Our Sports Fandom and Our Walk with Christ

As a sports fan you experience a vast array of emotions cheering for your favorite team. You love your team dearly and always stand up for them. Through the good times when they’re competing for a championship and the bad times when you’re hope to just win a couple games, you love them. You learn to forget about the tough losses and the heartbreaks and hold onto the small moments or games when they made your proud. For us living in Iowa, it doesn’t matter if the Hawkeyes or the Cyclones lose every game as long as they beat the other team. In the midst of a bad season, you still claim them as your own and protect their name from everybody who badmouths them. You stay loyal to them through and through. Maybe you stay loyal because you really do love them unconditionally or maybe it’s because you’ve never been anything but a Yankee fan so how could you leave them. You’ve invested so much of your time, life, energy, and emotion into cheering for this team and staying up-to-date on whose on it you really couldn’t imagine your life without them. We become passionate about our team and ability to build relationships out of mutual love with other fans. Our passion leads to enthusiasm and often times we can be seen yelling at the tv in frustration or imagining what the team would look like if we were the GM (or coach) and in control of their destiny. It’s a wonderful roller coaster ride, but I wouldn’t trade it. There are somethings to be learned from our fandom though.

Passion

We as sports fans can be so passionate and obsessive it can be kind of uncomfortable for those around us. Passion is a beautiful thing in life and God gave us passions, but we also need to be cautious about our passions. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Sometimes we put such a huge emphasis on sports in our lives and on our sports teams that the beautiful passion God gave us turns into idolatry. We need to be careful where we are investing our time into because that’s where the essence of our heart appears. We have an uncanny ability to be passionate about a team of team of players who will never know our name or anything about us defending these people to the death if someone says something ill about them but what about Jesus. Why are we more inclined to defend a quarterback for our team caught in the wrong than defend the one who died for us so that we might truly be a live and live in freedom. It begs the question, are we passionate about Jesus? Do we see going to church as a chore? Do we see reading the Bible as a hassle? Do we try to get out of having family devotions or neglect them fully? Would we rather go to a ball game or sit back in our La-Z-Boy and watch our team over build our relationship with Christ?

Are we capable of reaching out and building relationships on our love for the Minnesota Vikings, but spur away from fellowship with the body of Christ? I think it’s great to be passionate about sports but that can’t be the biggest passions in our life, not even close. We need to be passionate about our families, our children, our church, and Jesus. If you believe that it’s easy to be passionate about sports because they’re more fun than Jesus than you haven’t experienced the insurmountable joy that comes from being fully accepted, forgiven, and heart set on fire for the King of the Universe who transcended down into our lands to live amongst us, teach us, and die for us. There is no greater joy than calling His name.

Loyalty

The last thing that we can learn and more so be challenged by through our fandom is our loyalty. We as fans endure through the good times and the hard times. There are times when supporting and claiming a team is tough and whether it’s through a bad season, a scandal, drug charges or player conduct we endure and hold onto the hope that it will fade. I think that that long lasting enduring loyalty is a pretty special and uncommon trait amongst people who now a days tend to look after themselves. However, we should be challenged in why we will endure things like bad seasons but often run when it comes to things that matter in life. Whether it’s running or keeping our distance from the church or marital problems.

There are husbands and wives who can stay loyal to their sports team their whole life, but when a problem occurs in their marriage whether it’s financial problems, personality conflicts, illness, infidelity, will decide that it’s not worth staying there. That’s a hard thing to witness and for children to grow up believe it was easier for his parents to love a sports team than their spouse, but that’s the world we live in. There is grace in that moment, but what would our lives look like, our marriages look like, our churches look like if we decided to be loyal and stick it out through and through with them with the same fire and passion that we show for our precious Red Sox, Crimson Tide, or Wolves. They would look eternally different.

Sports and Jesus

I have personally always loved sports and have learned more about myself from sports than anything I learned in my formal education, but sports can’t be our lives. We need to be passionate about building our families and our relationship with Christ. We need to be passionate about being a part of our own team, the body of Christ and play our role. We need to be committed to our families and our God and put them as top priorities in our lives. We can love sports but we can’t worship sports, that’s what Jesus is for.

Fruit of the Spirit: Patience

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control.” – Galatians 5:22-23a

Patience on the Golf Course

I spent a large portion of my life trying to prove myself as an athlete. I grabbed a hold of any sport I could get my hands on to see if I could prove myself great in the eyes of my peers. Many sports were abandon immediately for lack of skill or better yet a lack of body size (turns out my middle school football team had no place a 5′ slow wide receiver who weighted 80 pounds.) I was doomed from the start. However, one particular sport was tried and tried and tried again until ultimately my frustration decided to throw the towel in once and for all. Golf. A sport of precision, mental fortitude, and what I lacked above all patience.

I determined I was a terrible golfer from the first tee box but I tried to enjoy it none-the-less. My attitude would not let me however, I couldn’t get past how awful I was. I knew if I put the work in and stayed with it eventually it’d pay off but I couldn’t get myself to do it. Bad shot after bad shot after bad shot my patience run low. I decided it was time to put the clubs in the shed and find a new sport to try.

In hindsight, a lot of great family memories occurred on the same courses that frustrated me into agony. When I was younger, my attitude dictated much of my life. My lack of patience made many things impossible for me. I was always told “Patience is a virtue” but there has to be a way that this behavior manifests itself in our lives right? There has to be a way we can continue to grow in our ability to hold it right?

Patience in the Gospel

The Gospel so beautifully illustrates patience in a way that nothing else can. As we examine the history of God’s story we see His perfect patience seen time and time again. As He created the world and us, everything is good, everything is perfect. Yet, as sin lurks in the shadows and is born into Adam and Eve, God’s patience is first seen. While they rebelled and disobeyed still God is seen tending to them, caring for them, and creating a plan for restoration for the sin that has come into the world. Flash forward to God’s chosen people Israel as they live through the sacrificial system of offerings God has created to continually remind them of their dependence and how they will need an all-atoning sacrifice once and for all we see them fall away. They disobey God, their hearts grow cold, they become distant, God ushers them back into His arm, they stay there momentary and fall away and the endless cycle continues. God’s patience was working perfectly as He continued to love them, guide them, and bring them back into His loving arms time after time. Flash forward to Jesus, walking around the earth teaching His disciples and His lost sheep. As He lie in the Garden of Gethsemane telling His disciples that they would turn away from Him, His patience was at work. The Gospel at every level demonstrates (especially through the life of Christ) what it looks like to be patient. As Jesus lived His life, He was patient and loving. While He lived, as He taught, He knew as the all-knowing God that He was knew who would turn away from Him, who would reject Him, who would betray Him, who would crucify Him, yet He remained patient with everyone around Him. He remained loving because of this patience.

Patience in our Lives

As Followers of Christ, the Gospel comes to life in us. As Jesus died on the cross crushing sin, His Spirit would be given to all believers as a gift, a deposit of Him in us. We are able to be made more Christ-like because of this then. We can look toward Christ and His Spirit to be our patience. As our tempers falls we can start to see things as Christ sees them if we renew our mind to be like His. We can regain our focus and composure for our co-workers who run our patience low by seeing them as Christ sees them. They are loved, they are desired and wanted, they are broken and in need of the same Savior we desperately cling too for our hope.  We can see our child who continually disobeys us and is out of control as the same lost sheep that “The Great Shepherd” looked up and down through the meadow to find. Through this love our patience will shine through again, because of His patience. We just need to continually look to Christ to fill us with His Spirit; it may not solve our golf game problems, but it will solve our inability to show patience and love to those around us.