Competition, Feb 13 devotional

Hello
Tonight, I’d like to talk with you guys about competition. I know that in a league like this, a recreational league that’s “just for fun,” the word competition seems like a bad word, a “no-no,” but is it our duty as a Christian to compete in everything that we do? First off, let’s clear some misunderstandings about the word, “competition”

Ok, could you guys please tell me what you think to compete means?

According to Webster’s New World dictionary, the definition of compete, which is the actual context that I want to explore, is to be in rivalry, contend, vie. I actually think that Sir Webster took this word out of context and applied his own personal meaning to that word in the dictionary. So I went to this website, wordinfo.info, which tells me the meaning of the greek and latin roots, and the part, com is latin for together, together with, or with. And the part pet, is latin for to aim at, aim for, go toward, seek, seek out, ask, request, strive after.

Now, I want to focus on two of the meanings that I mentioned above… together and strive after.

Well, first, the together part, is pretty obvious, so I’m going to go over the “strive after” part. I looked up the word strive in the webster’s dictionary, even though I don’t agree with it’s definition of compete, and the definition hit it right on… the word strive means to make great efforts, try very hard.

To try very hard, and then you put the entire word together… it means to try very hard, together. Two weeks ago, Deb had this awesome devotional about the playing field being our place of worship. This kind of expands on her devotional because would God like it if we didn’t give Him our all? If we just trudged through our day, just going through the motions, are we giving God our all?

The way that I see it is we are striving together, competing with each other, to improve each other. You can’t get faster in running a mile if you just run by yourself, as opposed to running with a partner who motivates and encourages you. I know I can’t run further and faster if I don’t have someone helping me, and teaching me how to run lighter on my feet so that I can run further and faster. You can’t learn how to wrestle better if you just shadow wrestle by yourself, because your opponent doesn’t just stand there and take whatever moves you use on him/her, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, which is one of newton’s laws for those who don’t know. You can’t learn how to tackle someone by tackling a motionless dummy that just flops down when you jump on the dummy… You have to learn how to tackle someone who will try and jump over you, jukestep you, or spin you off. But when you compete with someone else, it’s like Proverbs 27:17, As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

By ourselves, we are not being held accountable for our actions, we’re not learning anything, we’re not improving ourselves. We need another person to compete with us, to teach us, to tutor us in our ways. Right now, I’m struggling with my running, because I tend to run heavily on my feet, so I can only go so fast, and so far, so I need to find someone to work with me on my running so I can run faster and farther.

So how does that apply to our Christian walk? We need someone to walk beside us in our walk, we need someone to keep us accountable. Christianity, contrary to popular belief, is not a solitary lifestyle, you can’t do it by yourself. You need to compete with other Christians, not in the context of “who’s the best Christian” Christianity is not done on a grading scale, you can’t get an A, B, C, D, or F for being a role model Christian or not, it’s a pass/fail thing, you either go to heaven or you don’t. But what we need is competition, we need to improve our lives as a Christian, as a mode of bringing others to Christ. And how do we do that? By walking beside other Christians, asking questions about specific issues that we encounter everyday, and our stances on that. We need people to hold ourselves accountable, and we need to hold others accountable too. If we see someone struggling with something, just like we’ve experienced here on the volleyball court, if someone’s struggling with their serve, we help them serve the ball better by giving them pointers. If someone is not playing fairly, or being a ball hog, we need to pull them aside and let them know what they are doing, and how it's affecting the team.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts?