Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
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In 1992 Harvey Pennick wrote The Little Red Book, which became the best-selling sports book of all time. At first he thought this collection of advice about golf would be fun to hand down to his children, but then a publisher offered him a deal that he almost turned down, because he didn't understand what was being offered.
Good morning and welcome to Starting Right. I am Danny Mack, and I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back and relax for the next five minutes as I help you start your day by starting right.
When I was growing up, I had the opportunity to play a lot of golf. We lived on a hill called Little Mountain, and just at the base of that hill there was a golf course called Meadowlands. And as a kid, I had a membership, and we would play golf there almost every day, it seemed. And I got okay at the game. I was never really good at it, but I got okay at it. I'd play with my friends and I'd play with my dad, and you know, we'd have a good time together. And I did grow to have a great appreciation of golf, and I did enjoy those times out there. Over the years my participation and abilities have faded dramatically from what they were. I still respect the game, and it amazes me what professional golfers can do.
If you've played much golf at all any time in the last thirty years, you should be pretty familiar with the name Harvey Pinnock. He wrote a book called Harvey Pinnock's Little Red Book, and surprisingly, it became a bestseller in 1992 by selling over one million copies and becoming the best selling sports book of all time. Harvey was an interesting guy. He was a golf coach for over seventy years. He taught duffers all the way up to the pros and helped some of the very best become even better. All the time throughout those seventy years, Harvey was taking notes, watching the things that worked and the things that didn't work, the little emphasis that really made a difference in the golf game. And he collected all of those notes over the years, and his original intention was to pass it on to his children. But by the time he was ninety, he decided maybe he'd like to publish it. So he took his book and visited a professional writer in his town and asked the writer to read through it and see if he thought it might be worth publishing. Well, the writer read it and he told Harvey that he liked the book. In fact, he asked if he could take the book to a publisher and have them take a look at it for him. So the writer took the book to some major publishers, Simon and Schuster, some of the biggest publishers in the world, and he presented it to them. A couple days later, Pennock's wife got a phone call from the man who Harvey had shown the book to. He told her that the publishers had liked the book and wanted the rights to publish it with an advance of ninety thousand dollars. Two days later, the writer came to see Pennock, expecting that they were going to celebrate together, but instead he found the old man quite troubled and depressed. So the writer asked him, What was the problem? Tell me what's going on. So Pennick told him I'm sorry, but with all the medical bills and everything that's going on, there's no way that my wife and I could afford to advance Simon and Schuster that much money. The writer sat back in shock, and it took him almost an hour. But he finally convinced Pennick that the publisher would pay him the $90,000, not the other way around. Talk about a great surprise. That's when he thought he would have to pay the price. Isn't that amazing?
That's really how God works in our lives. That's how grace works in our lives. We really don't have any right to have a relationship with God. But through
Jesus Christ, he came and he paid the price for all of that. So instead of us having to pay for our sins and try to make things right with God, it's taken care of for us. We're given the gift, we're given the benefit of it all because of God's grace and love for us. In the book of Ephesians, chapter two, verses eight and nine, it tells us, For by grace you have been saved through faith. And that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. God's gift to us, the undeserved gift that God gives us, is this relationship with God, a life that is new and full of God's power and promises to work in us. The biggest mistake we can ever make is to believe that we have to earn a relationship with God. There's nothing you can do to earn God's grace. Jesus Christ did all of that for us. And that's really pretty incredible. God comes to us and says, if you receive the gift that I have for you, that I've paid for for you, you can have the very best life possible. The benefits go beyond anything that you can possibly imagine. And we have done absolutely nothing to earn it. It's a gift to us in our lives. We have the opportunity to celebrate the life that God has
given us. So let's do that. Let's celebrate this life. Get out and enjoy the sunshine, enjoy your family, enjoy where you live. Maybe even go out and play a game of golf. You know, I think I might just do that myself. But whatever you do, celebrate what God has given you. Have a great day, my friends. We will talk again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today. And I invite you to join me Monday to Friday right here on Starting Right with Danny Mack.
