The Carrot, The Coffee Bean, and The Egg

There has to be something inside of you bigger than what comes against you.

The question for tonight is - How will you handle adversity?

People and teams handle diversity in different ways.

Carrot - hard, durable, can hit it on a hard surface and it won’t harm it.

Egg - fragile, breakable, delicate

Coffee bean - small, seemingly insignificant

You can put each of them in the same pot of boiling pot of water and they react in starkly different ways.

The carrot is no longer hard. It becomes soft, so much so that you could cut it with a spoon.

The egg becomes hard, unbreakable, solid.

The coffee bean though is really interesting. The coffee bean flavors the water. It changes what it’s in.

Tonight you guys are going to face adversity. These guys want to beat you so bad and keep you up here as a North Georgia hick school. A bunch of pretenders who don’t belong in the conversation with the big boys. They are going to hit you. They are going to talk about you. They are going to frustrate you. AND IT IS A VERY LONG GAME. I’ll never forget what Evan Lester said to me after his first game, freshman year - man, these games last forever.

And it takes 4 quarters of handing wave after wave of adversity.

How are you going to respond?

Will you be like the carrot? Will you go in hard, all talk, all show - but when the pressure is on and the heat is turned up - will you go soft?

Will you be like the egg? Will you harden? Will you become more durable?

I hope that can be said of us.

And the Bible talks a lot about the strengthening that happens with adversity. But the coffee bean, I believe does it best.

But what I hope happens tonight is that you become like a bunch of coffee beans - you become a team. The adversity brings you together and you flavor the water. You gain an identity and you take over the game. You dictate the outcome.

Paul is a great example of a guy who in adversity became like a coffee bean. You could put him in any kind of circumstance and the same thing would consistently come out of him.

2 Corinthians 12:7–10 ESV

So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Paul names several kinds of adversity

weakness

insult

hardship

persecution

calamity

his response is always the same - Christ.

In Egypt - story of the pastor who they bulldozed his house

You’re Americans and we know that you’ll hear our stories and pray for the persecution to end. But don’t pray for it to end. Pray that God would strengthen us and use us to bring Muslims to Christ. - that’s a coffee bean mentality.

At the time Isis and the Muslim Brotherhood were running rampant in the country. Just a few months before Isis took 15 Coptic Chrstians from Egypt and beheaded them on the seashore.

But God was using their response to bring people to Christ.

Something inside of you has to be bigger and better than what comes against you.