One Point

Get the point? Two sports teams got it, and two lost it in the final seconds of their respective games.

Nursing a 0-9 opening record, the hapless New Jersey Nets faced off with the Miami Heat last Friday evening. They had stifled the superstition of "Friday the 13th" and a 0-10 loss. With 4.1 seconds to go, the Nets were leading 80 to 78 and Miami had the ball. The Heat’s Wade got the inbound pass, dribbled unsteadily for a couple of those precious seconds, and pumped up a long shot from three-point range. And—swoosh—the Nets were behind one point with 1/10 of a second left. Their inbound pass was futile with only a sliver of a second, and they sadly lost their 10th straight game.

Two days later, a decades-old rivalry brought the New England Patriots to face the Indianapolis Colts. Toward the end of a brutally hard-fought turf war, a questionable 4th down call by the Patriot’s coach gave the Colts the ball, and they ultimately pushed on to a very late touchdown and a "squeaker" 35-34 win to maintain their undefeated season. Again, it was the slimmest of margins, but one point is all it takes. Be it ever so late, that single point spells victory.

Baseball icon Yogi Berra said it well despite his grammatical slang. "It ain’t over ‘til it’s over." While there is game time, there is hope.

Many a Christian victory is within reach, even though the human chances seem slim. Too often our self-prediction of seeming failure is self-fulfilling. If only we’d have pushed on.

Christ said, "I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work" (John 9:4). The old Christian song says,

Encamped along the hills of light,
Ye Christian soldiers, rise,
And press the battle ere the night
Shall veil the glowing skies.
Against the foe in vales below,
Let all our strength be hurled.
Faith is the victory, we know,
That overcomes the world.

The author understood the battle pressure of the fleeting moments of sunset—that terminal opportunity is extremely fragile.

Years ago, I was preaching in Bangor, PA, and we closed with the invitation hymn "Just As I Am." The hour was getting late, and we’d sung a number of verses, so I closed in prayer. Afterward, man came to me and said, "If you had sung just one more verse, I would have come forward." Sometime later in another place, a man shared how he had walked forward to receive Christ on the fifteenth verse of "Just As I Am."

Galations 6:9-10 declares, "And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith." The word "opportunity" is the translation of the Greek word "kairon," which is an unrepeated time frame of set length. It is best described by being a sacred parenthesis with beginning and ending.

Pro athletes know that they need to spend every ounce of competitive energy until that last second has expired, for the last second may mean the winning or losing difference of a single point. Fighting the good fight of faith, as Paul describes it in I Timothy 6:12, is no less demanding.

Dave Virkler