Monday Morning Blast — September 15, 2014

Truett Cathy passed away a week or so ago. My first experience with Truett Cathy was not necessarily a positive one. You see I was REALLY hungry after church and headed over to this new restaurant everyone was raving about. I pulled up with my blood sugar “flatlined” only to realize…IT WAS CLOSED! The sign on the door simply read, “CLOSED ON SUNDAY”. Can you imagine that in our progressive society a restaurant would chose to be closed on Sunday? Sunday is a big sales day for restaurants!

In case you do not recognize the name, and my “tragic lunch time experience” does not help, Truett Cathy was the founder of Chick-fil-A. He died at the age of 93 after running his faith honoring business for 70 years. Cathy did want his employees to have to chose between work and church on Sunday’s, so he decided from the outset that he would value worship ahead of profits. He witnessed to the Lord’s priority in his life every Sunday. I believe he touched more people by that one decision than many pastors will reach in a lifetime.

I think the Lord was pleased by his decision as well; Chick-fil-A has more than 1,800 locations in the U.S. with annual sales of 5 billion dollars. We know that recent decisions by the Cathy family to support traditional marriage put their Biblical Christian beliefs in the cross hairs of the secular media, but once again, they chose to honor the Lord in spite of the fact that the decision was counter cultural.

Jim Denison of the Denison Forum writes, “Truett Cathy’s decision proves that the more difficult our obedience, the greater our reward.” I recall the words of the Apostle John in Revelation 14:7 where the Lord commands us to “fear God and give Him glory.” Oswald Chambers noted that “God rarely allows a soul to see how great a blessing he is.” But when we care only about what God cares about, he can use our faithfulness to change the world.

I wonder Men of INTENTION, what difficult decision is God asking you to make today? It may be something you need to stop doing, someone you need to forgive or seek forgiveness from. If it were easy, you would have done it already. But know this: the harder the climb, the greater the height. I love to remind myself each day of what Jim Elliot said: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Truett Cathy proved that he was right. So can you and I.