LEARNING FROM THE LIFE OF DEMAS – Part 2
(2) DEMAS FORGOT THAT WE CANNOT GROW A GREAT LIFE WITHOUT MAKING GREAT SACRIFICE.
A great life is all about the choices we make. That’s where the sacrifices come in.
(Joshua 24:15) And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.
Allow me if you will a couple of reminders.
“We are today what we chose yesterday, and we shall be tomorrow what we choose today.”
“Adversities do not make a person either weak or strong. They reveal who we are.”
BORNE IN DIFFICULTY
Most of the greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers of all time had to pass through the fire.
Many of the Psalms of David were born in difficulty.
Most of the Epistles of Paul were written in prisons.
Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress from Jail.
Florence Nightingale, too ill to move from her bed, reorganized the hospitals in England.
Semi-paralyzed and under the constant menace of apoplexy (stroke), Pasteur was tireless in his attack on disease.
During the greater part of his life, American historian Francis Parkman suffered so acutely that he could not work for more than five minutes at a time. His eyesight was so wretched that he could scrawl only a few gigantic words on a manuscript, but he contrived to write twenty magnificent volumes of history.
Bury a person in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington.
Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln.
Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Burn him so severely that the doctors say he will never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham, who set the world’s one-mile record in 1934.
Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, a Marian Anderson, a George Washington Carver, or a Martin Luther King, Jr.
Call him a slow learner and retarded, writing him off as uneducable, and you have an Albert Einstein.
From the book “Developing The Leader Within You” by John Maxwell states: “It’s not always what we take up in life that counts so much as it is what we give up.
A Story illustrates this point: A man walking home in winter sees a snake frozen in the snow. The man picks it up to take home and show the children. He puts the snake inside his coat pocket. While he’s walking the snake thaws and bites the man on the neck. The man says: “Why did you bite me, I picked you up when you were frozen.” The snake replies, “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
Our Olympians know this, as does every athlete, it’s called COMMITMENT.
In the Master’s Service
Leo Calvin Price