I watched the super bowl last night. What a game! In the midst of all the on-field excitement and the funny commercials I couldn\u2019t help but notice that the camera kept showing the backup quarterback on the sidelines. He was excited and kept shouting encouragement to his teammates, even though there was little chance of him getting into the game. With the exception of born super-stars, most want-to-be athletes have spent some time \u201cwarming the bench.\u201d Somewhere I read that there are four stages of benchwarmers: (1) I can do better (2) Coach doesn\u2019t know what he is doing (3) I hope someone gets injured (4) I hope we lose. While the Christian life is often compared to a game, it is more. And the last thing we need is benchwarmers. We need to clear the bench and get everyone in the game. After all, \u201cwe are members of one another\u201d (Rom. 12:5). I don\u2019t need you on the bench offering encouragement to me. I need you in the game, moving together toward the same objective. I stand amazed at how far we Christians have diverted from this simple truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I watched the super bowl last night. What a game! In the midst of all the on-field excitement and the funny commercials I couldn\u2019t help but notice that the camera kept showing the backup quarterback on the sidelines. He was excited and kept shouting encouragement to his teammates, even though there was little chance of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}