One Body, Many Parts, One Purpose

Praise God for the awesome weekend! God really blessed me with a better picture of what the Church really is this weekend. I'm not talking about individual churches like CFC, CCUC or CStone but rather the Church with a capital C, the body of believers.

I have played in a church sponsored basketball tournament every year since sixth grade. It started off as something fun. Go to church, play basketball with a bunch of your friends, and hopefully win so you have some bragging rights over everyone else until the next year's tournament. With age, the competition grew tougher and tougher and the wins became more sparse. Even though I'm not a serious baller, I HATE losing. Once I got to high school, I prayed before every tournament that I would carry myself in a manner that would glorify God. And every year since then, I left the tournament disappointed. The weight of missed shots, sloppy passes, isolationist offensive strategies, and lost games placed a large burden on my heart. In the heat of the moment, playing in this tournament ceased to be about God and became about performance on the court and the final box score. That was the case until this past weekend.

I came into this tournament with very much the same attitude that I had in past years. I changed teams from last year because my friends lured me in by inflating my head and ego with the idea of winning the ever so elusive championship. This team was not like most. They played with intensity on offense and defense. They worked offensive possessions by moving the ball around. They had a bunch of six-footers on the roster to play in an Asian tournament where your average dude is 5'5. How could I pass that up?

From tip-off to the final buzzer, the first game was a disaster. The other team won the tip off and score on a floater 10 seconds into the game. Our defensive rotation, or lack there of, led to lots of threes which hit nothing but net. Attitudes flared and one of our opponents provoked us with both his mouth and his antics. We complained about bad calls and had less than encouraging words for our fellow teammates. Long story short, we lost both the game and the spiritual battle. For a team that was supposed to win it all, this was not what we envisioned.

After the game, we sat down and talked. We didn't talk about basketball or the missed plays but about the reason why we're playing. As we were talking, we all looked at our jerseys which read "Promote Christ" across the chest. We failed to live up to our name. Thank God for second chances. That game was a wake up call, not to play harder, but to be representatives of Christ on the basketball court.

The games after that, win or loss, were spectacular. We weren't two different teams trying to beat each other. We were different people with different backgrounds playing for one purpose and one purpose only: to serve the God we love and make him known through our actions. Through the postgame prayers, this was so evident as our teams gathered into a huddle and lifted up praise to God.

It's awesome to see stuff like this, seriously. You take two people with nothing in common, different languages, schools, churches, hobbies, talents, and all that other fun stuff and you see that none of that matters. What brings us together is something so simple and yet so very profound at the same time. We are children of God of whom He loves deeply. It's His love that unifies us. It's that love that holds us together even though we have nothing else in common. It's that very love that gives us the same purpose and allows us to relate to brothers and sisters of whom we've never met before. The message is all the same. While we were still sinners, God reached out to us. In our depravity, He took the necessary steps for us to be redeemed even though we did things contrary to His desires. In our sin, He continues to love us and bear with us in patience.

Church isn't just a building. It isn't the place that you go to fellowship. It isn't just the people you see every Sunday and sit next to during service and sing songs with. The Church is the body of believers from all backgrounds and ways of life coming together to know our Savior and to make Him known.

As I sit here and reflect upon the weekend, it isn't the basketball plays that stand out. It isn't our 3-2 record with a third place trophy either. What stands out the most is the opportunity that God blessed our church with to fellowship with dozens of other churches from the Midwest unified under one roof to glorify our God. What a blessed weekend.