everyone eager for his coming.

2 Timothy 4:6-8, The Message

For the past fifteen years or so, Ive been a campus pastor, so Ive watched hundreds of first-year students arrive on campus fresh faced and bright eyed for fall orientation weekend. These young men and women are nervously hopeful; they are eager to grow and make friends, get a college degree, discover a vocation and a calling in life, and maybe even find a spouse. I watch them and pray for them with a fatherly longing in my heart.

As they step out on their own, imperceptible trajectories are being set and adjusted. The differences in direction seem so tiny and insignificant in the moment, but years in the future they will be gigantic, the way a ship leaving San Francisco harbor for Honolulu, slightly off course, may end up in Shanghai instead. But seaports have no eternal consequence; the direction of a life does.

Im aware, in ways they cant yet be, that some of the decisions these young people are making now will set the course for their lives. Thats largely because Im much closer to the finish line than they are. I feel about my age like Lou Holtz felt when he coached football at the University of Arkansas. He said of that Southern state, Its not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.

I live with a great deal of curiosity about how Im going to turn out in the end. Its because of a very unscientific theory I have about old age. I believe that when life has whittled us down, when joints have failed and skin has wrinkled and capillaries have clogged and hardened, what is left of us will be what we were becoming all along, in our essence.

Exhibit A is a distant relative of mine. For the sake of family pride, Ill give him an aliasRay. All his life he did nothing but find new ways to get rich. A few of his schemes succeeded, and he became a moderately wealthy man. He spent his senescence very comfortably, drooling and babbling constantly about all the money he had made. I remember watching when I was a child and even then being dumbstruck that he had wasted his whole life getting something that was useless to him as he approached eternity. It was worse than uselessit was an impediment. When life whittled him down to his essence, all that was left was raw greed. That was the man Ray had cultivated in a thousand little ways over a lifetime. He was a living illustration of the adage The reason men and rivers are crooked is that both take the line of least resistance.

Exhibit B is my wifes grandmother. No need to protect family pride with her. Her name was Edna. When she died in her mid-eighties, she had already been senile for several years. What did this lady talk about? The best example I can think of was what happened when we asked her to pray before dinner. She would reach out and hold the hands of those sitting beside her; a broad beatific smile would spread across her face; her dim eyes would fill up with tears as she looked up to heaven; and her chin would quaver as she poured out her love for Jesus. That was Edna in a nutshell. She loved Jesus, and she loved people. She couldnt remember our names, but she couldnt keep her hands from patting us lovingly whenever we got near her. When life whittled her down to her essence, all that was left was love. That was the woman Edna had cultivated over years by thousands of little acts of love. Her life wasnt easy; she had to fight for love and joy amid some great and terrible disappointments. But she foughtand made a strong finish.

The Noble Warrior

The apostle Paul also finished well. Near the end of his life he wrote something I dearly want to be able to say at my end. Tradition says he was beheaded in Rome, not long after he wrote these words:

As for me, my life has already been poured out as an offering to God. The time of my death is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. And now the prize awaits methe crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on the day of his return. And the prize is not just for me but for all who eagerly look forward to his appearing. (2 Timothy 4:6-8)

Not that it matters, but I am sure he looked exactly the way the apocryphal Acts of Paul described him about a hundred years after his death: