I’ve been writing about lessons learned in my progress in golf, such as it is, as a function of:

• Purpose
• Practice
• Perseverance
• Performance

Today, we finish it off with Performance because it doesn’t matter about our purpose to improve, our practice and perseverance to improve if we don’t translate our training to life. In golf, that means playing the game. In music, it means performing in public. In our spiritual lives, it’s transformation and application in the real world.

I often quote the last four words of 1 Timothy 4.7 with an emphasis on “train:”

Train yourself for godliness.

But we can’t forget the second half:

Train yourself for godliness.

Performance. My son David was a business major at Azusa Pacific University and played piano for the world-famous University Choir and Orchestra. Once I asked him how a business major got that job in a school filled with piano majors. He said, “Dad, the piano majors don’t perform with choirs; they are too busy practicing.”

No one cares how well you play in the practice studio if you don’t play for others’ enjoyment. No one cares how well you hit it off the range if you don’t ever play a round of golf with your friends. No one cares how much weight you lift at the gym if you never help someone move their piano. No one cares how many Bible verses you’ve memorized if you’re rude to the checkout clerk in the grocery store. There are other aspects of our “performance” as believers that I’ll address tomorrow.

Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy, an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure. Do everything readily and cheerfully—no bickering, no second-guessing allowed! Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God. Carry the light-giving Message into the night so I’ll have good cause to be proud of you on the day that Christ returns. (Philippians 2.12 – 16, MSG)