The Deep End

Only two more to go… We are nearing the end of the list of 11 Quarterback Commandments which Bill Parcells gave to Tony Romo during their time together with the Dallas Cowboys.

Quarterback Commandment No. 10: Don’t panic. When all around you is in chaos, you must be the hand that steers the ship. If you have a panic button, so will everyone else. Our ship can’t have a panic button.

Spiritual Application: In the heat of spiritual battle, when things seem as though they are getting out of control, God’s leaders must be thermostats, not thermometers.

We’ve all been there. You have been planning some event or occasion in detail. Maybe for hours, maybe for days, or even weeks, you have pictured in your mind just how it will go. You finally arrive and nothing is the way you expected it. Things are in disarray and people are panicking. What will you do?

A good quarterback knows that even the best gameplan does not contain a solution to every possible predicament. Sometimes your star receiver is injured in pre-game warmups. Sometimes, the opposing defense has concocted a blitz package you’ve never seen in your life. Once in a while, you find yourself trailing by three touchdowns halfway through the fourth quarter, and there is no play in the playbook for making a first down when it’s third and 29 to go.

When 10 anxious faces gathered around a huddle stare pensively at their leader, there’s only one right response: calm collected confidence tempered with firm determination. If the quarterback loses control, everyone else is going to lose control.

On the football field, leaders need a steady hand and a positive demeanor. Christian quarterbacks need the same attitude and posture during regular counseling sessions, church services, hospital visits, and in all types of spiritual calamities and unforeseen chaos.

When God prepared his people for battles in the land of Canaan, He told His priestly quarterback to tell the troops to:

…approach this day unto battle against your enemies: let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terrified because of them;

Deuteronomy 20:3

Peter hit the panic button when Jesus was arrested, and almost interfered with the plan of redemption:

Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant’s name was Malchus.

John 18:10

But Jesus, the greatest Spiritual Quarterback of all time, stayed cool:

Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?

John 18:11

Read Acts 27:41-44 for the account of a shipwreck, and the Apostle Paul’s great response, and you will almost be tempted to think Parcells was reading his Bible when he said, “Don’t panic. When all around you is in chaos, you must be the hand that steers the ship. If you have a panic button, so will everyone else. Our ship can’t have a panic button.”

As a Christian quarterback, when I walk into a chaotic situation, I must ask God to help me not to be a thermometer. A thermometer just reflects the temperature of a room. When things get hot, the mercury goes up. When things are cold and dead, the mercury dies down, too. I must instead ask God to make me a thermostat. A thermostat is not controlled by the temperature; it does the controlling. When I walk into a room of spiritually cold people, I need to warm things up in the Spirit of God. And when I walk into a room of hot-headed chaos or knee-knocking panic, I need be calm, and help to cool things down.