We have talked about sacrifice. We have talked about surrender. We have talked about commitment. When we have pursued these three essential elements of seeing God’s kingdom advancing work increase and expand in our midst, there’s just one thing left to do: Celebrate. But how we celebrate matters. As we wrap up this teaching series and enter together into the glorious future to which God is leading us, let’s talk about the best way to celebrate kingdom successes. Spoiler alert: It is an entirely more active process than we might imagine.
Doubling Down
So, my baseball team is not playing in the World Series right now. We could have. Our pitching was certainly good enough. Our manager definitely deserves great credit for his part of the effort. The Royals are one of three teams in baseball history to have gone from losing more than 100 games in a season to making the Playoffs the next. That kind of a turnaround doesn’t happen on talent alone. And for most of the season, we hit the ball pretty well. We were way ahead in the runs scored versus runs allowed statistic. Almost 100 ahead in fact. That was a pretty dramatic change from last year all by itself. In fact, we scored more total runs this season than Cleveland who won the division. If we had won as many games as our runs scored versus runs allowed stat suggested, we would have won the division instead of them. But from the All-Star break forward, we gradually hit the ball less and less, and as a result, we scored fewer and fewer runs. We didn’t do the things that had propelled us to first place in the division more than once earlier in the season. As a result, our success waned. And our Cinderella run ended.
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The Nexus 