Beyond March Madness: The Goodness of Our Physical Lives

I remember talking with a retired pastor about how he was spending his days. He was enjoying a continued ministry life in various volunteer capacities. He was also enjoying playing a lot of golf.

I asked him, “What are you looking forward to when you pass on from this life?”

Like most of us, he talked about the joy of being in the presence of God and worshiping him forever.

I then asked him, “Are you looking forward to playing golf then?”

His face scrunched up and he responded, “Well, we won’t golf in heaven!”

I said, “Of course not; we can’t golf when we don’t have bodies. But after we go to heaven, there will be that wonderful time when our physical bodies will be resurrected and we will live forever with God in the new heavens and new earth, right? Aren’t you looking forward to golfing then?”

This struck him as somehow sacrilegious. He believed that golf is not a godly endeavor. It is a leisure activity, not something worthy of doing in the eternal presence of God.

Then I asked him, “If it is not worthy of doing then, then what makes it worthy of doing now? Aren’t you sinning if you are wasting your time out on the golf course?”

Living double lives

This conversation reveals how many of us are living double lives without even knowing it. We believe that what really matters are the “things above,” not earthly things (Colossians 3). We think that the physical world is the enemy of righteousness, and therefore we need to live more contemplative and ascetic lives. We are supposed to long for a future rid of this physical body of sin, a life of pure spiritual, nonmaterial existence.

But then we golf and watch the NCAA basketball tournament. We enjoy a good cup of coffee or a great meal at a fancy restaurant. We play games and goof around.

And if we're pushed about it, we might feel guilty about these physical activities.

“This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin' through”

We've been trained to think this way. We sing the old Southern Gospel song,

“This world is not my home / I'm just a-passin' through”

or the more recent worship song,

“All I know is I'm not home yet / This is not where I belong /

Take this world and give me Jesus / This is not where I belong.”

Since the Bible often states that the “world” is evil, we assume that this must mean that this physical earth must be evil. This is not our home – we must be more suited for heaven. It is an all too common mistake in North American Christianity, and I don’t blame the writers of these songs for making it.

But it is not actually Christian. It is pagan; it is from Greek philosophy. Plato taught that there is a dualism between the soul and the body. He made a distinction between unchanging ideals (what he called “forms”) and the world of the unstable and changing (what he called “matter”). According to Plato, Heaven is the true and ultimate reality, and the earth is a derived reality and full of evil. Ever since Plato, our thinking about our physical existence has been messed up.

According to Platonic logic, our highest endeavor is to deny our creaturely existence in the world and strive for a heavenly existence. This teaching was the basis of the Gnostic heresy in the early church. The Gnostics denied the gospel story that Jesus was God incarnate and died on the cross; they could not believe that God would “come into the world” “in the flesh,” since the world and material flesh are evil. Instead, they offered a “secret knowledge” for the way to heaven. This was in keeping with the pagan Greek philosophy of Plato; he taught that the contemplative life is the highest thing a human can do and physical work and play were seen as menial and degrading.

Sadly, this Platonic thinking seeps into our interpretation of the Bible. We think that since the material world is evil, then we interpret anything "heavenly" or "spiritual" as being nonmaterial and good; anything to do with the "world" as being material and evil.

What's the matter with matter?

But when we look at a passage like Colossians 3, we should understand what is actually being said. Sure, we are commanded, “set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.”

But then we are told what this means: We are to "put to death” things like sexual immorality and greed, we are to rid ourselves of anger, malice, slander, and filthy language from our lips. Notice that it is not the lips that are evil, but what we do with them.

It is not our physical bodies that are evil, but what we do with them.

The “things above,” according to Colossians 3:12-14, are things like compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness and love. These things are not categorized as "spiritual" because they are nonmaterial; they are "spiritual" because they come from God - but we actually do these good things with and in our physical lives.

Jesus was an actual human being who walked on the face of this planet. Yes, Jesus certainly is God. But we need to remember that he is God incarnate. And after he died, he was resurrected. He is the "firstfruits" (1 Corinthians 15:20-23) that guarantees our resurrection. A guarantee that death will be defeated and we will dwell forever in a good physical existence with God.

And if Jesus is God become flesh, and if Jesus was resurrected, this should inform us of what God thinks of our physical bodies. And this should inform us of what he wants us to do to celebrate the goodness of our physical bodies.

Does God want us to glorify him by playing sports? Yes.

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Sports for the Glory of God: Overview of Articles in this Series

In this series, “Sports for the Glory of God,” we’ve looked at sports from various angles. Below is a roundup of what is on offer. In addition, our High Calling Blog Community has provided some great posts; for a summary of those posts, go to "Community Post Summary: Can Sports Have a High Calling?" by The High Calling's David Rupert.

Sean Purcell gave us a framework for understanding and engaging with the institutions that are necessary for our joy of sports.

Philip Schiavoni, in "Are We Allowed to Enjoy Sports?" tells the story of how, as a college outreach minister, he felt guilty for enjoying sports so much until he realized “I don’t have to live a dual life: the spiritual life, and also my sports life. God has told us that the ‘fruit of His spirit is…joy…’ (Galatians 5:22).”

Stephen Chen, pastor of the church that the Houston Rockets’ Jeremy Linn attends (Linn was made famous by the “Linsanity” of the New York fans when he played for the Knicks), talks about what it’s like to have a famous basketball player in the congregation.

Being both a well-respected sports columnist as well as a writer on issues of faith, Terry Pluto is often asked "What athletes do you know who have real faith in their lives?" In his “Confessions of a Sports Columnist,” he admits that what he is really impressed with are the Christians in the sports world that don’t grab the headlines but who model Christ in little ways, through their daily struggles, and in their impact in the lives of others.

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In “When Sports Become a God,” Jonathan McKee offers three lessons to help navigate sports and activities as a parent. He writes,

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying sports are from the devil and you need to ‘choose this day who you will follow,’ as if there is only one or the other. But maybe parents need to think ahead when it comes to signing up for sports and decide exactly how committed to a team or activity they are really ready to be.”

In a 16 page paper called “Created to Play: Thoughts on Play, Sport, and the Christian Life,” K. Erik Thoennes, Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Talbot School of Theology/Biola University, offers a deeply thought-out understanding of play and competition that is thoroughly biblical. He writes,

“I want us to think about the necessity of keeping play in sport for the glory of God. The main question I want to answer is ‘how does play help us to fulfill our intended, created purpose in this beautiful yet tragically fallen world?’”

At the website, everyathlete.org from Athletes in Action, college athletes share their stories through short videos about the adversity they experience within and outside of their sport, and how God has ultimately delivered them from these struggles.

C.J. Mahaney preached an insightful sermon at Covenant Life Church that later was expanded and turned into his 2010 book, Don’t Waste Your Sports (Crossway). Listen to the sermon here.

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Sports for the Glory of God

If God has created humanity with bodies that are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” we need to develop a Christian way of living that incorporates play and recreation, leisure and competition, sports and athletics. Faith in the Creator and Redeemer should lead us to identify the way sports and athletics are meant to be, discern when something is wrong with sports in our broken and sinful culture, and imagine ways to be instruments of redemption in this sphere. In this series, Sports for the Glory of God, we engage with stories of people who are working through these issues on a daily basis.

Image by SD Dirk. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.