Mark 12:30
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
I live near the University of Oklahoma. You may not know this, but they have a very good football team. The fans fascinate me. Most border on being fanatics! There is something amazing about packing 81,000 fans into a stadium and hearing them cheer as the team takes the field. There is typical university paraphernalia: sweatshirts, hats, and little flags that people put in their car windows. And this is not just during the football season, but year around! People are so engrossed by football that this past weekend over 10,000 packed the stadium for a spring practice game, even though the team wasn’t playing anyone else! Loyalty to the University is huge. I even know families that wouldn’t think of allowing their kids to go to any other school.
Often, when I am driving around town, I listen to the local sports show. I am amazed at the statistics and facts that people know about the team. I have trouble remembering my cell phone number, but these people can tell you how many yards a running back ran in 1977!
There is a good chance that in your town there is similar loyalty to some team.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if people loved Jesus the way they love sports teams? Wouldn’t it be cool if people knew the Bible like they know the hitting average of the top baseball players? Wouldn’t it be neat if people felt church were as important as the Saturday sports show lineups?
Wow! That is so true. It kind of makes me sick. The sad thing is that the world sees our devotion to sports, (or other activities) and compares them to our devotion to our God in order to see if our God is worth worshiping. What they discover is that we don’t worship God as much as we worship gods, football, baseball, tv shows, movies, video games… So why would they want to worship Him. After all, we don’t believe He is worth our worship.