The Short Game

 
Like many of us, you may have a tendency to focus primarily on long-range and long-term things like attaining your career goals, getting a new venture started, or reaching your retirement goals. Yes, those things are important.

Yet, it’s the little things that matter the most: the short game of life. Like a championship golfer approaching the “putting green,” experiencing “the A+ Life” requires that we focus on what really matters in life. It’s the little things in life that make a big impact.¹

How does this pertain to our walk with Jesus?

Today we continue to look at our “Five Year Plan” that is not a five-year plan. Instead, it is a look out to five years from now, and then a look back to now, and what we are going to change in our lives, so that five years from now we have grown and gone deeper in our relationship with Jesus. Not to mention growing as mature, balanced adults.

Those changes will be in the “Short Game” of our lives. The little things we change now will bump our trajectory and not just change us, but transform us into followers and true disciples of Jesus. And that is where the joy is.

Peter wrote in his second letter,

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge ….⁸ For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, …—2 Pt. 1:5–8

Therefore our guiding principle in this journey of changing our short game is:

1. Add to
2. (And Eliminate from)
3. In increasing measure

What will we first eliminate from our lives, so that we can then add to our lives, in increasing measure? In increasing measure: that is the key. Not wholesale measure, although that would of course be nice, but just bumping our trajectory now, even if in small ways.

And Hebrews 12 guides us even further:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.—Heb. 12:1 (Bold added)

What is hindering you from going deeper? And what sins are entangling you and preventing you from a positive, freeing relationship with Jesus?

“Everything that hinders” may not be wrong things, but just good things that are nowhere near the best things. The good is often the enemy of the best. Let me repeat that: The good is often the enemy of the best. Recently when I read this next observation from Oswald Chambers in his little book on the Sermon on the Mount, I had to take a breath:

“If I am only willing to give up wrong things for Jesus, let me never talk about being a disciple of Jesus.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

What good things – not necessarily wrong things – in your life are getting in the way? Well, busyness, for starters. The busyness that comes from committees, activities, electronics, social media, and social gatherings that are filled with noisy chatter about news, weather, and sports.

Next week we will dig a little deeper into this exercise on what hinders us and what sins are entangling us, specifically with our Mind-Body-Spirit, but for now, may I ask you to think about what little things you can change in the short game of your life, so that big changes will render a transformation of your long game?

What good things in your short game are hindering the best for your long game: Going deeper with Jesus?

1. The Putting Green Devotional Introduction