As I was sitting in church yesterday morning, I was again struck by my strange way of thinking… I spend a lot of time talking about grace and faith… and what that really means. That in and of itself is not strange, but after almost 21 years of these sports-themed devotions, I always see coaching/playing parallels with Biblical truths… and then yesterday evening as I huddled up with a couple of coaches, we again drew sports parallels to Biblical truths.
Lately we have been keying on the team and being a good teammate, and a lot of that ends up boiling down to another important truth (which I have written about many times over the years), trusting the coach! It is much easier to focus on our roles as players when trusting the direction we are heading in.
This is especially true with new coaches or new programs, where a new culture is being established. And it is much harder to accomplish when the scoreboard or record have us on the losing end… times when we are having to be reminded about the difference between winning a battle vs winning a war… I remember many times that players would question my decisions based upon the score of a game and not the effect on the season or seasons to come. I’ve asked players… students… my own kids… many times to trust me, even when they couldn’t see the projected outcome.
Well I feel like I am rambling a bit (which those that have been in my huddles, or services, know happens easily)… but bottom line is that we tend to spend too much time looking at life’s current circumstances and allowing that to cause us to question the Coach. I know that sounds harsh, but we spend way too much time questioning God, or let me be more blunt, distrusting God. When life doesn’t line up the way we want it, we tend to try to take things in our own hands instead of trusting the Coach!
This truth came out in the message yesterday when one of our pastors (Clay Minor) was sharing about King David’s disobedience to God in taking a census of his men… looking for confidence in numbers instead of in God…
David went against God’s word and wise counsel (2 Samuel 24) and afterwards was broken before the Lord admitting, “I have sinned greatly in what I have done…” (vs 10) Clay did a good job of reminding us that it was not a sin of census-taking but a sin of not trusting God.
If you personally want peace… if you want a positive team culture in the body of Christ… stop being driven by “the score” or your “record” [circumstances] and focus on, what we have been talking about the last few weeks, the good of the team! This is rooted in simply “playing’ in a way that has confidence in the Coach… which allows us to “play” freely.
Clay’s bottom line was: Don’t count, trust.
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