When I was at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, playing basketball many years ago, there was a saying in the locker room, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” What does that mean? It means that if you’re not in shape and you’re tired and your legs aren’t strong, you’re not going defend or shoot properly. You’re going to be falling over, and your balance won’t be right, or if you have to get low and guard someone, you’re going to just cheat and wave at the ball and not stay in front of your man.
You take a shortcut. You don’t do what you should do. Why? You’re tired, fatigued. It’s true in the spiritual realm too. I was down in Mississippi recently, and someone told me about a need. “You know, the warden and inmates would love for you to come down with the Brooklyn Tabernacle singers and hold an outdoor rally.” All 2,300 inmates, including the death row. When we went down, I talked to one of them, and these guys were in the same cell twenty years, one hour outside a day.
Before Christmas, though, I found out about something more practical that they needed. The prison chaplains came to me and said, “You want to help the inmates, you could bring down boxes with a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap and deodorant in each one. Pastor Jim, that would mean so much.”
Now I felt like I had a thousand things on my mind and the needs of the church, but God put it on my heart, “Just because you’re busy preparing sermons and devotionals and all of that, don’t give up. You have a chance to do good, so do good! Don’t give up and say, ‘Let someone else do it.’” So, I started looking into it. An organization, who had heard about my research, called me and said, “Hey, we’ve got 2,300 toothbrushes, tubes of toothpaste, bars of soap and deodorant.” Isn’t that God being so good?
“And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9, ESV). In other words, let’s not get tired or fatigued. You could do something good today. Call somebody, encourage somebody!
Jim Cymbala began the Brooklyn Tabernacle with less than twenty members in a small, rundown building in a difficult part of the city. A native of Brooklyn, he is a longtime friend of both David and Gary Wilkerson.