Get a Face in Your Mind — The Motivation That Never Runs Out

Central Image

Benaiah going down into a snowy pit to fight a lion - not recklessness, but the joy of seeing whoever was down there come out alive on the other side.

The Turn

We assume the reason to live beyond a mediocre Christian life is duty, obligation, or not wanting to waste what God gave you - but Jesus didn't walk into the cross for any of those reasons; he walked in for joy.

Outline

The Diagnostic: "Hold My Beer" Criteria

Toby opens with Jeff Foxworthy and builds out a three-part taxonomy for genuine "hold my beer" behavior: it has to require skill, it has to carry real danger (somewhere on the spectrum from public embarrassment to you don't survive), and it has to be completely unnecessary. This isn't just an opening bit - it's the lens the whole sermon looks through.

The Text: Benaiah (1 Chronicles 11:22-25)

Three feats, each harder to explain than the last. Killing two Moabite heroes together: skill and danger, but necessary - he's a soldier, this is what soldiers do. The Egyptian - seven and a half feet tall, carrying a spear the writer compares to Goliath's, and Benaiah comes at him with a stick, takes the spear out of his hand, and kills him with it. Terrifying, but still arguably necessary. The lion is the one that doesn't fit. He goes down into a pit, on a day when snow had fallen (unstable ground - good for the lion, bad for him), with a lion that had no business being fought at close range by a human being. That's the one that demands an explanation.

The Question Nobody Asked

Benaiah didn't have to live this way. He's the son of the high priest - he could have had a comfortable life. And David trusted him specifically because he wasn't reckless; reckless men don't end up running your personal security detail. So the question isn't whether he was crazy. The question is: what was the calculation? What would cause a man like that to climb down in a pit with a lion?

The Pivot: Hebrews 12:1-2

Jesus and the cross run through the same three criteria. Skill: living a sinless human life while being fully God. Danger: not "might get crucified" - will get crucified, and he knows it ahead of time, which is worse. Unnecessary: he is the eternal second person of the Trinity and no one is twisting his arm. He chose it. And the text says why: for the joy set before him. Not duty. Not because it was right. Joy. The joy was, at least in part, seeing the faces of the people he was buying - our faces - in glory. He could see it ahead of time, and that was enough.

Reading Benaiah Backward

Toby can't prove it from the text, but he can't make Benaiah's character hold together any other way: Benaiah went into that pit because someone was in there. The delight of seeing that person come out alive is what sent him in. Maybe it was someone helpless. Maybe it was some redneck idiot who said "hold my beer" and went in first and was about to get eaten. Either way, Jesus saves both kinds - and Toby thinks Benaiah did too.

The Application: Put a Face on It

Who is the face you can't stand the thought of not seeing in glory? If you can get that picture clear enough, and if you can feel the actual working connection between how you live and what happens to that face, nobody will ever have to motivate you again. You'll carry it. The sermon's entire burden is getting that engine started inside the room.

The Trot Line Story

Running a trot line on the Red River with his dad and Uncle C.A. - who is seventeen years older than his dad and acts like it. C.A. pulls a soft-shell turtle off the hook and throws it in the boat. His dad warns him. C.A. says, "I ain't never heard of a soft-shell turtle biting nobody." The turtle bites his pinky toe down to the meat. Blood everywhere. Toby and his dad are useless because they're laughing too hard to help. Hebrews 12 says cast off everything that hinders. The turtle in the boat is old shame, old sin you've made peace with, old grudges, old wounds - whatever is riding in there waiting for its moment. You cut it loose not because you're disciplined but because of the face in your mind. And when tomorrow brings another turtle, you cut that one loose too. That's not failure; that's the process. It's resurrection. It's the whole thing.

Corporate Expansion

What if the picture got bigger than the people you already love? What if the church couldn't stand the thought of not seeing its neighbors, Chester, the people all around them, in glory either? That's what loving your neighbor as yourself actually means in practice - they become part of the joy set before you, not just a category of duty. He closes on that: we ain't seen nothing yet.

The Landing

Get a face in your mind, cut the turtle loose because of that face, and go. And when the turtle comes back tomorrow, cut it loose again - that's not failure, that's the walk.

1. Walk us through a "hold my beer" moment - yours or someone else's. What made it qualify? Did it actually have the three things Toby listed: skill, real danger, and completely unnecessary?
2. Toby made a point that Benaiah wasn't reckless - David trusted him specifically because his risks were calculated. Based on the three feats in the text, what do you think the difference was between what Benaiah did and what a guy who just has a death wish does?
3. The sermon argued that the cross meets "hold my beer" criteria, and the word Toby leaned hardest on was "unnecessary." What did he mean by that, and why does calling it unnecessary actually say something more about Jesus than calling it sacrificial does?
4. Toby said he could put a face in that pit - someone he'd go after even if the best outcome was giving them time to climb out over his body. Is there a face like that for you? And if you're honest, does that face actually change how you're living right now?
5. The turtle in the boat - an old wound, an old grudge, a sin you've made peace with. What's yours, and how long has it been riding in there waiting for a chance to bite?
6. Toby said straight out that you can be saved, live a mediocre Christian life, and die and go to heaven just the same as someone who wasn't mediocre - and preachers don't usually say that out loud. If mediocre still gets you to glory, what's your actual reason for doing anything more than the minimum?
7. Toby closed by asking what it would look like for the whole church to expand that picture beyond the people we already love - to Chester itself, to neighbors, to people we haven't thought of that way. Is that picture real for this congregation right now, or does it still mostly sound like something we'd say but not feel?
8. Write one name down this week - one face you want to see in glory. Put it somewhere you'll actually see it. What is one thing you're going to do differently this week because that name is sitting there?