One of my favorite parts of the 2000 movie Remember the Titans is the scene where there’s a confrontation between football starters Gerry and Julius. Jerry explodes at the brilliant but moody football player Julius and says a memorable quote:
Honesty? You want honesty? All right, honestly, I think you're nothing. Nothing but a pure waste of God-given talent. You don't listen to nobody, man.
How many of us are a "waste of God-given talent" because we don’t listen to anybody? We don’t listen when God speaks to us through His Word and through His leaders to us. I wonder how many of us lack the drive to see God's great things done in our lives because we lack the convictions to see them through to the end? We have the faith needed to walk with Christ, for sure...but when it comes to the time to run with Christ, we wave our hand and shake our head. The blessing falls to someone else, simply because we did not have the drive.
In an earlier post I told you about the sad story of the lax attitude of inventor Walter Hunt. Time after time, Hunt had brilliant flashes of genius, but he lacked the essentials, the outlook, the overview…the commitment to carry them through. And the fearful, fearful thing to me is that the story of Walter Hunt ends in the fact that though he had great talent, in essence his life was basically useless. That’s one of the scariest words to me in the entire Bible. To a Christian, nothing could be more sad than to realize that you indeed have had a useless life.
In Romans 3:12 it talks about how bad that mankind has become. Listen to this description: ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS." The passage in Romans gives one of the worst condemnations anyone could think of. Think about it. One of the worst, deeply-felt insults you could give someone is to say, "you’re useless." The word "useless" in Romans is achreíos and it means unprofitable - nobody benefits from it. Achreios is found only three times in the NT and it was known in its time to mean the picture of rotten fruit; something irrevocably bad and therefore thoroughly useless. The teaching in all three verses is that the people who have not stayed on the path to God have become useless. They cannot fulfill their purpose as creatures made in the image of God. They are like fish that cannot swim - they aren't performing the very thing they were created to do.
