When my youngest son, Royce, played 5th/6th grade football, his team’s line coach was a guy named Stacy Peterson. Even though I’d gone to high school with Stacy and had loosely known him for years, we’d always run in different circles and had never done any one-on-on talking. So, I was glad to get to know him better over the course of that season. Trust me, the guy knew a thing or two about being a lineman. Of course, that didn’t surprise me because he did play college ball.

As I think back to that 5th/6th grade season, the thing that stood out to me about Stacy was a certain coaching philosophy he employed. It went as follows: If you aren’t getting better by doing a drill, shut it down and do another drill that allows you to get better. For example, let’s say that our linemen were sleepwalking their way through a drill involving the blocking sleds. After a rebuke or two, Stacy would finally say something like, “Okay, we’re not getting better here; let’s set up some cones and work on our footwork.” If all else failed and he was out of options for alternative drills, he’d say, “Well, if we can’t get better by doing drills, we can at least get in better shape by running. Start running and I’ll tell you when to stop.”

The point is that Stacy was all about making practice time efficient and productive. His time was too valuable for anything less. If a ten-minute span went by in which our players weren’t a little better at football than they had been ten minutes earlier, he saw that as ten minutes wasted.

I’ve been a pastor for many years now and can speak with some expertise when I say that a lot of Christians sleepwalk their way through serving Christ and, consequently, never get much better at it. They aren’t any more involved with church than they were five years ago. They don’t know much more Bible than they did ten years ago. They spend the same amount of time in prayer, if not less, as they did two years ago. They aren’t giving an increased amount of money to church or parachurch ministries. They witness to the same number of people they always have: none. Obviously, these Christians are doing their “drilling” for Jesus, but somehow all of it isn’t making them better at serving Him.

So tell me, Christian, where are you right now in your service to Christ? Are you on fire for Him? Is your service to Him growing? Are you excited about what He is doing through you to affect the lives of others? Or is your service stagnated and stationary? Have you plateaued? Even worse, are you backslidden?

If you have to admit that you aren’t currently getting better at serving Christ, let me encourage you to apply Stacy’s coaching philosophy by trying a different “drill.” Step out in faith by starting something new for Jesus. Volunteer to teach a Sunday School class. Take up the challenge of reading the Bible through in a year. Get a notebook and begin a prayer journal in which you write down not only your daily prayer requests but also how you see God answering them. Muster up the courage to witness to a friend, a neighbor, a coworker, or a family member. Increase your giving to your local church or make a one-time gift to a Christian organization that can surely use it. Even if you can’t give financially, give of your time or your other resources. You get the idea. Whatever you do, don’t keep halfheartedly doing your same old “drills” over and over again, expecting different results.

In 1 Corinthians 15:58, the apostle Paul encourages Christians to always be “abounding in the work of the Lord.” The word “abounding” stands out to me in that verse. There is such a vibrancy to that word, such a vitality. It calls to my mind Olympic athletes bounding down a track-and-field event, muscles rippling and functioning in perfect harmony to power the athletes along.

But how does an athlete reach such an impressive state of performance? With each training drill and exercise, the athlete gets better! Every day, every week, every month, every year, the athlete just keeps getting better until he or she finally reaches that idealized state the world sees on television. You see, Christian, Stacy’s philosophy will work in terms of spiritual drills just as well as it worked in terms of football ones. You simply have to make the commitment to keep constantly getting better. And what I’m asking right now is, “How are you doing on that?”