Have you ever seen the movie Cool Hand Luke? Its an older movie, with Paul Newman. If you haven't seen it. I highly recommend it. Its one of my favorite movies. It has some really memorable quotes in it, such as-
"No one can eat fifty eggs" and "What we have here is a failure to communicate" and "Spend a night in the box".
The movie is about a guy who goes to jail on a chain gang for taking the tops off a bunch of parking meters while he's drunk. Not very moral, but the theme of the movies centers around watching the spirit of a guy who will not be broken, no matter what.
In the chain gang prison on Saturdays, they have grudge matches with the prisoners. The prisoners don boxing gloves and then proceed to beat the living pulp out of each other (we may be instituting this at church- more to come). The point of this exercise is that if you have a problem with someone, you save it til Saturday, and it starts and ends there.
In this pivotal scene, Luke and Dragline (George Kennedy) have their match. Luke is clearly not in a position to win. He is smaller and not nearly as skilled in the pugilistic arts as Dragline.
He gets the pulp beat out of him.
In the scene, Dragline is beating him, but to the amazement of the spectators, Luke refuses to stop getting up. Time and time again he gets up out of the dirt to once again face this man who slugs him in the face or gut, and then he falls down again.
Eventually, after watching Luke get up again and again, Dragline stops swinging, and walks away from the fight.
I love that scene.
You can see the scene here- the audio is off- but the scene is there-
I love it because Luke wins the fight even though he didn't inflict the most damage. Anyone who knows boxing knows that the guy who lands the most punches wins, but in this fight, the guy who won was the guy who didn't quit. Luke refused to stay down.
Sometimes, that's the best way to win- to never stop getting back up again.
Oftentimes when faced with dire circumstances or repeated attacks, the initial response is to quit or give up. The problem with quitting is that you'll never achieve greatness if you give up every time things get hard.
You have to pull yourself up out of the dirt and take a few more licks. Sure, you may not be able to swing as hard as the next guy, but take enough licks and eventually, you'll be the only one standing. I'm using a metaphor here- but I think you get the point.
Don't quit.
If you're going through something today here's the word of the Lord- don't give up. Don't give in. Keep fighting the good fight. Don't allow discouragement or past defeat keep you from getting up one more time. Feel like you don't have what it takes? Take another line from the movie-
"Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand".
God moves in our nothingness- in our inabilities- in our failures, but we need to keep ourselves in the equation and allow him to move through us. But we need to keep getting up.
Be blessed
pastor matt
ps. according to www.imdb.com Luke's prison number is 37 in reference to Luke 1:37- look it up.
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