Charlie is a student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I
can always feel it coming. Another
sports season is just around the corner.
The banter is already starting.
Fans touting their team’s previous record. Excitement stirring over the latest
recruits. The casual jabs at the fans of
the big rival. Soon the real show will
begin. Stadiums will fill with their
loyal subjects, decked out in team colors, face-paint and foam fingers. The chants will echo. The mascot will dance down the sideline.
Anxiety, elation, and despair will sweep around stadiums and living rooms while
grown men live vicariously through their hometown warriors.
Being from Georgia, I have experienced my share of great expectations eventually being crushed by what seems like a regional curse. I remember one particular friend who told me that he could not bring himself to take phone calls at his home after a loss. Many people’s entire week will be either made or ruined by the final numbers on the scoreboard. Looking at them the next day, fans from the losing side often appear as if they just lost a family member.
I’m
a sports fan. I’m not knocking rooting
for the home team, or even getting excited about it. There’s a place for that. The problem is that some of the most
dangerous things in life are good things.
Whenever we take a good
thing, and make it a god thing, that’s
a bad thing. This improper elevation of affections is
natural for us. John Calvin famously
said that “the human heart is an idol factory.”
Imagine
you went to a friend’s house and found them gardening in their front yard. As you approached you noticed that they were
digging holes for their flowers with a jewel-laden, golden chalice. Surely you would have chastised your friend
for using such an expensive, precious cup for such a common task. The problem would not have been with digging
the holes. With a shovel, that is a
right and proper thing to do. But a
golden chalice is made to serve a more noble purpose.
Being
made in the image of God, we are indeed created to glory in something outside
ourselves. What a shame if the practical
climax of the affections of our
heart are wasted in the dirt of trivial games.
Again, there is nothing wrong with rooting for the home team, but
consider how your affections for those things stack up against your affections
for Christ.
When
I think about something worth getting excited about…
I
see a man standing on the bow of a boat being tossed in a tumultuous storm,
telling it to shut up and sit down – and it obeys because it hears the very One
who made it.
I
see a man sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, surrounded by angels unable
to look, in the middle of a smoke-filled temple whose very foundations
literally shake at the declaration of His holiness.
I
see a man on a white horse, with eyes ablaze in manifested power, having
tattooed on his thigh “King of kings and Lord of lords.”
I
think of the experience of Him in 1989, when this little 9-year-old boy knelt
before Him on an old metal stool and felt the chains of sin and death snap away
– and the Sovereign and Omnipotent grasp of that same man snatched him out of
the kingdom of darkness and thrust him into the Light.
Now that… is worth getting excited about. As
C.S. Lewis said, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong,
but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex
and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants
to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by
the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
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