Most people think that serving is the same as service, but I believe that there is a huge difference between the two. Service is something we pay for or something we might come to expect at a restaurant or at a gas station. But serving goes deeper. Serving deals with heart issues, involves sacrifice and meets real needs. We don’t pay for serving, though it can be costly.

Christ did not come to give good service. He came to serve. Athletes are not required to give good service to their teammates, but Christian athletes are called to serve. Coaches who follow the greatest servant who ever lived also have the privilege of serving their teams, not just providing a service to them.

What’s worse: getting beat by your opponent because they’re better than you or getting beat because of strife within your own team? The worst teams I’ve been part of as an athlete or coach were those with internal problems. Preparing for an opponent is tough enough, but trying to “right the ship” from within is a different animal. In the Old Testament, as Nehemiah and his crew rebuilt the wall, they were oppressed by outside forces. They struggled financially and started to fight, creating dissension. Finally Nehemiah had enough. He put his foot down and held an “all team” meeting. I’m sure he did most of the talking.

It was August 1984, at Alamo Heights High School. I burst into the middle of the locker room and yelled, “Who are we going to beat this week?” The room erupted and players and coaches celebrated like we had just won the championship, before we had even played a game! During that excitement my life changed direction. Louie Reiniger, one of our players, got in my face and yelled, “Coach, will you come to FCA tonight?”

Paul uses the phrase “one thing” to bring focus and clarity to his calling. This phrase appears five times in the New International Version of the Bible—once in the verse above in Philippians and four times in the Gospels:

In Luke 10:42, Jesus says to Martha, “only one thing is needed.”
In both Luke 18:22 and Mark 10:21, Jesus tells the rich man that he still lacks “one thing.”
In John 9:25, the blind man who was healed by Christ tells the Pharisees, “One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”

Ready. What does it take to be ready for your season to start? It takes physical training—a lot of it. But it also takes an extensive amount of mental training. What will you do when you step up to the line or into the box? The mental part seems trivial sometimes because we mostly like to trust what we can see and feel, which is the physical part of the game. But when it comes down to the wire and the game is on the line, it’s the battle 6 inches between our ears that either says, “I’m done; I can’t,”, or “I’m strong enough. Bring it on.”

When you’re in the midst of a situation that seems hopeless in sports or in life, how do you respond to your doubts and frustrations? As Christians, we all tend to think that doubt should never come to our minds. I mean, we believe that God can do anything, right?

First, let’s all step back and realize that we will constantly deal with the doubts in our human nature, but it’s how we respond to them that makes the difference. In Luke 5:8, Simon Peter responds to Jesus with a tone of frustration and doubt. Jesus had asked him to let down his fishing nets into deep water, but Peter responded by stating they’d already worked hard all night and hadn’t caught a thing.