Stay The Course!

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus…” (Hebrews 12:1,2a)

Have you ever watched a film that motivates you to follow through on your convictions even when everything within you wants to quit?

Last night I watched on Amazon Prime the 2000 American epic historical film, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. The film is “historical fiction.” It is based upon real Revolutionary War figures. Benjamin Martin (Gibson) is a composite of four historical men: Andrew Pickens, Francis Marion, Daniel Morgan and Thomas Sumter.

Though not all the events portrayed in the film happened, the main story line is true to the historical record. A guerrilla militia formed in South Carolina became strategic factor in the Continentals to winning the war for independence from Britain. Their role led by the likes of Benjamin Martin was to hold down and weaken the British army led by Lord Cornwallis. They sought to buy enough time for the French Navy to assist by sea.

The tide eventually turned against the British in the decisive Battle at Cowpens. The French arrived with their ships and aided the Continental army who had Cornwallis surrounded by land, forcing him to surrender his army in a humiliating defeat.

 But the most important battle had to be won first in the soul of Benjamin Martin. He had lost his wife before the war. Then as the war began, he saw his youngest son, Thomas, murdered by a British officer while attempting to protect his oldest brother, Gabriel. Later he is seen holding Gabriel as he watches him die from a mortal wound inflicted by that same officer. This is when Martin was ready to call it quits. He strongly contemplated desertion and returning to his five remaining children. As he is readying to bury Gabriel he utters the words, “I have run my course.” At that point Col. Harry Burwell, who had been the one who appointed him originally to lead the militia says to him, “Stay the course.”

As Martin heard these words, they echoed within him the same words he remembers his late wife said to him before she died, leaving him alone to care for their seven children. They were also the same words Gabriel said to him while he was still alive. Among his dead son’s belongings, he held a tattered American flag that his son had repaired. This flag and the words “stay the course” said three times by three different people is what he needed shore up his soul with the strength to continue. He had not yet finished his course. And now he  knew that only if he stayed the course would he honor the courage and sacrifice of his late wife and two oldest sons as well as help secure a future free of tyranny for his remaining five children.

This story is a powerful metaphor. Many of us today, brothers and sisters in Christ, think we have done enough for the cause of Christ to be tempted to say, like Martin, “I have run my course.” Like him we have had our victories and defeats but what is causing us to lose heart are the accumulation of the many losses. Many of us have seen our children drift away from the faith. We have lost relationships with family and friends over what appears to be “political opinions,” but mostly they have spiritual roots. We have begun to believe the lie that we have nothing left of value to contribute to the great spiritual war being fought for our nation’s to turn back to God through Jesus Christ.

But the Holy Spirit is whispering to His children who will turn our ears to Him today, “Stay the course.” All the challenges we have faced head on, learned from and suffered through will never be wasted. They have only prepared us, like Martin in The Patriot, to play a strategic role in the pivotal battles that lay ahead of us. The war is not over. And just as it occurred in the Revolutionary War at that time, the tide is now turning… Will we “stay the course?”