25.02 | Butt Whippin’ & Belief
Romans 3:9-31
“… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”
Romans 3:23
There was one movie that was a staple of the 1990s Christian youth group:
Cool Runnings.
A classic. Inspirational, funny, clean, broad appeal, loosely based on a true story.
If you’ve not had the pleasure, Cool Runnings tells the story of the Jamaican bobsled team, who took part in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. The four-man team (from an island where the average annual temperature is 32ºC) are ridiculed and marginalised by the other teams, who view their presence at the games somewhere between a joke and an insult. The Jamaican team try and eke out their place at the games amidst the laughs of their opponents and their own internal wrestling for self-belief.
A turning moment in the movie is the night after a bar fight breaks out between the Jamaicans and the Swiss. The Jamaican team are back in their hotel, laughing about what happened.
And then their coach walks in. Erv Blitzer, played by John Candy (his final movie), enters, and he is furious. He gives them his famous “butt-whippin’” speech, turns around, and leaves.
It’s the turning point in the movie. The team are galvanised, and journey from a joke to contenders, harnessing their athleticism and determination, to shock the games with outstanding performances and courage.
Blitzer does in Cool Runnings what every good coach sometimes has to do.
He reminds them of who they are.
He calls them to stop shooting low when they are able to go high.
He confronts them with hard truths in order to release full potential.
It’s brutal. But it’s also belief in their actual talent.
Butt whippin’ and belief.
Romans 3 is an Erv Blitzer moment.
Paul walks into the hotel room of our lives, looks us in the eye, and shoots straight.
You all, Paul says, are under sin.
He reels off some sin highlights from the Old Testament, giving us a rapid fire assessment of the universality of humanity’s fall from what we were created to be—with quotes stacked up from Psalms, Proverbs and Isaiah.
We tend to hear this, and many of us react a little defensively.
Easy Paul, I’m not that bad.
The analysis of our performance, however, is proportionate to our potential.
Because at the other end of the spectrum, Paul knows what we were created for.
All have sinned, he says.
Butt whippin’.
And have fallen short of glory.
Belief.
You’ve only fallen short if you were created for something extraordinarily greater.
The Gospel doesn’t come and pat us on the head with an apathetic acquiescence with current mediocrity, or the measure of our ambition for just-above-average morality. It truthfully confronts our brokenness and relentlessly calls us back to the shimmering glory of a life of deep holiness, gratuitous joy, abundant life, and the extraordinary freedom for which we were made.
It is butt whippin’ and it is belief.
Are you offended?
Maybe a little. It hurts our pride.
But here’s what Paul is going to want to drive deep into our very souls in the pages to come:
The death of Jesus means that every failure, every departure, every single area of my life and your life that looks like less than glory, was dealt with at the Cross of Jesus.
There is nothing left, then, but a dying away of all things of brokenness,
And a steady, day by day restoration of you, and me,
On the road to glory.
Reflect:
My sin is worse than I thought. And the glory I am called to is great than I’ve imagined.
Spend some time with this.
Now place the cross of Jesus in the middle.
Pray:
Father,
When I think about sin,
I usually get stuck in guilt.
Or defensiveness.
It makes me feel worse,
And leaves me thinking of you as critical and disappointed,
Rather than near, loving, good, and kind.
I end up hiding in the bushes with Adam and Eve,
Rather than coming closer to the only one who can heal my life.
But I get a little glimpse in these words today,
That the necessity of Jesus’ death
Was not actually because I am disappointing in your eyes,
But rather that you so zealously will not abandon your passion for my wholeness
That you would go to the Cross to restore me;
And I get a glimpse that,
Behind every time I feel convicted of something that I do wrong,
I am actually experiencing the grief of glory lost,
And the hunger for glory restored.
And so, Father,
I give you this broken life again.
I trust myself utterly again to the Cross of Jesus,
Which covers my every shortfall,
And is the only place of power,
That sets me on the path again,
To the shining wholeness for which I was made.
In Jesus’ Name,
And entrusting this wounded life to the power of His Cross,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Leviticus 24-25 | Psalm 27
“But rather that you so zealously will not abandon your passion for my wholeness” ❤️