Introduction
As Christians we all need to learn what Augustine was referring to with the phrase ordo amoris—the structuring of your loves. How do you prioritize all the things you do, and how do they rank when it comes to your love for Christ? At the same time, this must be balanced with Paul’s instruction to strive for excellence in whatever you do, and that needs to be coupled with a refusal to judge others—or to envy others.
And virtually nothing brings out the spiritual challenges involved in all of this the way athletics will do. If you are approaching it correctly, athletics will work you over. If you are approaching it correctly, athletics will reveal things to you about yourself that you didn’t want to know. And if you approach it incorrectly, athletics will help you to hide from yourself.
The Text
“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).
“Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand” (Romans 14:4).
Summary of the Text
Whatever we set our hands to do should be pursued with God’s glory in mind—what burger we eat, what girl we marry, what car we buy, and what ball we chase. All of Christ for all of life. Not only must God’s glory be kept in mind, it should always be kept foremost in our minds. And that means striving for excellence in whatever you do. “Run in such a way that you may win” (1 Cor. 9:24, NASB). The one who strives for excellence is not of a mind to settle.
And the second text from Romans instructs us not to be all judgey about how others around us are doing this. We are not all structuring the same responsibilities, and we are not all pursuing the same secondary ends. So if it not a matter of direct obedience to Scripture, and is adiaphora, a thing indifferent, then leave them alone. They might be a slacker, but you are not their coach. And if you are their coach, remember that they still might not be slacking. So he couldn’t memorize all the plays because he had taken on an extra job to buy medicine for his ailing mother. So he is morally in the clear, but he still might lose his starting position . . . and the coach would be morally in the clear for doing that—while admiring the student he benched.
Structuring Time and Structuring Your Loves
The first thing to realize is that the metric for evaluating your loves is not simply “time spent.” Suppose a man is a bookkeeper, and so he does math problems all day. Every evening he visits with his wife for a solid half an hour; he is being a dutiful husband. But . . . he still spends 16x more time doing math than he spends talking with her. Isn’t that terrible? No, because of how life is structured. The math pays for her house, her dinners, her car, her kids’ tuition. It fits into a hierarchy of value. Our loves are ranked like Russian dolls—and it is frequently the case that one of them contains another.
Judging Your Neighbor’s Priorities?
Two student athletes, both of them talented, are allowed to have different priorities with regard to the game. One wants to play college ball and so spends a lot of his own time studying the sport and practicing, and the other enjoys the sport but wants to focus on music, say, and so he spends that extra time playing the piano.
So someone is not necessarily an idolater because he spends three times the effort on his pursuit of the sport than you do. Nor is he an idolater because he is more talented, or faster, or whatever. People are different, and they are not supposed to want all the same things. Why should the pianist judge the athlete? Why should the athlete judge the pianist?
An Opportunity for Sanctification
So sports will in fact create numerous opportunities for sanctification. But remember that there is nothing automatic about it. There are plenty of talented athletes who are also punks. There are plenty of people who have managed to extract all the wrong life lessons out of whatever sport it might be. Your task is to use the athletic situations as opportunities for real sanctification. If you just wait for the sport to do it to you, you are likely to have it do all the wrong things to you.
Meritocracy and Humility
Now one of the besetting sins in Christian athletic circles is egalitarianism, and a reluctance to recognize that the glory of athletic competition is that it is by its very nature uneven. But mothers who love “their sweet baby” don’t like what that unevenness does to his feelings. “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize?” (1 Cor. 9:24). Only one gets the prize. Only one is the starting quarterback. Only one came in first in the 400.
So there is a difference between a second grade PE class, where you are teaching each student how to kick a ball, which means that each student needs to get a decent chance to kick the ball, on the one hand, and a team that has graduated to the level of competing with other teams on the other. Now the objective is to win (1 Cor. 9:24). When that moment arrives, the situation needs to move from universal participation to a meritocracy—with objective measurements and concrete results.
Only one gets the choice spot, but there is a real spiritual opportunity for everyone. One of the prizes that is available to all the other athletes is the prize of humility—rejoicing for those who beat you out. But in order for that lesson to be learned well (which is challenging and difficult enough), it is important that the people in charge not make it an impossible situation. You want the person who beat you out to do so on the merits, and not because he was the coach’s nephew, and the superintendent’s grandson, and they waived the academic eligibility requirements for him, and only for him. Unequal weights and measures are actually a grotesque sin. “Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the Lord.” (Prov. 20:10). Objective measurements protect the players from the coach’s crochets. And from politics. And from egalitarianism.
Christ Before Us
Everyone involved in sports has a real opportunity to learn one of two things. In the very nature of the case, they are given the opportunity to learn humility, or to learn industry.
This is because the Bell Curve is a thing. Half of all players are below average. Not only that, but half of all coaches are below average. Half of all trainers are below average. Half of all athletic directors are below average. Now if they are giving it all they’ve got, then this gives them the opportunity to learn humility. Others are just better.
“For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.”Romans 12:3 (KJV)
And if they are below average because they are lazy and unmotivated, it gives them the opportunity to learn industry. Time to step it up.
And all of it is informed by the imitation of Christ. We are Christians, after all.
“Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” ().Phil. 2:4–5 (KJV)