How to be a champion for God
After the recent Superbowl victory by Tom Brady and the team, many of us are fired up. The football season is over, the New England Patriots rest on their well-deserved laurels, and many of us feel like we now have to wait till September to get any sense of sportsmanship and championship in our lives. But do we really have to wait? Not at all.
You see, we all want to be champions in life, but the question is not just of your passion or enthusiasm. The question is – what training program are you following? Are we only doing weekly bicep curls with our black leather thumb-index Bibles, cheering on who we perceive to be real athletes, while reading about the strong and the mighty in the news or on Facebook feeds, being content with attending third-rate programs with the kind of “training” that makes you fall asleep every time you show up? Holding hands in circles and singing kumbaya gets us only so far. We have been taught for too long to be passive spectators by tradition, which has a notoriously poor track record in training real champions.
We don’t need any more preachers with three-piece suits and silk ties (or jeans and a hip T-shirt, as the case may be) to sermonize us for an hour at a time in exchange for a monetary donation. Thank God for the good ones among them, but we have enough of them already. What we need more than ever are coaches who can roll up their sleeves, get down in the dirt with us, and show us the real moves, the ones that really work. We need them huddling with us in the locker room, showing us who we really are, showing us that we are “more than conquerors in Christ Jesus”, and doing all that in a real believable way. Week in and week out, up to and including eventual championship nights.
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At some point, make-believe Christianity has to make room for the living spirit of God. Otherwise all we got is empty doctrine. And honestly, I really don’t think that mere mental assent has any power to save anyone. A parrot can be trained to recite the sinner’s prayer, but his heart won’t change.
Terminal Salvation 