The Unforgettable Pete Maravich

It happened so suddenly. One minute he was enjoying playing basketball, telling a friend he felt

great. The next, he was sprawled on the floor, his body con vulsing in a seizure. An ambulance

whisked him to the hospital where doctors tried for fifty minutes to revive him. It was all in vain;

Peter Press Maravich, known to the world as “Pistol Pete,” slipped into eternity at 9:42 a.m. on

January 5, 1988 at the age of 40.

 

Pete was beloved by many, yet understood by few. He was a legend in his own time, one of the

greatest basketball players who ever lived, and probably the most colorful. The news of his sudden

death sent shock waves from coast to coast and brought back an avalanche of memories to his

many admirers, of whom I was chief. Few, if any, ever inspired me as he did. Pete left a deep and

lasting impression on me because of his commitment to excellence, his incredible intensity, and his

perseverance in the face of constant criticism and nagging problems.

 

The Amazing String Bean

 

I still vividly remember the first time I saw Pistol Pete play in person. I can see him now. It was

March of 1968. The coliseum at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee was packed to capacity. During

the warm up, I observed Maravich’s 6’5″ 170-pound frame, which resembled a cross between a

clarinet and a string bean, and I wondered if he could possibly live up to his lofty reputation. I

chuckled at the floppy socks that had slid to the bottom of his spindly legs. And of course, there

was his mop of shaggy hair.

 

But from the opening tip-off, the sophomore sensation from LSU quickly impressed me with his

behind-the-back dribbling, his long, feathery jump shots, and that amazing between-the-legs passing

that often caught his own teammates off guard. By the time the final buzzer sounded, he had poured

in a torrent of 44 points, his average–all in a losing effort!

 

While I was attending the University of Missouri, I read about Pete in the newspaper. He had just

become the top scorer in the history of college basketball and a three-time All-American. Then he

climaxed a brilliant amateur career by being selected Player of the Year in 1970.

 

In the pros, Pete soared to new heights. He led the league in scoring in 1977 with a 31.1 average.

His career spanned ten years, primarily with Atlanta and New Orleans, during which he became a

four-time all star and averaged 24.2 points per game. His highest point total for one game was 68,

but without a strong supporting cast it was difficult to win a title. The elusieness of a championship

disturbed him deeply.

 

A Misunderstood Genius

 

Criticism began to mount. Many thought he was a loser and questioned why he could not win at

least one championship. Pete was tormented. No matter what he did, or how hard he played,

people just didn’t understand this genius in sneakers. Though Pete played with a flair and intensity

never before seen, to his critics–and especially to himself–he was never good enough.

 

Meanwhile, his life seemed to be falling apart. His mother committed suicide, for which he felt

responsible. His social drinking became more frequent and intense. Worst of all, Pete had no inner

peace. Maybe a championship was all that was necessary. But season after season passed, and no

championship.

 

At last he had the opportunity to win that coveted crown. He was traded to Boston in 1980 for his

final season. His mind knew exactly what to do, but his tired body refused to cooperate. For once,

the Celtics didn’t win the title, and Pistol Pete was finished at 33.

 

Life Beyond the Court

 

Retirement was almost more than Pete could handle. Basketball had been his life, even his god, for

over 25 years. Searching for peace and fulfillment, he dabbled in astrology, mysticism, survivalism,

and UFOs. He even contemplated suicide as he raced his Porsche over a bridge at 140 mph.

 

Then in November of 1982, as Pete tried to sleep one night at his home in Metairie, Louisiana, the

weight of his sin against a holy God almost crushed him. What the Bible said about sin was true: “All

have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans3:23), and “the wages of sin is death”

(Romans 6:23).

 

At that moment the light of God’s mercy shone brightly in his heart, and he realized “God

demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans

5:8). Pete remembered the biblical promise, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved”

(Acts 16:31). Rolling off his bed and kneeling there, he repented of his sin and trusted Jesus Christ

to give him eternal life.

 

Before long, Pete was sharing his testimony with anyone who would listen. He spoke about the

emptiness of his former life without Christ, despite possessing all the material benefits a young man

could ever desire.

 

Not long before his death, he told his former coach, Richie Guerin, that his desire was to be

remembered as a good Christian, a good husband, and a good father. Speaking before 35,000

people at the Billy Graham Crusade in Columbia, South Carolina just a few months before his

death, he said, “Next week I’ll be inducted into the Hall of Fame. . . (but) I wouldn’t trade my

position in Christ for a thousand NBA championships, for a thousand Hall of Fame rings, or for a

hundred billion dollars.”

 

For those of us who loved and admired Pete, his place in sports history is quite secure. But more

important, his standing before a holy God is eternally secure. Pete Maravich was a winner whose

end was greater than his beginning, for he had come to know His great God and Savior, the Lord

Jesus Christ. After all, a relationship with Christ, not a championship, was what Pete really needed.

 

Though Pistol Pete died suddenly, he was prepared. What about you? Do you have peace with

God through the Lord Jesus Christ? Has He changed your life? If not, trust Him now for the

forgiveness of your sin, for “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans

10:13).

 

Ed Cheek

 

Like Pete, I know that I am a sinner and that I need God’s forgiveness. I believe that Christ died in

my place to pay the penalty for my sin and that He rose from the dead. I now trust in Jesus Christ

alone as my Savior and receive His gift of eternal life.

 

If you have made this decision and desire help, please contact us through the methods mentioned at

the bottom of the page.

 

For a free sample of this gospel tract, call American Tract at 1-800-548-7228 .

 

The Testimony

Since becoming a disciple of Christ, Paul knows that all mere orthodoxy, all mere knowledge concerning God’s will, is not only nothing but less than nothing. The more knowledge, the more obligation. The maintaining of revealed doctrine becomes blasphemy if it is not borne out by the corresponding testimony of the life.  He who is always appealing to the Word of God without his life and conduct corresponding to this knowledge of God, dishonours God’s name, making Him an object of mockery and hatred.  It is just those who know so well how to talk about God who make His name hateful among men, because their lives darken the picture of God and turn it into a caricature.  The Lord is judged by the life of His servants; this is the truer, the more zealously they appeal to Him.

—Emil Brunner, The Letter to the Romans [1959]

Legend Of The Cherokee Indian Youth’s Rite of Passage

Do you know the legend of the Cherokee Indian youth’s rite of Passage? His father takes him into the forest, blindfolds him and leaves him alone. He is required to sit on a stump the whole night and not remove the blindfold until the rays of the morning sun shine through it. He cannot cry out for help to anyone. Once he survives the night, he is a MAN.

He cannot tell the other boys of this experience, because each lad must come into manhood on his own. The boy is naturally terrified. He can hear all kinds of noises. Wild beasts must surely be all around him. Maybe even some human might do him harm. The wind blew the grass and earth, and shook his stump, but he sat stoically, never removing the blindfold. It would be the only way he could become a man!

Finally, after a horrific night the sun appeared and he removed his blindfold. It was then that he discovered his father sitting on the stump next to him. He had been at watch the entire night, protecting his son from harm.

We, too, are never alone. Even when we don’t know it, God is watching over us, Sitting on the stump beside us. When trouble comes, all we have to do is reach out to Him.

Moral of the story: Just because you can’t see God, Doesn’t mean He is not there. “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7)

Now Thank We All Our God

“You have turned for me my mourning into dancing.” —Psalm 30:11

It was the worst of times. In the first half of the 17th century, Germany was in the midst of wars and famine and pestilence. In the city of Eilenburg lived a pastor by the name of Martin Rinkart. During one especially oppressive period, Rinkart conducted up to 50 funerals a day as a plague swept through the town and as the Thirty Years’ War wreaked its own terror on the people. Among those whom Rinkart buried were members of his own family. Yet during those years of darkness and despair, when death and destruction greeted each new day, Pastor Rinkart wrote 66 sacred songs and hymns. Among them was the song “Now Thank We All Our God.” As sorrow crouched all around him, Rinkart wrote:

Now thank we all our God

With hearts and hands and voices,

Who wondrous things hath done,

In whom His world rejoices;

Who, from our mothers’ arms,

Hath blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love,

And still is ours today.

Rinkart demonstrated a valuable lesson for us all: Thankfulness does not have to wait for prosperity and peace. It’s always a good time to praise God for the “wondrous things” He has done.

—Unknown

Stepping into Something Frightening

There are all sorts of things that get in the way of doing what we feel we’re called to do. Sometimes it’s sloth; sometimes we simply get distracted. But a lot of times, it’s fear that stands in the way. And a lot of times, the only way to conquer fear is, as the commercial goes, just do it.

In the early 1800s, English prisons were pits of indecency and brutality. In the women’s division at Newgate Prison in London, for example, women awaiting trial for stealing apples were crammed into the same cell as women who had been convicted of murder or forgery (which was also a capital crime).

Eating, sleeping, and defecating were all performed in the same confined area. Women begged or stole to get clothes, alcohol, and food. Many became despondent in such conditions and sat around in a drunken stupor stark naked. Some even starved to death.

In short, it was not the place for a lady, especially a seemingly delicate woman like Elizabeth Fry.

Fry was the daughter of an English banker, and she married young (age twenty) into another wealthy family. Children came quickly, one on top of another, to eventually number eleven in all. She spent her days mothering and entertaining people of high society. Yet years before, she had sensed a call to work on behalf of the downtrodden. So while a young bride and mother, she had given medicine and clothes to the homeless and helped establish a school for nurses. And at age thirty-three, she found the courage to step inside London’s Newgate Prison and began visiting female prisoners. Friends and prison officials warned her of both the disease and violence she exposed herself to. But she waved the warnings aside and kept visiting.

But visiting soon wasn’t enough. She taught female prisoners basic hygiene, as well as sewing and quilting. She read the Bible to inmates and intervened for women on death row.

To nineteenth-century observers, her efforts produced a miracle: many of the reportedly wild and shifty inmates became, under her care, orderly, disciplined, and devout. Mayors and sheriffs from the surrounding regions (and later other European countries) visited Newgate and began initiating reforms in their own jails and prisons.

Elizabeth Fry today is remembered as a pioneer in prison reform. And yet the only thing that separated her from many others of her day was her willingness to step into a frightening environment to see what she could do.

(Mark Galli, Christian History Magazine)

Worth Dying For

It’s hard to read any of the sermons the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about death and heaven without hearing echoes of gunshots.

“The minute you conquer the fear of death, at that moment you are free,” he said in 1963. “I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

Decades later, these words still inspire faith and courage, said social activist Johann Christoph Arnold, who marched with King in the Civil Rights Movement. That’s why the patriarch of the nine Bruderhof communes in the U.S., England, and Australia included this quotation in his most recent book, SEEKING PEACE.

This was the book that Cassie Bernall and other teenagers at Littleton’s West Bowles Community Church were supposed to have discussed on the evening of April 20. After that tragic day at Columbine High School, Bernall’s parents showed Arnold her copy of SEEKING PEACE, with its handwritten notes for the study session that was never held.

Cassie had boldly underlined King’s thoughts on death. Did she hear echoes of gunshots?

“Why did these words speak to her at such a young age? It is such a great mystery,” said Arnold. “But I do know this. She had found something she was willing to live for, and even to die for, and that made all the difference in her life.”

(Syndicated columnist Terry Mattingly; File under: Death, Courage; Scripture: Matthew 16:25)

Under His Wings

After a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park, forest rangers began their trek up a mountain to assess the inferno’s damage. One ranger found a bird literally petrified in ashes, perched statuesquely on the ground at the base of a tree. Somewhat sickened by the eerie sight, he knocked over the bird with a stick. When he struck it, three tiny chicks scurried from under their dead mother’s wings. The loving mother, keenly aware of impending disaster, had carried her offspring to the base of the tree and had gathered them under her wings, instinctively knowing that the toxic smoke would rise. She could have flown to safety but had refused to abandon her babies. When the blaze had arrived and the heat had scorched her small body, the mother had remained steadfast. Because she had been willing to die, those under the cover of her wings would live.

“He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge. . .” (Psalm 91:4)

—National Geographic

A Cause that Will Not Fail

Haddon Robinson, preaching professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, recently told me that the biggest challenge to understanding a Scripture passage accurately is the context. That wasn’t new to me (hermeneutics was one of the first classes I took in seminary), but the example Haddon gave me drove home to me the power of Scripture applied with accuracy.

Haddon said that in the D.Min preaching program he directs, students are asked to come up with the main idea and application of Mark 4:35-41—Jesus calming the storm when the disciples feared it might sink their boat. The application that most students come up with is that, “Jesus can calm your storms of life. Whether it’s cancer or the loss of your job—whatever storm is raging in your

life—Jesus is there and calms the storm.”

The problem with that application, Haddon said, is that the disciples made it to the other side of the sea safely. A lot of people don’t survive the storm in real life. The cancer metastasizes and kills your father. You can’t find a job that replaces the income of the job you lost. How do you apply that passage for people who often don’t survive the storms of life?

The story of Jesus calming the storm, Haddon said, cannot be understood without knowing what the “seed” is in the previous parables. The seed is the disciples’ effort at spreading the message of the kingdom. The “Jesus calming the storm” story must be connected to the parables which precede it.

The point is that Mark 4:35-41 does not promise individual Christians physical deliverance from every storm in life. Rather, it promises that kingdom people are part of a grand enterprise that will succeed. If you give your life to God, no matter what storms you encounter, you are giving your life to a cause that will not fail.

After I hung up with Haddon, I thought for the rest of the day about the decisions I’ve made that have brought me to this point in life. I’ve often questioned, as I’ve watched my friends climb the corporate ladder and reap the financial rewards, whether I am wasting my life in ministry. I’m not. I’m in a business that is guaranteed success and whose Owner will someday make it worth my while.

(Dave Goetz, Editor of LEADERSHIP Resources and ChurchLeadership.Net)

Tremble

“It is not Christianity which need fear the giant universe. It is those systems which place the whole meaning of existence in biological or social evolution on our own planet. It is the creative evolutionist, the Bergsonian or Shavian, or the Communist, who should tremble when he looks up at the night sky. For he really is committed to a sinking ship. He really is attempting to ignore the discovered nature of things, as though he could make himself forget the inevitable downward trend in the universe as a whole, the trend to low temperatures and irrevocable disorganization; for entrophy is the real cosmic wave, and evolution only a momentary tellurian ripple within it.”

(Lewis, C.S., God In The Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, © 1970 by The Trustees of the Estate of C.S. Lewis, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, Chapter 3: Dogma and the Universe, p. 44)

What the Door Really Conceals

“I hear someone whimpering on with his question, ‘Will it help me? Will it make me happy? Do you really think I’d be better if I became a Christian?’ Well, if you must have it, my answer is, ‘Yes.’ But I don’t like giving an answer at all at this stage. Here is a door, behind which, according to some people, the secret of the universe is waiting for you. Either that’s true, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t, then what the door really conceals is simply the greatest fraud, the most colossal ‘sell’ on record. Isn’t it obviously the job of every man … to try to find out which, and then to devote his full energies either to serving this tremendous secret or to exposing and destroying this gigantic humbug?”

(Lewis, C.S., God In The Dock, C.S. Lewis, Eerdman’s: Grand Rapids, 1970, pp. 111-12)

Trust Me

A man named Jack was walking along a steep cliff one day when he accidentally got too close to the edge and fell. On the way down he grabbed a branch, which temporarily stopped his fall. He looked down and to his horror saw that the canyon fell straight down for more than a thousand feet. He couldn’t hang onto the branch forever, and there was no way for him to climb up the steep wall of the cliff. So Jack began yelling for help, hoping someone passing by would hear him and lower a rope or something.

“HELP! HELP! Is anyone up there? HELP!” He yelled for hours, but no one heard him. He was about to give up when he heard a voice.

“Jack, Jack, Can you hear me?”

“Yes, yes! I can hear you. I’m down here!”

I can see you, Jack. Are you all right?”

“Yes, but … are you, and where are you?”

“I am the Lord, Jack. I’m everywhere.”

“The Lord? You mean, GOD?”

“That’s Me.”

“God, please help me! I promise if you’ll get me down from here, I’ll stop sinning. I’ll be a really good person. I’ll serve You for the rest of my life.”

“Easy on the promises, Jack. Let’s just get you down from there; then we can talk. Now, here’s what I want you to do. Listen carefully.”

I’ll do anything, Lord. Just tell me what to do.”

“Okay,. Let go of the branch.”

“What?”

“I said, let go of the branch. Just trust Me. Let go.”

There was a long silence. Finally Jack yelled, “HELP! Is anyone else up there?”

(Wayne Rice, Hot Illustrations for Youth Talks, p. 70)

How Many of You Believe

The story is told of a great circus performer by the name of Blondin who stretched a long steel cable across Niagra Falls. During high winds and without a safety net, he walked, ran, and even danced across the tightrope to the amazement and delight of the large crowd of people who watched. Once he took the wheelbarrow full of bricks and amazed the crowd by pushing it effortlessly across the cable, from one side of the falls to the other. Blondin then turned to the crowd and asked, “Now, how many of you believe that I could push a man across the wire in the wheelbarrow?” The vote was unanimous. Everyone cheered and held their hands high. They all believed he could do it! “Then,” asked Blondin, “would one of you please volunteer to be that man?” As quickly as the hands went up, they went back down. Not a single person would volunteer to ride in the wheelbarrow and to trust his life to Blondin.

(Wayne Rice, Hot Illustrations For Youth Talks, Copyright 1994, Youth Specialties: El Cajon, CA, p. 206-7)

Bible Trivia



The prince of Grenada, and heir to the Spanish crown, was sentenced to life in solitary confinement in Madrid’s ancient prison called “the Place of the Skull.” The fearful, dirty, and dreary nature of the place earned it the name. Everyone knew that once you were in, you would never come out alive. The prince was given one book to read the entire time—the Bible.

With only one book to read, he read it over hundreds and hundreds of times. The book became his constant companion. After 33 years of imprisonment, he died. When they came in to clean out his cell, they found some notes he had written using nails to mark the soft stone of the prison walls. The notations were of this sort: Psalm 118:8 is the middle verse of the Bible; Ezra 7:21 contains all the letters of the alphabet except the letter j; the ninth verse of the eighth chapter of Esther is the longest verse in the Bible; no word or name of more than six syllables can be found in the Bible, etc…

When Scot Udell originally noted these facts in an article in Psychology Today, he noted the oddity of an individual who spent 33 years of his life studying what some have described as the greatest book of all time yet could only glean trivia. From all we know of the Prince of Grenada, he never made any religious or spiritual commitment to Christ, but he became an expert at Bible trivia.

(Wayne Rice, Hot Illustrations for Youth Talks, Copyright 1994, Youth Specialties, p. 165-6)

It is in the Bible

There was this Christian lady that had to do a lot of traveling for her business so she did a lot of flying. But flying made her nervous so she always took her Bible along with her to read and it helped relax her. One time she was sitting next to a man. When he saw her pull out her Bible he gave a little chuckle and went back to what he was doing.

After awhile he turned to her and asked “You don’t really believe all that stuff in there do you?”

The lady replied “Of course I do. It is the Bible.”

He said “Well what about that guy that was swallowed by that whale?

She replied “Oh, Jonah. Yes I believe that, it is in the Bible.

He asked “Well, how do you suppose he survived all that time inside the whale?”

The lady said “Well I don’t really know. I guess when I get to heaven I will ask him.”

“What if he isn’t in heaven?” the man asked sarcastically.

“Then you can ask him.” replied the lady.

marklowery.com

Fashioned for Faith

“I am inwardly fashioned for faith, not for fear. Fear is not my native land; faith is. I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil. I live better by faith and confidence than by fear, doubt and anxiety. In anxiety and worry, my being is gasping for breath—these are not my native air. But in faith and confidence, I breathe freely—these are my native air. A Johns Hopkins University doctor says, “We do not know why it is that worriers die sooner than the non-worriers, but that is a fact.” But I, who am simple of mind, think I know; We are inwardly constructed in nerve and tissue, brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. To live by worry is to live against reality.”

Dr. E. Stanley Jones—one of the greatest missionaries of the last century

Battle Call

“When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.”

Abraham Kuyper (quoted in Counterfeit Revival, by Hank Hanegraaff, p.11)

A Gate to Heaven

The Roman Catholic monk/priest, Martin Luther, was tormented by his sin. He had been well-schooled in the Roman Catholic understanding of sin, its consequences and the man-made system developed by Rome to try to rid oneself of that sin.

Historian Roland Bainton describes Luther’s journey in the classic book Here I Stand:

Luther “…confessed frequently, often daily, and for as long as six hours on a single occasion. Every sin in order to be absolved (cleansed by God through a Roman Catholic priest) was to be confessed. Therefore the soul must be searched and the memory ransacked and the motives probed. As an aid the penitent (the one confessing his sins) ran through the seven deadly sins and the Ten Commandments. Luther would repeat a confession and, to be sure of including everything, would review his entire life…

His immediate supervisor, Johann von “Staupitz tried to bring Luther to see that he was making religion altogether too difficult. There is just one thing needful, and that is to love God. …The intended word of comfort pierced like an arrow. How could anyone love a God who is a consuming fire? The psalm says, “Serve the Lord with fear.” Who, then, can love a God angry, judging, and damning?

“Staupitz then cast about for some effective cure for this tormented spirit…Plainly argument and consolation did no good. Some other way must be found. One day under the pear tree in the garden of the Augustinian cloister…(Staupitz) informed Brother Martin that he should study for his doctor’s degree, that he should undertake preaching and assume the chair of Bible at the university. Luther gasped, stammered out fifteen reasons why he could do nothing of the sort. The sum of it all was that so much work would kill him. “Quite all right,” said Staupitz. “God has plenty of work for clever men to do in heaven.”

Bainton explains: Staupitz had decided “to drive this agonizing brother to wrestle with the source book of his religion. One may wonder why Luther had not thought of this himself. The reason is not that the Bible was inaccessible, but that Luther was following a prescribed course and the Bible was not the staple of (Roman Catholic) theological education. Yet anyone who seeks to discover the secret of Christianity is inevitably driven to the Bible, because Christianity is based on something which happened in the past, the incarnation of God in Christ at a definite point in history. The Bible records this event.”

So Bainton explains that Luther began studying and teaching the Bible. He eventually came face to face with the Apostle Paul in the Book of Romans. 

“These are Luther’s own words: I greatly longed to understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, ‘the justice of God,’ because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant. Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by his faith.’ Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the ‘justice of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven. . . .”

My Native Air

I am inwardly fashioned for faith, not for fear. Fear is not my native land; faith is. I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil. I live better by faith and confidence than by fear, doubt and anxiety. In anxiety and worry, my being is gasping for breath—these are not my native air. But in faith and confidence, I breathe freely—these are my native air.

A John Hopkins University doctor says, “We do not know why it is that worriers die sooner than the non-worriers, but that is a fact.” But I, who am simple of mind, think I know; We are inwardly constructed in nerve and tissue, brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. To live by worry is to live against reality.

Dr. E. Stanley Jones (Source unknown)