Strengthening Your Faith
By Tony Dungy and Nathan Whitaker
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About this ebook
Read all seven! The complete Uncommon Life Weekly Challenge series includes the following:
- Achieving Your Potential
- Building Your Team
- Developing Your Core
- Living Your Life’s Purpose
- Maximizing Your Influence
- Strengthening Your Faith
- Strengthening Your Family
Tony Dungy
Tony Dungy and his wife Lauren Dungy are active members of a number of family, faith, and community-based organizations, including All Pro Dad, iMom, Fellowship of Chrstian Athletes, Mentors for Life, Family First, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and the Boys and Girls Club of America. Tony is a former NFL player and retired head coach of the 2006 Superbowl Champions, the Indianapolis Colts of the National Football League.
Read more from Tony Dungy
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Strengthening Your Faith - Tony Dungy
How to Use This Weekly Challenge
We hope you will enjoy reading The Uncommon Life Weekly Challenge—Strengthening Your Faith. The faith-building principles in this devotional were taken from The One Year Uncommon Life Daily Challenge—a book we collaborated on together.
While The Uncommon Life Weekly Challenge—Strengthening Your Faith offers weekly readings instead of daily ones, our hope is that the format will prove useful for regular doses of encouragement and strength—one for each week of the year. It’s possible that instead of getting together every day for devotions, your family opts for a weekly devotional time. Or maybe you’re a coach or a sports chaplain who has set aside time once a week for devotions with your team. Or perhaps you attend a weekly prayer meeting that would benefit from a short devotional time. It may also be the case that weekly personal devotions fit better into your schedule than a daily devotional routine. On the flip side, another option is to go ahead and read the devotions on a daily basis, either consecutively for fifty-two days or sporadically throughout the year. Whether read on a daily or weekly basis, or in a group or an individual setting, the fundamentals highlighted in The Uncommon Life Weekly Challenge—Strengthening Your Faith will keep you anchored in God’s Word. And check out www.coachdungy.com for more resources.
Each Faith Fundamental includes Scripture and an Uncommon Key—an application or action to implement based on what you’ve just read. This isn’t just a read-it-and-you’re-done
type of devotional. The goal is not only to engage your mind but also to challenge your heart with the faith-strengthening principles of God’s message to us through his Word, the Bible.
If you miss a week, keep going. Don’t try to catch up, and don’t feel guilty. Last week is gone—spend time with God today. Our prayer is that every week you will be blessed by what you read and challenged to do more for God’s Kingdom.
Tony Dungy
Nathan Whitaker
WEEK 1
Faith Fundamental: A Gift You Don’t Want to Return
God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
Matthew 5:3
As a coach, I would always ask the players to come in on Monday, then give them Tuesday off. As strange as it may sound, many times a player suffered an injury in the game and didn’t know it until he did a little activity the next day. He’d think that he was okay, but he really wasn’t. The day-after workout revealed the need for treatment.
The Bible says God blesses those who realize their need for Him. That seems like an easy way to be blessed, but a lot of people can’t bring themselves to realize they need anyone, even God. Still, that doesn’t keep Him from pursuing them. He wants all of us to spend eternity in heaven with Him.
Step one is to realize we need Him. Jesus made that clear. Not a single one of us is perfect, and because we have fallen short of God’s standard for our lives—in other words, we have sinned—we are separated from Him. He is holy and perfect, and our sin puts a gap between us and Him. Without being holy, we can’t be in a right relationship with Him or even come close to experiencing His presence—unless He makes a way.
God has provided that way in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. God loved us so much that He sent His only Son to die for us and take the punishment for our sinful nature so that we could have a direct relationship with Christ and God. All we have to do is desire to be in a relationship with God, understand that we can’t do it ourselves, and believe that God sent His Son for us.
That’s a gift from God. It cost Him a lot, but to us it’s absolutely free. Have you ever accepted that free gift?
When we truly believe in the free gift of Jesus in our hearts; acknowledge that we need that gift; accept Him as the Savior who died in our place for the consequences of our sin; and embrace Him as our Lord, making Him the number one priority in our lives, then we are absolutely assured of spending eternity with Him in heaven (John 3:16-17). Nothing we can do has greater power to change our lives than making this one decision.
UNCOMMON KEY > God’s gift is anything but common, and it’s by far the most important key for living an uncommon life. The implications are huge. What is your relationship with Jesus Christ?
WEEK 2
Faith Fundamental: Working with the Amount of Faith You Have
If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, May you be uprooted and thrown into the sea,
and it would obey you!
Luke 17:6
The Lord asks us to have faith. Faith in His promises. Faith in His Son Jesus Christ. Faith in the hope of the resurrection of Christ. Faith in everything He has set forth in His Word.
He asks us to believe without doubting, to ask without stopping, to seek until we find, to knock because the door will be opened, and to pray without ceasing, believing that what we ask for, seek for, knock for, and pray for He will do something about. But God also realizes that sometimes it’s tough to believe. Sometimes we feel like Thomas, asking for physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection. Sometimes we want to get our finite brains around an infinite God and understand things without having to do it on faith alone.
And usually those times are when we need to have faith even more. Often it’s in those times that the world keeps preying on us and nothing feels right. I’ve been there. There are days when I appreciate Thomas’s assertiveness: Show me, Lord. I need to touch Your hands.
There are days when I, too, want to see the nail holes and hear His voice of quiet assurance. There are those days when I just seem to need a little more visible proof to go with the usual dose of faith.
Losing a playoff game. Being fired. Losing a child.
Some are important, some are not so important, but any of them can disquiet us or shake us to the core. Those are the days when I need to remember even more to just hang on, to clutch the faith He calls me to. The disciples had their moments of doubt, and Jesus was standing there, right in front of them. So I don’t feel quite so guilty when I have my moments of doubt. The disciples were struggling on a regular basis, and Jesus told them that it doesn’t always take much—it just takes some faith. Even faith as small as a mustard seed.
That’s all we need—you and me—and He’ll take it home.
UNCOMMON KEY > Christ doesn’t call us to understand it all, to see all of God’s plan for His Kingdom and our role in it. Instead, He wants us to have just enough faith in Him to continue to follow Him day by day on the path He has set before us. Step out in faith today.
WEEK 3
Faith Fundamental: Playing the Position God Gives Us
We live by believing and not by seeing.
2 Corinthians 5:7
Faith is a big component in a football team’s game plan. Our team ran a Cover 2
defense, an assignment-oriented plan that requires faith and trust to work. Players can’t just run to the ball in a Cover 2,