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London 2012 is now history.
Although I didn’t have the time and opportunity to watch as much of the
Summer Olympics as I would have liked, I thoroughly enjoyed the events that I
was able to view. One of the special
things about watching the Olympics is having my horizons broadened, to become
more familiar with previously unfamiliar events. I will confess that I didn’t even know that
team handball exists!
There are many themes that run through the Olympic Games:
talent, dedication, support, etc. One
theme that particularly struck me this time was the mental component of
athletic competition. While the world
focused on the physical performance, the competitors needed to focus on the
mental foundation of their sport. This
was perhaps most apparent in the gymnastics and diving competitions in which
nerves play an obvious role, but mental preparation was surely a significant
piece of every event.
It has occurred to me that we, as individual Christians and
as the body of Christ, can learn from this.
It is easy to focus on performance in a culture that uses productivity
to measure a person’s value. Even in the
church, the spirituality of believers is often evaluated based on church
attendance, committee work, and “busy-ness” for Christ. And yet the Apostle Paul, in one of the most
famous passages of Scripture, reminds his Corinthian readers that all the
“doing” in the Christian world is nothing without love.
This brings us back to the Olympics. In order to perform as well as possible, each
athlete needed to combine mental focus with physical performance and to
maintain the mental focus even while competing.
If we are to glorify God in our Christian activity, we need to ground
that activity upon a spiritual focus and maintain that spiritual focus as we
serve. As bond-servants of Christ, our
eyes are to be on our Master and our hearts are to be set on doing His
bidding. If we do not follow the lead of
the Holy Spirit, all of our doing, our activity, our performance, will come up
empty; we will not glorify God.
I know that this is “Christianity 101,” so to speak. I do not wish to insult anyone’s intelligence
or commitment. I have experienced in my
own life, however, the temptation to use “auto pilot” at times, to perform without
maintaining a dependence on Christ. Jesus
likened our need to depend on Him to a vine and its branches. In John 15, Christ tells His disciples that
He is the vine and that they are the branches.
The only way to bear fruit is by maintaining the life-flow of that
connection. Without the vine, the
branches wither; without Christ, His disciples can bear no fruit.
When an Olympic athlete loses focus, he or she loses a
chance at a medal. Christians have
infinitely more at stake. God’s desire
for His children is to produce fruit that has eternal value. May we encourage one another to maintain and
deepen our mindset of complete, continual, and utter dependence on our Lord and
Master, Jesus Christ.
