Dribbling Footballs

Read: Matthew 6:19-33


No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.                                                                                                   Matthew 6:24


     Dribbling a basketball is pretty easy, isn’t it? I mean, that is exactly what a basketball is designed for – bouncing. I have seen some people who were very adept at dribbling, whether in a game with one ball, or on a street corner with several of them; but, it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of skill to bounce a basketball up and down. Try dribbling a football, on the other hand. It is possible to do, I suppose, but footballs were made for throwing, not dribbling. You will find it extremely difficult to dribble a football – or, at least I did. It would certainly take a tremendous supply of skill and exorbitant amounts of practice to be able to dribble two or more footballs (if it is even possible).

     Yet, so many people, young and old alike, are trying to do the equivalent of dribbling footballs in their spiritual lives. They are trying to serve the world at the same time that they are pleasing God, and that is just impossible. So many people are wishy-washy today. They don’t want to displease God by following after the world, but they don’t want to displease the world by letting it slip that they go to church and worship God; that they have standards; and that they believe the way to Heaven is through Christ alone. The very nature of their “wishy-washiness” is displeasing to God. God made it very clear that you cannot serve Him and the world at the same time. You are either completely given over to the world, or you are all God’s. There is no middle ground.

     Here is what it all comes down to: you must make a decision one way or the other. Either you must either throw all of your heart into the world, or you must make the obviously right decision to give your heart completely over to God. Footballs were never made to be bounced like basketballs, and you were never created to serve the devil. Rather than forcing a football to be used like a basketball, the natural thing to do is to use it in the way it was intended: throwing it in a football game. Your life is no different. God created you to serve Him; so, rather than trying to force yourself into a relationship with sin that you were never meant to have, the better choice is to just serve the God you were created to serve. It is impossible to serve both masters, so simply choose the One who loves you the best and blesses you the most.

Quote of the day: “God created a void in your heart that is only His to fill. When life becomes meaningless, boring, and hard, it’s because you’ve been filling it with anything but Him.” – Anna Bachinsky