Just "Do Something"

Sam Bennett is a collegiate golfer from Texas A&M. He made an amazing showing at the Masters tournament recently. But his tattoo got as much attention as his golf game. He lost his father two years ago and had his father's last written words identically tattooed on his arm. The message is powerful and needful for us all.

It can be so easy to do nothing. We do nothing out of fear. We do nothing out of a lack of self belief. Often we may do nothing as a result of a weaker faith than we'd like to admit. Jesus didn't teach a "do nothing" Gospel. His message is for disciples to follow Him. He asked them to do something. He challenged them to do hard things, amazing things, and things that would change the world. He is calling you to that same path.

- Why is it so easy to do nothing, even when we know change could help?

- How is "Don't wait to do something" a message we all need every day?

- What is a better version of you in terms of faith or family or even fitness?

- What will happen if you use your gifts, even in small amounts, over time?

Here is an episode list referenced in the podcast today:

1 - Just Get Better
4 - Be Wise Small
11 - Eat That Frog
24 - Try Three Times
26 - Do Hard Things
37 - Be An Encourager
41 - Change Your Geography 
46 - Start From Here
64 - Cast Your Bread!

Transcript

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Welcome to the Excel Still More podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in. Today's podcast is sponsored by a wonderful company, Creation to Revelation. This group of Christians believe it is extremely important that we teach the Word of God to our kids. They have original graphic illustrations from the beginning of the Bible to the end, featuring the beautiful and consistent presence of Jesus throughout. You can explore all of that at CreationToreation.com. I'm so thankful you're here, so let's get started. And personally, I'm just glad to be a part of helping people get exposed to the good material that they produce. Please be in prayer on their behalf for those good people and their work for Brian and Joey Harbour and their entire team. That company continues to work to help families connect to God through beautifully illustrated stories. And so long as ESM still exists, all of the old episodes will have the CTR ad within it, and you're welcome to contact them anytime. Okay, second little piece of business. Last week the episode was titled The Holy Longing. It was based on the early portion of a book called Sacred Fire. As you might recall, we devoted that episode to the first of three stages of adulthood, particularly trying to encourage our young adults. I am still planning two more episodes. The second one will relate to people around my stage in life, and that is the main focal point of the book Sacred Fire. How do we begin to transition from building something to giving that thing away? And then I hope we get to finish with an episode for those in that last major portion of their life where they really begin to think about the mark that they leave on others and their legacy in that stage called radical discipleship where you learn how to give your death away. So I feel pretty confident those episodes will exist by the end of the summer, but I just wanted to be clear that they won't be coming out in consecutive weeks. Alright, so let's get into today's content, which for me is incredibly nostalgic. It feels like a throwback to January 2019. I'm sitting on the floor in my closet recording the first ever Excel Stillmore episode. We titled that episode Just Get Better. I can recall my biggest crisis moment of the first day was deciding what to call the program and what to call the first episode. Originally, the first episode was going to be called Excel Stillmore, and the podcast was going to be called Just Get Better. To me at least, that's really hard to imagine now and kind of feels ridiculous. But I just remember very clearly that that was the basic message I wanted to get through to you week in and week out. God has great plans for you. However good things are today, God has a path for things to be better. Whatever is not so good in your life right now, God wants you to use those trials to develop deeper faith, but there is almost always a path to better. By his grace and his power, you can excel still more. The entire premise for starting this podcast was simple and remains consistent today. If you can visualize what better looks like, maybe it's six months from now, maybe a year, maybe five years, but you can see something more. It could relate to your faith, your walk in God, or your fitness or finances, friendship or family. If you can create this vision of better and you are willing to put together the biblical concepts that are timeless from God with the practical things that people around you in this life are doing and being very successful with, you have a tremendous list of reasons to be optimistic. But even way back then, we were talking about the parable of the talents, which I will reference again for you today. It just seems to me it is so much easier to do nothing. Maybe like the one talent man, it's because of fear. Fear that you might blow it. Fear that you might lose everything. You are woefully risk averse. And sure, there's room for some caution, but look, life is short. And in so many ways, better is out there, a more fulfilling life, a healthier life, a happier life. But you are going to have to be willing to do what most people won't. You're going to have to do the hard thing. You might ask, Chris, what is that hard thing that bridges the gap to better? Well, I'll tell you this, it is definitely something. And you might be like, wow, that's great. I'm giving you 20 minutes of my day to tell me to go do something. Well, look, I'll give you some specifics at the end, and I have a little human interest piece to pull at your heartstrings in the middle. But basically, yeah, you have to be willing to do the opposite of nothing. You've heard the old definition of insanity doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. For a lot of people, when it comes to their marriage or their walk with God or their health, they keep doing nothing over and over again, day after day, and expecting something to happen. Ultimately, when we do nothing, something does happen, but it's atrophy, a wasting away. The tricky part about convincing someone that they're doing too little is that they have probably convinced themselves that they're doing a lot. I mean, if you would have asked the one talent man from Jesus story, hey man, why aren't you doing anything? You need to do something. He would say, I'm doing something. I took the talent, I found a nice place to bury it, I dug a hole, I covered it up, I made myself a treasure map. I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm being responsible. I'm avoiding risk. I'm traveling the safe road. Somehow in people's lives, even in churches, we've equated words like safe equals right equals inactive. But that's just not the story Jesus tells about true discipleship or fruitful lives. I guess when I think about that one talent man defending all that he was doing, which was really nothing, I think about the fact that probably no one listening to the episode today is going to say, yep, that's me. I'm doing nothing. I have no vision and I'm taking no action. You are probably more likely to say I'm doing a lot of things, doing too many things. I don't have time to do anything else. But I might argue that the things that you are doing are not directional. They are not designed to help you reach another level. They are not designed to help you repair something that is broken. They are not designed to help you connect to God in a way that is greater than you've ever imagined before. They are often busy body daily things to just hang on to the status quo. They are usually things that are limited by fear and risk and really aren't that hard to do because they don't demand much change from you, and by now they've just become a habit. Things like sitting at dinner with the family or going to church on Sunday mornings. Those are good things. But are you ready for the fact that God may expect even more? Maybe we could put it this way there are some people who are doing some things, but they need to get out there and do something. So kind of cool, I look back at the first six or eight months of episodes at some of the titles that were about leading you or motivating you to a direction that is better, and I'd like to reference a few of those today. But first, I just have to tell you this little story. It's about a golfer. You don't have to be into golf or know anything about it to appreciate this. But there's a guy who's a senior at Texas AM, and his name is Sam Bennett. He is an amazing golfer. He's been the number one ranked amateur in years past, and he won the U.S. Amateur last year, which enabled him to enter into the Masters. The Masters tournament was held in Augusta, Georgia about two weeks ago, and the whole world got introduced to Sam Bennett. He played amazingly. He was eight under par after two rounds, sitting in third place in an event that included the best players in the world. The weather was really tough on the weekend and he didn't finish quite as well, but he placed in the top 20 overall, and he far and away beat all of the other college players who were invited. But I think what really caught everyone's attention that week and won us all over was the story behind a tattoo that he has on the inside of his left forearm. It looks like the scribblings of a young child. It's really kind of difficult to even make out the words. But he knows what it says, and he looks at it as part of his pre-shot routine in every round of golf, and really it just means the world to him. Back in 2013, his dad, at the age of forty-five, was diagnosed with aggressive Alzheimer's. He and his dad were very close, they grew up playing golf together, and his dad meant a great deal to him. Things advanced rather quickly, and his father passed away two years ago in 2021. But about a year before his passing in June of 2020, Sam talks about a really difficult time that he personally was going through. His dad had just about lost the ability to communicate with words or even to write. But Sam's dad sat down at a table with a pad and pencil, and with his wife's help, he wrote out a simple statement to his son. And then he put his name Pops right after it. After his dad's passing, Sam had that note tattooed on his arm in a way that looked exactly like his father had written it. I'll go ahead and include a photo of that tattoo as the thumbnail for today's episode. Sam has given countless interviews since then about how much that meant to him. It was the end of his dad's life. His dad was diagnosed far earlier than anyone would have imagined, and now in his fifties, about to pass away. Who better to give his son a simple message? Don't wait. You do not have all the time in the world. You don't know what's coming next. You don't know how long you're going to be here. If there is something that is important to you, something that you hope to achieve, that you want to achieve, no matter how scary it is or hard it is, don't wait to do something. Sam is really run with that idea. He's been incredibly successful, and like I said, he looks at that message before each of the shots that he hits. Maybe you know exactly what that story is like. Maybe you've lost someone close to you far too soon. Maybe you're super proud of what that person was able to accomplish in their life, or maybe you know that they'd have regrets that they didn't get to work when they had the energy and time. Maybe you have people in your life encouraging you to excel still more, to just get better. If you have supportive people in your life who believe in your gifts, in what you can do and in you, somehow, and it's crazy to say, but somehow you will find it still easier to do nothing, to come up with reasons not to change, to hear messages about thirty minutes a day changing your body over time for the better forever, or one percent growth over time changing everything. And somehow, for some reason, it just won't be the right time. I want to speak to you on behalf of everyone who loves you and believes in you. When it comes to achieving the potential that Christ has invested in you, when it comes to infusing your life with difficult challenges that helped you clearly identify your purpose for being here. Regardless of what stage in life you're in, I'll kind of combine our very first episode with the tattoo that Sam wears on his arm and tell you to just do something. Something small but definitive, something that clearly changes direction, even if it means incrementally. Something that services a vision of a better version of you that you have clearly identified, you have developed steps toward, and you are doing something, you are taking that first step. It's amazing, by the way, how true success, financial independence, better health, stronger marriage, whatever it might be, is usually not some large leap. It is developing smaller, great things to do, and then just keep doing them. Now, this can be true for last week's episode if you're in those teenage, young adult years. You've got a ton of energy to do something. Be careful. Make sure you're choosing the right things, and then let's go see what's possible. For people who are more in my age in life, we're trying to transition from receiving to giving, from planting and growing to bearing and sharing fruit. For us, doing something is far more related to charity and giving and investing yourself in the betterment of others. I'm not going to throw Matthew twenty-five at you today, but we cannot afford to do nothing when it comes to helping people. And then even if you're in that last stage of life, in what is probably your last 15 or 20 years on this earth, you may think today's message just isn't for you. You've tried your things. You either waited or you didn't, but that time is past. I do not believe that is true. Especially when it comes to using the gifts and wisdom God has put in you to carry out his workmanship. Maybe you're a Noah or an Abraham, people who did their best work, their most lasting work in their third act. And look, again, we have these four categories we used to talk about in the first few years. It could be growing and developing your faith, it could be friendships and family attachments, it could have to do with your finances or your fitness. It will always be easier to do nothing, but if you are feeling unfulfilled in burying your talent in the ground, that's exactly how you should feel. Because God developed us to keep growing and changing and helping until the day that we die. I was going to mention my dad for a moment. He's 68 years old, he's had some health issues, but he started walking 30 minutes a day, like a month ago. He would have been the guy not many months ago, and certainly over the past five years, who would have said, Chris, I like a lot of what you have going on here, but that's just not something I'm going to do. But then he decided he wanted to enjoy the last years of his life instead of lamenting the difficulties within them. At least so far as it depended on him. So you know what? He stopped waiting and he started doing something. That actually reminds me of an old episode from season one. And I want to finish out the last few minutes just referencing some of what we laid out in the early stages, but one of them was called Motion is Lotion, which a home health nurse said one day when I was visiting an older gentleman at church. Basically, the best way to get the most out of your body is to do something with your body. In that category and many others, the thing about not doing anything is you often end up realizing the very fears you tried to avoid. Like in the parable of the talents, he was afraid to invest the money, to take risks, to do something, because he was afraid of the judgment of the master. And yet the very act of doing nothing is what rendered him judged by that master. Health and fitness is that way. We have all of these reasons why we can't do it, it's going to hurt, our body won't hold up, it won't make a difference. So maybe we decide not to do anything, or we just wait a really long time, and guess what happens? All of the things we feared start to come to pass. The devil's really good at that when it comes to our faith. Starting a conversation, inviting someone to church, engaging in a study, going all in and being vulnerable with members of the body, making real cuts in my life to prioritize the word. We are paralyzed with all of the risks involved and what could go wrong, but oftentimes not doing anything ends up realizing all of those very fears. Isolation, discouragement, and maybe even a dangerously wavering faith. So in these last few minutes, I just want to encourage you, and I thought it might be fun to go back through some of the opening episodes. They were numbered back then, so if you want to go back and check them out, I'll give you the number. It's kind of neat that I get emails occasionally from people who are new listeners, they catch a couple of the most recent episodes, and then they go back and start at the beginning. So every once in a while I'll get an encouraging note, even about some of these oldies. But I thought it might be a good way to give you some practical things to consider this week. We've already talked about episode one, just get better. Start with that decision. I'm not going to wait. Maybe like Sam, you draw on an old relationship and someone you love who encouraged you, or maybe you want to be that encouragement to someone who is younger. Better is available to everyone, especially in the name and power of the Lord. It's not always enormous things. Episode four was be wise small. Start by looking for basic little opportunities right in front of you that maybe you overlooked before. Episode eleven, eat that frog. I remember getting a lot of feedback on that. Getting up in the morning, starting early, knock out something difficult early. Go on the walk early. Set aside study time early. If there's something that you need but you don't want to do, do it first. Episode 24, try three times. Just recognize when you start something new, it takes a little while for the habit to form. You may not even do it right the first couple of times. If it's important, keep trying. Find your groove. Episode 26, do hard things. I think that's pretty self-evident, though there's a really cool story behind that episode about two young men who encouraged other young men and women to rebel against low expectations. Sometimes I feel like we could all stand to rebel a little bit about expectations related to our age or environment. Episode 37. If nothing else, you can share the kindness and the grace of Christ with the people in your life. Pick somebody up. If you want to do something for yourself but you don't know what it is yet, then do something for someone else. It'll be a great way to start. Oh, I remember this one, episode 41, Change Your Geography. This was in June of 2019. I think I started getting emails saying, Are you trying to get everyone to move to Lindale? Well, yeah, I was then and I I still am now, actually. Let me give you two more. Episode forty six, start from here. It doesn't matter what has happened. If you are alive today and you have tools and gifts and any form of opportunity, you can do something. The mercies of the Lord are new every morning. You are cleansed in him if you live in Christ. Don't look back at what you haven't done. Look forward to what you're going to do. And then go out and start today. And then lastly, episode sixty four, cast your bread. It comes from Ecclesiastes, which is filled chapter eleven with truths about all the things that you don't know. We don't know how practically anything is going to work out. Instead of using your lack of knowledge as a reason not to do something, listen to what Solomon said. You have no idea what's going to happen, so get excited, maybe even optimistic, and cast your bread upon the waters. It relates to the farmer who thinks that the fields are too full of water to sow the seed. Well the person who never sows never reaps. But for the person who does sow, even in less than ideal situations, there's always a chance, and usually a good result. Those episodes really bring up a bunch of memories for me, but honestly, a few reminders that I needed, and maybe they'll be helpful to you as well. Let me say as we close, everybody wants to get better, but very few people can tell you what better looks like. Identify that vision of a better you. Get excited about what is possible when you combine your effort with God's will. I might go so far as to say that nothing is impossible when those two things come together. I pray that God is already with you and He's just waiting for you to just do something. Thank you so much for joining in today. If you enjoyed this program, consider sharing it with your family and your friends. As always, you can go to excelstillmore.life to sign up for the email, order the three-month journal, or just catch up on old episodes. And also, if you are looking for financial advice or future planning, give John Cunningham a call today, 205 913 1720. And remember this whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus, excel still more.