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The Gospel According to Training Montages

You know it. I know it. Let's just say it together: training montages are awesome! Whether it's Rocky learning how to box Apollo Creed, Mr. T or Ivan Drago, Batman becoming Batman, or Kevin Bacon teaching that redneck guy how to dance in Footloose, training montages of all kinds continue to be essential building blocks for making a great movie. My two favorite montages are in the original Karate Kid. After Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel the basics of Karate, Daniel goes out and starts to train on his own. If you haven't seen it, watch it: training montage. Then of course there is the classic, unbeatable fighting montage set to the perfect montage song "You're the Best Around". In this outstanding stroke of cinematic brilliance, we see Daniel winning all his preliminary matches in the All-Valley Karate Championships until he finally gets to his biggest nemesis: the classic 80's bad guy/bully, Johnny. Then the movie finally culminates into the greatest/lamest fight scene of all time. I say lamest because if you really pay attention to the fighting that's taking place, it's horrible. They clearly didn't want to spend a lot of money teaching these actors actual Karate so they just kind of fumble around trying to get a punch in, and it's just not great. However, I can't seem to stop watching and absolutely loving that perfect, powerful moment when Daniel raises his arms, lifts up that one leg and amongst the cries of "Finish Him!"  and "You can do it, Daniel," the referee says fight and BAM! Come on, watch it! Click on that link and WATCH IT!!!
So awesome, right? It's so powerful and inspiring because Daniel had a huge problem: Johnny and his karate buddies were beating him down over and over again, Mr. Miyagi stepped in, bought him some time, and Daniel used that time to train and learn how to deal with his problems rather than run from them, and then he gets to kick Johnny in the face. It's perfect. And unlike a lot of perfectly resolved movie endings, this one is actually pretty realistic. Daniel didn't become a karate expert and save the world from a million bad guys he fought off single-handedly. He was getting picked on, he learned karate from a helpful Asian handyman who lived in his apartment complex and entered a city tournament and won. It's simple and completely possible. The truth is, if you add a training montage to most problems in our lives, we can overcome them. Overweight? A training montage will fix that. Need to learn to dance for that big date you have with the girl you're secretly in love with? Training montage. Need to overthrow an evil dictator who has taken over your country? Training montage, boom! The only problem with this is that in real life we don't get to gloss over all the actual training stuff while an upbeat, inspirational song keeps the action moving. We have to wake up early, go to the gym, work out all the time, eat better and after a few months or years, we get healthy and lose all the extra weight. Training takes a lot of work and time and it isn't nearly as fun and entertaining as a perfectly crafted training montage. It's frustrating.
Here's the weird thing: there are no training montages in the Bible. Over and over again, the people of God are faced with challenges and rather than teaching them how to fight their own battles, God usually just takes care of it. Perfect example: Joshua 3-6, the Israelites crossing the Jordan River and the battle of Jericho. These are two huge problems that would typically need a training montage to be solved. The Israelites need to get their entire congregation across the overflowing Jordan River, hundreds of thousands of people crossing a raging river is a huge undertaking that would typically result in some loss of lives and lost or ruined supplies. God could have given them a list of items and tools to gather so they could build a temporary dam which would allow them to cross without any problem. It would have taken a while. It would have been hard work. They would have learned a valuable skill and grown together as a community. It would have been an awesome training montage. Instead, God just parted the waters and told them to cross -no montage.
Then they get to Jericho, this massive city with immense walls that seem completely impenetrable. Here would be an awesome moment for God to bring down a hardcore, no nonsense, Angelic military commander named Michael to teach the Israelites how to build siege-works, catapults, huge ladders and maybe even give them some super secret exploding powder to use to blow up the walls. It would be an extremely epic montage with some strong war drum music playing. Then Michael would mysteriously leave or something and just before the Israelites began their initial charge against the city, there could be this epic silence while the wind sweeps across the field in front of them and then Joshua could step forward, raise his sword while his immense muscles glisten in the early morning light and let out an intense war cry, "For MICHAEL!!!!" And then everybody would yell and charge and take the city. It would have been AWESOME!! Instead, God just had them march around for a week and then pulled the walls down Himself. They do get to yell at the end, but it would be the worst montage ever. 

Financial debt is a huge problem in our society worldwide. It cripples a lot of families and even entire nations. Imagine, however, if some mysteriously wealthy individual went on TV and announced that he has contacted every credit agency in the world and asked them to send all their unpaid loans, collection accounts, etc. directly to him from now on and he will take care of it, effectively erasing all financial debts across the entire world forever.
So here's the weirdest thing. Humanity owes a massive debt to God. Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death and humanity had been drawing on an empty account for thousands of years accruing a massive debt of death owed to God -the kind of debt that no Dave Ramsey debt-snowball system could ever erase. We owed big-time and we needed to pay up. Instead of collecting on this massive debt as He had done before with the great flood, He sent His son, Jesus, to Earth as a human so that His death could act as a one-time lump sum payment on the incredibly massive debt accrued over all of existence past, present and future.
God is continually fixing our problems. He doesn't always just fix the problems we couldn't solve without him either. He wants to fix everything, but we keep trying to do it ourselves. Rather than marching around the walls of Jericho and waiting for God to do what He promised, we keep drawing our sword, breaking ranks and charging at the walls ourselves, hacking away until our sword breaks and then we find a new one and keep hacking. We seem to prefer the montage. God is offering to free us from the slavery of sin, but we keep trying to modify our own behavior. God is offering us true joy and prosperity (by which I mean contentment in whatever stage we are in, not continual financial and physical prosperity, Heb. 13:5!!!), but we keep tying our joy to the things of this world.

You know it. I know it. Let's just say it together: we need to surrender everything and become completely, 100% dependent on God. Give up trying to DO and just BE. Romans 12:2 (paraphrase)
"DO NOT conform. BE transformed." Stop trying to DO the work of transformation and just BE transformed.
We aren't the artist. We're the canvas.