Does Being a Christian Make You a Better Athlete?
Does being a Christian make you a better athlete? Keep in mind, titles for blogs and articles need to be fairly concise. What I am attempting to answer in this post is this: Does an athlete who has a Christian faith best position themselves to maximize their God given skill set? To put it another way, if you lined up two athletic versions of yourself, one as a Christ follower and the other is not, who would I expect to play at a higher level?
Broadly speaking, I would vote for the Christian athlete. Why?
I think being a Christ follower equips you with more tools for success in sport in the same way I believe that being a Christ follower equips you with more tools for success in marriage. What does marriage have to do with sports? Nothing, really. Just hear me out...
For a long term relationship, like marriage, to thrive, you need a few important things. You need to know how to forgive and how to ask for forgiveness. You need to give grace. You need to serve—and not expect anything back in return. You need to have a desire to grow and mature. You need to understand that love is not just an emotion, but also an action (with this understanding, you can’t “fall” out of love). Now, Christians don’t have exclusive rights to any of those ethics—but they are all an overflow of a biblical faith. These are expected behaviors of someone who has surrendered their life to Christ.
This means Christians are expected to act in these sorts of ways within the context of marriage. Does this guarantee a Christian marriage will last longer than one that does not include two professing Christians? No. Divorce statistics would back this up. It just means that a Christian marriage is better set up for thriving over the long haul—if these tools of forgiveness, grace, and biblical love are embraced and practiced.
Back to sports. I believe Christian athletes have certain tools at their disposal that set them up to optimize their God given skill set.
What follows are three reasons why being a Christian makes you a better athlete—and the one reason it oftentimes won’t. All of my reasons support my belief that athletes who compete freely will more often than not, compete at a higher level than those who are weighed down by the need for other’s approval and the fear of making a mistake.
Christian athletes have perspective
I think maintaining perspective puts you in the best position to optimize your God given skill set. Perspective allows you to see your sport against the backdrop of bigger things going on in the world around you. And I can’t think of anything bigger than eternity (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Proper perspective is not about minimizing sport and lessening one’s competitive drive, but seeing it against the backdrop of eternity in a way that frees an athlete to play without the fear of failure. Why? Because perspective should free athletes from attaching too much weight to the outcome of a game.
While eternal perspective is helpful for a Christian athlete, relational perspective matters too. A Christian athlete understands that they are a son or daughter of God. They understand that God identifies with them as a Father. This does not mean Christian athletes have an advantage because they have “God on their side.” It simply means they already have access to everything—through God—that sports promises but fails to deliver: lasting joy, peace, and contentment.
A Christian perspective looks something like this:
“This life is not the end. I will spend eternity with God in a redeemed body on the new earth. Endless joy, for all of eternity, with the God of the Universe. This is a relational God who has adopted me into his family as a son/daughter. Because of this, I will play fast and free. What can sports offer me that God has not already freely given? I may make a mistake, but against the backdrop of eternity, that’s ok. While I will listen to the advice of my coaches and teammates, I refuse to be weighed down by the weight of their approval because this game will not affect my eternal destination. And that carries more weight to me than the outcome of an earthly competition.”
Christian athletes have proper motivation
I hope that the phrase “Audience of One” never becomes so cliche that we become numb to what it means. God wants us to do everything, including sport, as if he was our primary audience (Colossians 3:23). This is an incredible truth—and privilege. It should also motivate us to play with an optimal level of effort and excellence.
My son loves sports. He wants me at his games watching him play. It’s no coincidence that when I am there—which I usually am—he plays as hard as he can. Why does he do this? He knows I am watching. He knows that after every practice and every game I tell him that I love him and few things bring me greater joy than watching him play with energy and effort.
Shouldn’t Christian athletes share a similar motivation?
A Christian motivation looks something like this:
“While I know there are many people present at my competition: coaches, teammates, fans, scouts and parents, my heart will reflect a motivation birthed out of Colossians 3:23. I will play as if God is in the stands watching me. The effort and excellence that I play with will not be an attempt to earn God’s love and affection, but a response on my part to the love and affection he freely offers me, regardless of how I perform during competition.”
Christian athletes have a Person
Christian athletes not only have the privilege of playing before God as their Audience of One, they also have the unique opportunity to play with God. The Bible affirms that when we surrender our lives to Jesus, when we recognize him as both Savior and Lord, God gives us his Holy Spirit. His Spirit is not a super fairy that falls upon us in our time of need, but a Person who is fully God living within us. You read that right. The Holy Spirit is referred to in the Bible as a Person. And He dwells within Christ followers.
His role in our lives, simply put, is to help us to look like, think like, and act like Jesus. So how does the Holy Spirit help us in competition? Remember, my argument from the beginning is that athletes who play free, for the most part, play better. The Spirit can help with this. He can help remind us to have an eternal perspective. He can help remind us that God is in the audience. He can calm our fears. He can remind us of our identity outside of sport.
A Christian who competes in step with the Spirit looks something like this:
“God, thank you that you are with me. You are not only watching me, you are with me. This direct access to you means that at any time during the competition, I can reach out to you for the fruit that you promise in Galatians 5:22 to produce in my life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. I trust that you will help convict me of when I am playing with an ungodly motivation or when I am trying to win the approval of others instead of resting in the approval you have already granted to me because of Jesus.”
Why being a Christian sometimes will not make you a better athlete
While I believe wholeheartedly that Christian athletes have crucial tools available to them to free them up to compete without the fear of failure and without the need for other’s approval, there is one reason why I think being a Christian athlete doesn’t make you better: God often uses our sport in ways that we don’t like to draw us closer to him. What does that even mean?
When you become a Christian, you surrender your life to God. This means we are telling God, as Lord of our life from this point on, to use everything in my life to draw me closer to you and use me for your purposes—not my own. Athlete, your life includes your sport. And for many athletes, their life is their sport. God knows this too.
I have worked alongside a lot of Christian athletes in my life. I’ve had the humbling opportunity to see athlete’s eyes open to the good news of the Gospel and profess faith in a God who made a way for them to be in a relationship with him. These athletes say yes to God and express excitement of competing with a new perspective and motivation. And while I celebrate outwardly and hope this translates into newfound success and an opportunity to use this elevated platform to tell a watching world about God, that’s often not how it has played out.
Over the last decade, this is what I have seen, not in every case, but enough of them to believe it’s not a coincidence: the Christian athlete gets injured. The coach benches them for no apparent reason. Circumstances beyond their control prevent them from getting opportunities to compete. This list goes on. Why? I don’t know. I have a guess though.
What’s my guess for why this happens? I think God often goes after our biggest idol. It’s what he did in Mark 10:17-27. A rich young ruler asks Jesus what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Knowing his hope was in his finances, Jesus tells him to sell everything. The young ruler couldn’t do it and walked away dejected.
I think for a lot of athletes, myself included, sports can become a god in our lives. In his book Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller describes an idol as “anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.”
He later explains that it is “anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.”
Who cares? God does. He actually cares a lot. Exodus 20:4-5 shows us that God is jealous for our full attention. We see in Colossians 3:5-6 that the wrath of God is coming upon idolatry.
What I have seen more times than I can count while working in sports ministry is God moving towards the one thing athletes cling to for happiness more than him: our sport. And out of kindness (not cruelty) he removes it for a season to reveal its idolatrous role in our life and show that he is, in fact, far better than our previous god.
Does being a Christian make you a better athlete? I think Christians get perspective, proper motivation, and the Holy Spirit, all of which help them optimize their God given gift set. But Christian athletes also give God permission to use their sport in a way that he deems most glorifying to himself and for our greatest good (Romans 8:28). Maybe that means success. Maybe it means injury or Covid strikes and sports are cancelled.
We can get so caught up in thinking sports is the avenue that God wants to bless us through—which he may.
But what if sports are actually the tool that God wants to use to sharpen us so we look more like him?
