I am the youngest of three sons of a man who made his living playing three different sports professionally. Think about that for just a moment. As a young man my Dad boxed professionally (albeit briefly). A few years later he was catching for a minor league baseball team on the West Coast. A couple of years before I was born, he got his PGA card and became a club professional in West Texas and Southern New Mexico. For about 5 years he got out of the golf business and opened (wait for it…) a sporting goods store (what else?!). If I drooled long enough over a first baseman’s mitt, a football or a basketball it would somehow mysteriously appear for my birthday or it would wind up wrapped under the tree on Christmas morning! During my school years I played all the major sports: football, basketball, baseball, golf, swimming, track, etc. My oldest brother was signed by the Cleveland Indians as a left-handed pitcher, but he skipped training camp to get married and that ended his baseball career! I never played any sport well enough to become professional. I guess God had other plans for me…namely seminary at the age of 35 and a three-decade stint as a church pastor. As I was looking over a sample of my old sermons, I was struck by how often I used athletic metaphors to make my theological points over the years. That’s probably not so surprising once you consider my years growing up and my family history.
I’m reasonably sure Jesus never kicked a soccer ball, swam a 50-meter butterfly, did a 2 1/2 forward dive in the pike position off a 3-meter board or chipped in from a greenside bunker (although I AM pretty sure he was very familiar with sand…minus the sand wedge itself, of course). But I couldn’t help noticing how so much of what Jesus said, taught and did was easily relatable to the average athlete. Hence, the eventual birth of an athletically themed devotional book: Jesus For Jocks. I have drawn from famous athletes, teams and even my own athletic endeavors and tried to make them relevant to the words, actions, themes and general examples of Jesus. As you read I hope you will, by relating to the athletic nature of each devotional, perhaps find new meaning, motivation, and maybe even a smidgen of humor and the joyful life of discipleship for which God designed you. Jesus probably would have made a great “jock” in that he was hyper-focused, motivated to the max and single-minded in attaining the goal that had been set for him. (It didn’t hurt that he had the greatest coach ever…. God!) He would have made a great spokesman for Nike. How often did his actions or his teachings convey Nike’s slogan. He may have been saying it in Hebrew or Aramaic, but his point was “Just DO it!