Think a minute…A father was trying to get his little boy to drink a glass of milk, but the son kept refusing, so the battle of wills was on. The father then poured himself a glass of milk and challenged his son to a race to see who could drink their milk the fastest. When the son had finished drinking his entire glass of milk, he said: “Let’s race again!”
The will to win is built into all of us, some more than others. In fact, massive armies led by ambitious men like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napolean Bonaparte, marched off to foreign lands simply to conquer them. The military general Robert E. Lee said: “It’s a good thing war is so terrible, otherwise we would like it too much.”
However, the good side of our human drive to conquer has given us tremendous discoveries that have advanced mankind. Like the team that Captain Earnest Shackleton led to boldly explore the bottom of the world: Antarctica. Amazingly, this is the advertisement he put in the local newspaper to attract men to join his team: “Men wanted for dangerous duty. Small wages. Bitter cold. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful.”
Not a smart and appealing advertisement, right? Wrong! More than 5,000 men applied in response to that ad. But why would so many men want to risk everything to be part of such a miserable, dangerous journey? The answer: the human will to win and conquer. It is that powerful.
That’s why it’s so important that we control and use our will to win in a positive, right, and mature way. It also means learning to lose gracefully, while maintaining our good character and relationships as our life’s greatest ambition and goal. We can conquer others in sports competitions, career, or business, but lose the real competition of life: our honest character and right relationship with our Maker and others around us. Only God can help us conquer our own wrong heart and character that causes us to lose at life.
Won’t you ask Jesus to forgive you for not controlling and using your will to win in His right way? Then ask Him daily to help you become the person of honest character with close, caring relationships He created you to be and have. Just think a minute…