This morning’s word is Ten Thousand Kicks.
The anchor verses are 2 Corinthians 3:18 and Romans 10:17.
Sun-like stars do not die all at once. In their final hundreds of thousands of years, they swell into red giants and begin to shed their outer mass. The star ejects material in small episodes, one after another, each one in a slightly different direction. Each ejection gives the star a tiny push the other way.
A new study from Jim Fuller, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at Caltech, calculates the rhythm. Around ten thousand of these little pushes happen over the star’s last stretch of life. Each push is a few meters per second. About the pace of a slow human jog.
The star cannot feel any single kick. But the math of it is what physicists call a random walk. Tiny motions in random directions over a very long time still displace the star. By the time it has become a white dwarf, it is traveling at a kilometer per second, far from where it began.
That is the thread this morning. What you take in over time decides where you end up. The star drifts without choosing. You and I have a choice the star does not.
Samson, in the book of Judges, walked four miles from his home in Zorah to a place called Timnah. The ten-day plan from ResLife Church on overcoming temptation counts the steps. Eight thousand of them. None of them seemed to matter. The first led him toward a Philistine girl. Then a prostitute. Then Delilah, who asked for the secret of his strength until he gave it. When she cut his hair, he stood up to shake himself free as he had done before, and Judges chapter sixteen verse twenty is the chill of the whole arc. “But he did not know that the Lord had departed from him.” Each small step had felt like nothing. The cumulative effect was everything.
The star does not choose its drift. Samson did. Every step.
Ignatius of Antioch, the second-century bishop and martyr who wrote seven letters to early churches on his way to Rome and execution, names the same dynamic from a different angle in chapter six of his letter to the Trallians. He warns against false teachers who mix Christ with poison the way someone mixes aconite with sweet wine. The drinker tastes the sweetness. The poison goes in unnoticed. The danger is not loud. The danger is sweet. By the time the drinker notices, the kick has already landed.
Peyton Jones and Kris Langham, in the time rhythm of their disciple-making plan Discipology, name the opposite of drift. They anchor it in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians chapter three. “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” The believer is also subject to the math of accumulation. But this accumulation does not happen by the random ejection of mass. It happens by sustained beholding. What you behold over time, you become. Their image is a light bulb. Fragile, ordinary, with power inside that shines. The bulb is not the source. The bulb stays plugged in.
The drift is not the gift. The choosing of the source is what GOD has already invited you into. The star cannot decide what pushes it. You decide today what you behold, what you drink, what you hear, what you step toward.
The Day Nine reading on healing from ResLife Church lands the same teaching from the angle of faith. The author walks Luke chapter five, where four friends carried their paralyzed companion to a house too crowded to enter, climbed the roof, broke through, and lowered him in front of Jesus. The text says Jesus saw THEIR faith and healed the man. In the same room, the Pharisees stood near enough to touch HIM and complained about what they did not understand. The four had heard enough about Jesus to climb a roof. The Pharisees had heard enough to stay in the doorway. Romans chapter ten verse seventeen carries it home. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
Ten thousand kicks move a star. Eight thousand steps moved Samson. The number for you today is one. One choice, this morning, of what to drink, what to behold, what to hear, what to step toward. The drift the star cannot resist is yours to refuse, by choosing again today the source HE has already given you.
You are not the star. You are not the source. You are the bulb. Stay plugged in.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.