What Really Matters?

"And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ," - Philippians 1:10

It is amazing to me how faithfully consistent God is in His word with our goal for our lives. Currently I am preparing to teach at our FCA Tennis Clinics starting this Thursday in Scottsbluff and continuing on in North Platte, Hastings, and Omaha on Friday, Saturday, and Monday. As I have been studying I was struck by this passage when God inspires Paul to write about being able to discern what is best.

In a world that Paul refers to in Philippians 3 as full of enemies of the Cross of Christ, it can be very difficult to discern what is best. We have been drilled time and time again with questions that reveal the heart of the goal of sports according to the world such as "How many points did you score?" or "Did you win?" To which I ask: "What really matters!"

Philippians 1 refers to us being pure and blameless until the day of Christ as what really matters. Therefore, the questions we ought to be asking are "Did I glorify the Lord in what I did in competition today?" or "Did I learn to better walk in obedience to the Lord through my competition today? or "Did I become more like Jesus through my competition today?"

What is interesting is that God's goal for us in sports is really no different then God's Goal for us in our lives. Many of us (including me) have just failed to consider whether or not God would have a goal for us in sports and have simply deferred to what the world would define as the goal. The thing that makes this difficult to understand in our flesh is that God's goal for us is not something that is measurable like a win or a loss is. It is a matter of the heart. And God desires to be with us in the midst of competition as well.

Check out a great description of this from Western Nebraska FCA's Spring Banquet as former Denver Bronco and current National Spokesperson for FCA's Drug and Alcohol Free Ministry One Way 2 Play, Steve Fitzhugh recites FCA's Competitor's Creed.

Nate Lewis
FCA-Area Representative
Western Nebraska