“Unceasing praise, songs of passion, a desire for triumph, unity of spirit, an object of worship, lament over wrongdoing, flawless attendance, and all in a beautiful sanctuary.” That may sound like a church service, but it was actually the experience I had years ago at a professional soccer game in England. In spite of the setting, it was encouraging to hear men sing with passion, a passion often lacking in congregational worship.

In this way, professional sports reveal that we were made to worship, celebrate glory, and admire excellence. We are worshiping beings. It is not whether we worship but what or whom we worship. And many today worship sports in some form or another. I have spent enough time in various sporting contexts (as an athlete, fan, and coach) to understand that both men and women, boys and girls, can be very passionate about sports and the teams they support. Yet particularly men and boys seem to be especially given to idolatry in supporting their favorite sports teams.

Worldly Passions

Enjoying sports and supporting one’s favorite team is not necessarily a problem (like I said, I’ve been a player, fan, and coach). Like anything in the Christian life, though, we must learn to manage God’s gifts wisely. However, sometimes we misuse God’s gifts, and we become worldly in our thoughts and deeds. John tells us to “not love the world or the things in the world” (1 John 2:15). This doesn’t mean we can’t love a beautiful lake or a nice meal, but it does mean we need to be careful that we don’t love created things in place of the Creator. In the world are “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 John 2:16). Professional sports teams offer ample opportunities for worldly desires to come to full expression.

God created us with good desires, such as the desire to love or give vent to our joy. However, our sinful nature easily corrupts these powerful desires so that we love things we should not love, or we love things in ways or degrees that do not fit their God-given purposes. The Greeks used to speak of four passions, and Augustine and others saw these as helpful tools to analyze and understand human behavior: (1) desire, which is the good wished for; (2) joy, which is the good obtained; (3) fear, which involves an evil to be avoided and the good threatened; and (4) grief, which is when an evil happens and the good is lost. These passions run rampant among many sports fans, and where strong passions roam wild, one must proceed with great care.

Passionate sports fans desire the joy of victory, but in many cases, the fear of defeat and the accompanying grief can reveal how disordered our passions can be. I have heard it said by many players, coaches, and fans that they hate losing more than they love winning. For many, sports is the clearest window into their soul, where they show more joy or grief than in any other realm of life!

Enslaved Fans

In diagnosing whether sports have an unhealthy grip on our lives, we should ask ourselves some questions. For example, is our love for sports drawing us away from corporate worship on the Lord’s Day or consistently distracting us during worship? As in all things, can we enjoy God and give thanks to him in and through our delight in sports (Ephesians 5:20)? Or are we merely indulging self-focused desires? Remember, whatever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23). Even in the realm of enjoying sports, we must do so by faith, which also guards our passions as we seek enjoyment as God’s people enjoying his various gifts. We are to do all things to the glory of God, including support sports teams (1 Corinthians 10:31).

When we take pleasure in sports, are we causing damage to anyone — including ourselves? Some men can become so inordinately distressed or angry when their team loses that they take their anger out on others, even their own family members. This is a violation of the sixth commandment.

We could also ask, are we given to the pleasure of supporting a team, or is the pleasure given to us? In other words, we should not allow the failures of a sports team to dominate how we feel days after a loss. When we are given to something, it controls us rather than us controlling it. The art of enjoying sports is to remember that we can learn to be content whatever the circumstances (Philippians 4:11).

I say this as an extremely competitive person (who hates losing more than I enjoy winning), but I need to continually see the success of the teams that I support and coach in both a temporal and eternal perspective. Even temporally, isn’t it amazing how we can get so riled up over sweaty men with whom we have no relationship except that they happen to wear a different color jersey than another group of sweaty men? And none of these sweaty men care in the least about my feelings. Plus, even when your team wins the championship, the joy is short-lived: on to next season where we will worry about the coaching or the quality of newly acquired players.

Greater Glory

The solution to our worldliness and idolatry in relation to sports cannot be found in merely showing the ultimate emptiness of becoming an enslaved fan. As Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) famously argues in “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” you cannot destroy love for the world merely by showing its emptiness. Love of the world — and specifically an inordinate, enslaving love for sports — can only be expelled by a new love and affection for God from God.

Love for God the Father, as his children (1 John 3:1), is a delight that frees us from slavery to the glory of sports. So, unless we have a love for God based upon all that he has done and will do for us, we will find ourselves increasingly addicted to worldly pursuits like sports.

In addition, John also connects the beatific vision — seeing Jesus face to face — to our love for God. As God’s children, we patiently await what we shall one day become: fully conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29). When Jesus appears, “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Both our love for the Father and our hope of being made like Christ when we see him give us a passion to make worship of God, not sports, central to our daily living as God’s people.

And if supporters of sports teams can gather week after week to sit on cold metal, loudly chanting and singing to spur their team to victory, should we not also be able to gather each Lord’s Day with our brothers and sisters to celebrate, all the more enthusiastically, the victories of our King and his eternal glories?

Midway through my surgical training, the suffering I witnessed on a single night in the ER pitched my faith into turmoil.

I was a nominal Christian, with an understanding of God grounded in sentimentality rather than biblical truth. When paramedics rushed three dying young men through the sliding doors of my emergency department, my meager faith unraveled. One teenager had been bludgeoned with a baseball bat while his 4-year-old son watched; another had been stabbed in the chest; a third, shot in the head. In each case, I fought and failed to save their lives, and then watched helplessly as their families crumpled to the ground in grief.

I had dealt with tragedy in the ER before, but not to this extreme. After work the next morning, I felt hollowed, as if a vital part of me had been torn out from its roots. Although my body ached for rest, I drove two hours from home in desperation to connect with something good and true. I stopped at a bridge spanning the Connecticut River and tried to pray, but through closed lids I saw only the blood staining my gloves and three boys’ eyes fixed in their final gaze. I could still hear their mothers’ screams as they collapsed to the floor in anguish.

As I stood on that bridge, I wrestled with grief. I wrestled with guilt. And over and over again, the question troubled me: How could a good God allow this? How could he allow people to look at one another, to perceive no worth, and then to devastate life with a trigger pull or a swing of a bat?

After years of stumbling through life without Scripture, the only answer I could discern that day was silence. I decided that God must not exist, and as I trudged back to my car, I abandoned my faith on that bridge.

Yet God did not abandon me. Within a year, he would use my pain — the very calamity that had cracked my brittle faith in two — to draw me to himself.

Age-Old Question

While few people glimpse the tragedies and triumphs of the trauma bay, questions about suffering and faith have troubled humankind for ages. For centuries, academics and laypeople alike have wrestled with “the problem of pain,” as C. S. Lewis phrases it. The problem, in brief, is how a benevolent and all-powerful God could permit pain and suffering in the world he created.

Lewis himself penned an entire book to address the question. In The Problem of Pain, he argues that pain and suffering are in fact compatible with, rather than contradictory to, the God of the Bible. His commentary includes a famous quote that struck me like a thunderclap in the wake of my own faith struggles, and that continues to guide and refine me whenever hurts break into my days: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (91).

Problem of Pain

Lewis himself was no stranger to suffering, having lost his parents at an early age and fought in World War I. And then later, he would grieve his wife’s untimely death. In The Problem of Pain, such personal experiences nuance his writing and combine with his deftness as an apologist to offer a thorough, careful exposition of suffering through a Christian lens.

In keeping with his tradition of intellectual rigor, Lewis offers a particularly strong argument for suffering as a necessary consequence of the fall. “Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil,” he writes. “Every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt” (90). Pain and suffering are the penalties for our corruption of the created order (Genesis 3:16–19; Romans 6:23), and they signify our rebellion against a good and holy God.

And yet, Lewis does not oversimplify the place of suffering in the Christian life. Instead, he acknowledges that God can and does work through pain for the ultimate good of his people (Romans 8:28). Given our depravity, Lewis argues, God’s love for us must necessarily be corrective and remedial (Hebrews 12:6). With hearts like ours, to give us what we always desire would be to ignore the reproof necessary to shape us into the image of Christ.

Smashing Our Idols

Left to ourselves, Lewis notes, we are content to cleave to our sins and to make idols of what we fashion with our own hands (Romans 1:25). “The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it,” he writes (90). Through the “megaphone” of pain, therefore, God prods us to acknowledge our need for him, for our good and for his glory:

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. . . . What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? (94)

“Pain rouses us from spiritual deafness, convicts us of sin, and reminds us that his grace is sufficient.”

According to Lewis, when pain crashes into our lives, it prompts us to seek happiness in God rather than in our own self-sufficiency. It rouses us from spiritual deafness, convicts us of sin, and reminds us that his grace is sufficient and his power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Pain, then, is entirely compatible with a good, powerful, and loving God, and in fact speaks of his love for us — a love that is neither sentimental nor flimsy, but robust and self-sacrificial. A love so radical that he gave his only Son for us (John 3:16).

Rousing a Deaf World

Although Lewis builds his analysis with reason and logic, his assertions have biblical precedent. As Paul explains in Romans 1:18–23, evidence of God’s existence surrounds us in abundance, but we shield our eyes from his glory. We jealously cultivate the fallacy that we are entirely in command and self-sufficient, that we have no need for him, and that we owe him no debt. We do what is right in our own eyes rather than seek God’s will and righteousness (Proverbs 14:12; 21:2).

Meanwhile, God knows what we need (Matthew 6:8) and will work through our pain to steer us back to his guiding light and love. The Bible is replete with such examples. Jonah, the wayward prophet, ran from God and didn’t pray until he was locked within the darkness of the fish’s belly (Jonah 2:1–9). Jesus waited until Lazarus had died before journeying to his home, so he could reveal to the mourning throng that he was the Christ (John 11:15, 40–42). Samson repented of his transgressions and defeated the Philistines only after God had stripped away his strength and his pride (Judges 16:28–29). Throughout the Bible, God works through suffering to awaken his people to their need for him.

“Throughout the Bible, God works through suffering to awaken his people to their need for him.”

After I walked away from God, I had no claim to hope. I discerned no meaning, no glint of mercy lining the dark moments. I saw only the horror of life, the pervasive suffering.

And in that darkness, God roused me to look to him.

Rousing Me to Faith

For a year after that night in the ER, living felt a lot like dying. Without God infusing the world with purpose, despair tarnished everything. In this ghostly state, existing but not thriving, I ruminated daily about taking my own life.

Then, while I was working in the ICU, I witnessed a patient’s improbable recovery in response to prayer. Had darkness not enveloped me, I might have dismissed the event as an outlier, but my time in the wilderness had primed my soul for God. My journey through pain had ignited in me a thirst for him and for his word.

One evening, I trudged home bedraggled and exhausted after a trauma call, and for the first time I cracked open a Bible, its cover sheathed in a layer of dust. I read Romans 5:1–9, burst into tears, and reread verses 3–5 as sunset spilled over the horizon:

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Not only are pain and a loving God compatible, but on this side of the cross, we can rejoice in our sufferings. God works through our pain to refine us, to strengthen us, and to instill us with hope. He works through it to draw us to himself, to rouse us as with a megaphone, and to convict us of our desperate need for him. He works through our suffering because — like a father guiding his children toward the one right path — he loves us (Matthew 7:13–14).

God used my time in the darkness to rouse me to his grace. He used it to open my eyes to the truth that his own Son also suffered. Our Savior knows our agonies (Hebrews 4:15). He bore the Father’s wrath for us. And when we are downtrodden, weary, and crushed beneath the suffering of this world, he is gentle and lowly and offers a light burden for our souls (Matthew 11:28–30).

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15718199/will-there-be-a-rapture