I am looking forward to seeing how March Madness winds down tonight for the men’s side of the tournament… and wow, what a great women’s tourney this year! Yet what amazes me is how little coverage and social media comments there has been about the actual athletic performances in the game… Over and over I am see posts about Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Coach Mulkey… and oh yeah, an enormous amount of complaints about the officials. (Yet, expected to read mo0re about the INVREDIBLE bench play that LSU got… outscoring Iowa’s bench 30-8… and Jasmine Carson, holy smokes, 7-7 from the field in the 1st half… 5 of those were 3-pointers…)
Throughout the years of doing these weekly game plans I have tried to use sports analogies to teach Scriptural principles… and adversely the transforming power of the Scriptures over the years changed my athletic principles as a player, coach, and fan! Thus my mantra when I was an athletic director/coach was “Players Play, Coaches Coach, Refs Ref, Fans Cheer!” And then as we developed our men’s basketball outreach we allowed Scripture to dictate our “rules”… one of which was “if you get fouled you can’t call it… instead play through the contact.”
This rule was based off of Philippians 2:14,15 which states: Do all things without complaining or disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, and whom you shine as lights in the world…
Notice that in the game of life we are going to face a game that is “crooked and perverse”… in other words the refs may be bad and the opponents may cheat or be jerks… YET how are we told we should respond?
The reality is that we, as God’s Team, are far too often children of God with fault… I have often heard that Christians are more known for what they are against than what they are for… we spend our energy yelling at the refs and fighting with the opposition instead of cheering for God’s team and game plan.
This came to my mind, as stated, from reading everything about last night’s women’s championship… and also from a point that jumped out during church yesterday… one where Jesus is being arrested in the garden and Peter decides to fight for right… pulls his sword and cuts off Malchus’s ear… to which Jesus told Peter, “Put your sword back in its sheath…” (John 18:11)
Jesus didn’t need Peter to fight the enemy… Jesus came to Bethlehem (in the womb) riding a donkey… He then rode a donkey on His triumphal entry into Jerusalem leading to this moment… in other words Jesus came and left in peace on that visit… and calls us to be ambassadors of that peace… He faced the worst call in history by a ref (judge) when Pilot sentenced Him to death… and He took it without complaining…
If we are to be “blameless and harmless, children of God
without fault” we need to “put our swords in their sheaths”! As I discussed the
message yesterday with my wife and daughter it ended with Faith (my daughter)
making this observation: Maybe refs (those judging us and our message about God)
aren’t blind, but instead are deaf because in our haste to fight for right, we
have cut off their ears…
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