I was at the Rec Center watching the 4th, 5th and 6th grade girls play basketball this week and I was impressed! These girls are scrappy! They play hard. They run down hard on defense, they often steal the ball with their hard-pressing, relentless harassment of their opponents, and they scramble back to their own basket with reckless abandon! And while they don’t have the best shooting percentage yet (this will come with experience and practice) they just won’t give up! They just keep putting the ball up, and eventually it goes in!
I couldn’t help thinking this morning that if we all played life like these girls played basketball, we’d be in pretty good shape! Pressing hard on defending the things we believe (playing good, fair defense); never giving up on making an impression with our winsome attitude and words (playing solid offense); and not being overly distraught about our shortcomings and getting back up when we’ve fallen down (admitting when we’ve committed a foul).
The apostle Paul has some pretty good advice when it comes to excellence. Paul was living in a time when the church was in its infancy. The church was made up of two groups of people: the Jews, who had descended from Abraham and who had learned to follow the laws of God; and the Gentiles, those people who lived in the surrounding countryside and neighboring lands but who were not a part of the Jewish community. Now these two groups had come together under the banner of Jesus Christ, but there were some kinks to work out. Should these new Jesus-following males undergo circumcision (a Jewish rite that had marked a person as a member of God’s family)? Should there be food prohibitions for these new Jesus followers, like the Jews had obeyed?
The great advice—the God-inspired advice—from Paul was this: “Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Cor. 10:31) It doesn’t matter as much what external traditions we have followed—things that are a part of our own little cultures. It doesn’t matter if we sprinkle or pour or dip when we baptize. It doesn’t matter so much what we eat or drink. What truly matters is that we play the game well and play it fairly.
Just like those 4th, 5th, and 6th grade girls, we play well when we do it with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. We may drop the ball a few times. We will not always make a basket. But we are living life excellently when we “do it all for the glory of God.”
Ron Olson serves as pastor of Bowman United Methodist Church.
