Adventures in Syberspace

God and Stevie Johnson

 

On Sunday November 28th, the Buffalo Bills (not very good at football) forced overtime in a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers (generally pretty good at football). Overtime is sudden death-- first one to score wins. At one point, the Bills QB threw a perfect (it literally could not have been thrown any better) deep ball to wide receiver Stevie Johnson (above), right in his arms in the endzone...and Stevie dropped it (video here, if you can bear to watch it). The game would have been over, the home crowd would have gone nuts, and Stevie would have been a hero. Instead, the Steelers went on to win with a field goal, and Stevie felt terrible. He also felt angry at God. Here's what he said on his Twitter account immediately after the game:

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO...

His response got a lot of media attention and his later tweets had him retracting his statement, saying he wasn't blaming God at all. But let's be real. That's precisely what he was doing.

It is very interesting to me that Johnson did this, because while you often hear players praising God after a victory, you don't ever hear them blaming God after a loss. Clearly, he was tweeting out of his frustration and anger, and wasn't thinking as clearly as he would have liked. And who hasn't felt this way?

I find this to be such a teaching moment. Here's why. Those of us who espouse faith can sometimes fall into this (usually unspoken) deal we think we've made with God that goes something like this. I agree to praise you, give you glory, and generally be a good person most of the time. And YOU agree to not allow bad or even unfortunate things to happen to me. As long as life goes along "as it should," this arrangement works out really nicely. And it's easy to praise God, because...what's not to like? When things don't go the way we want them to, out come the fists, shaking skyward: "I thought we had a deal!"

Nope, no deal. Here's the deal. We praise God in all circumstances, and trust that even when things don't go the way we'd like, God's purposes are at work. Stevie Johnson is a young man and so I think he'll learn as he gets older that life doesn't always go the way you hope it will. (He really could have learned this lesson had he spent any amount of time with Buffalo Bills fans, but oh well). The message of the Bible is that life is hard, but God is good.

Keep being honest, Stevie. That's what the psalmists teach us. But at the end of the day, God is God and He will work all things together for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28), many times in ways we don't understand.

Quote of the Day: October 28th

"If the temperature of a sick man rises and falls daily the doctor regards him as seriously ill. This is the case with religion. Not spiritual chills and fevers, but an abiding faith which gently presses the will toward Christ all day, is a sign of a healthy religion."  ~Frank Laubach, 1953

Deep Thought for the Day

I was doing some Tozer-quote-searching, and stumbled on this quote that cut me to the core, published in Man: The Dwelling Place of God. (A.W. Tozer was a Chicago pastor for 30 years who died in 1963).

Almost every day of my life I am praying that "a jubilant pining and longing for God" might come back on the evangelical churches. We don't need to have our doctrine straightened out; we're as orthodox as the Pharisees of old. But this longing for God that brings spiritual torrents and whirlwinds of seeking and self-denial-- this is almost gone from our midst.

(Hard to believe that his perspective when he wrote this was that this was "almost gone" from his midst. Then he says this):

I believe that God wants us to long for Him with the longing that will become lovesickness, that will become a wound to our spirits, to keep us always moving toward Him, always finding and always seeking, always having and always desiring. So the earth becomes less and less valuable and heaven gets closer as we move into God and up into Christ. Dare we bow our hearts now and say, "Father, I've been an irresponsible, childish kind of Christian-- more concerned with being happy than with being holy. O God, give me three wounds. Wound me with a sense of my own sinfulness. Wound me with compassion for the world, and wound me with love of Thee that will keep me always pursuing and always exploring and always seeking and always finding."

I'm not sure why this stirred me the way it did. But it did. Incidentally, this song that I listened to today stirred me similarly.

In unrelated news, I'm preaching this Sunday at Christ Church on "Tough Questions: Why does God allow suffering?"

Be killing sin

I found this quote in an article in Christianity Today last month and it has been swirling in my brain ever since: "Be killing sin, or it will be killing you."  -John Owen, 17th Century Theologian.

There are times when the Christian life is painted as being only about the fight against sin, and about coming to terms with our own selfishness. The equal and opposite error is to think lightly of our sin. You can argue for hours about whether the sin in our lives is a result of the devil or our own flesh or you could blame God who made us this way, but the reality is that sin desires to control us, and we can't let it. If we don't actively resist the urges in our own hearts to turn away from God and towards sin, we will be losing, and dying. We can't be indifferent or neutral towards it.

As we begin the season of Lent today, when we traditionally take time to examine our lives and the sin in it, may you find the strength, by God's grace, to kill, or be killed.