Kingdom Coaching

     While considering the upcoming season I like to reflect back on first principles.  As a coach my primary concern is the spiritual health of my team.  I believe the way to accomplish the spiritual health of my team is to integrate ‘Kingdom Coaching’ into my program.

    As Christian coaches we don’t have to go about coaching like the rest of the world.  Many of us can look at a culture that is becoming more and more self-centered and decadent and become discouraged.  We can see coaching in a post-Christian environment as overwhelming or a as challenge.  Michael Hyatt said, “You don’t have to stay stuck in the state you are in. But first, you must own your specific situation and take responsibility for the choices that led to it. Only then can you begin to create a different future.”

     I, as a Kingdom Coach, can make a break with mistakes of the past and look ahead to integrating Christ into every aspect of the program that God has entrusted me with.  God has put us in this spot and at this time to intentionally integrate our programs with Christ. 

    One of the major ills of our day is a dividing up of our world into the secular and sacred.  We have accepted the lie of secularism that it is okay to live a privatized faith.  Many Christians believe that religion is okay for the church house but not okay in the workplace.  We hear phrases from popular culture such as, “Your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth.”  Others say, “Don’t impose your religion on me!”  This type of thinking has saturated the world of sports. 

    One can observe a very pious coach on Sunday morning during worship, but on Monday at the practice field they display anger filled, explicative riddled behavior that looks anything but Christian.  Athletes also fall into this trap.  Many athletes have a hard time knowing what it looks like to honor Christ on the field because they have not seen it modeled by their coaches.  We witness athletes invoke the name of Jesus but have behavior that looks nothing like the teaching of Christ. 

    The answer to this malady is ‘Kingdom Coaching’ or, more broadly, “Kingdom Sports.”  In the Lord’s prayer we pray that, “God’s will be done on earth as in Heaven.”  We are crying out for God’s Kingdom rule to integrate every aspect of life.  We as coaches are tasked with challenging every aspect of our programs to fall under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  This all sounds like good philosophy so what is the practical applications of this?

First of all, we must simply show young men how to be followers of Jesus Christ.
We must develop young men and women that are disciples of Jesus Christ.  We need young men that are COURAGEOUS.  We need men as C.S. Lewis put it, “with chests.”


This begins with the idea of becoming like Jesus Christ - to follow the way of the Master.  This is not just head knowledge about Jesus but is a way of living. 

This is best embodied by a coach that is a follower of Jesus.  Coaches must model what a mature follower of Jesus Christ looks like. 

Paul told the Christians at Corinth, in 1 Corinthians 4:15-16, “For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.  I urge you, then, be imitators of me.”

The best method to learn how to follow Jesus is to imitate someone that is a mature disciple of Christ. 

2) The second aspect of Kingdom coaching is found in the realm of purity and personal holiness.

 With young people today, the flash point of the spiritual battle that we see ourselves in the midst of is in the area of purity. 

I Peter 1: 15-16, “but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

As Christians, we are called to live a life of radical purity and holiness.  Many times professional athletes glorify a life of excess and immorality.  Some people, outside the realm of athletics, see athletes in a negative light because of this.

As coaches we must hold our kids to a higher standard of Biblical purity. 

3)  Another aspect in the structure of Kingdom Coaching is building upon a foundation of truth.

All relationships are built upon trust.  Trust is destroyed when truth is compromised.  As coaches, we want to build relationships built upon telling the truth to one another.  We need coaches that speak the truth to their athletes and fellow coaches as well as players that speak the truth in all situations. 

Adrian Rogers once stated, “It is better to tell the truth that heals than the lie the kills.”

We would much rather speak truth to players about their status on the team than mislead them and lead to further damage.  We also want young men that go into society as ones that tell the truth.  Jesus embodied truth in his very being and we are called to be people of truth.

Paul told the Ephesian brethren in Ephesians 4:25, “Therefore having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.”

One of the main components of having a healthy team is to build that team on mutual trust and respect. 

4) Finally, ‘Kingdom Coaching’ encourages the ‘dos’ as well as the ‘do nots’.  We want to develop young athletes that will stand up for the defenseless.  So much of what we focus on as Christians is the negatives or the ‘don’t dos’. 

    Coaches want to develop young athletes that stand up for what is right in all situations.  Part of the measure of the character of a person is how they treat those that are less powerful than they.  We want our athletes to have the perfect mix of toughness and tenderness.  We want young people that are tough enough to stand up to the world but not so tough they they become overbearing.  We want to develop the proper mix of both toughness and tenderness. 

Psalm 82:3 states, “Give justice to the weak and fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.”

    We are called to stand up for what is right and to demand justice for those that have been mistreated.  We want to develop courageous young people that will stand up to evil and try to correct that which is wrong.

    As I consider the upcoming season I think it is important to remember what we are all about.  These first principles will come before we ever consider lining up and winning a game.   My prayer this season is that we will bring God’s kingdom rule into our football program. 

A Hermeneutic of the Cross

Sunday morning I will be preaching on the importance of the Bible.  While writing my sermon I thought a lot about interpretation.  The question arises, “How does one interpret Scripture?”  How do we make sense of the hard stuff we find in the Bible?  Even Peter says some of Paul’s writings are hard to understand and are twisted by those that have bad intentions. When considering interpreting the Bible many turn to understanding the following: learning the grammar of the text from the original languages, the historical background of the passages, the idioms used, and the context of the over passage in question.  I think all of these are excellent tools to use but I would like to propose another method.  I call it the hermeneutic of the Cross.

    I believe one way to look at hard passages is through the lens of the cross.  The cross is one of the single most dramatic ways that God demonstrated His love for us.  As John 3:16 tells us, “for God so loved the world.”  The Son going to the cross is Father’s ultimate display of His love for us.  Philippians 2 tells us that the Son willingly emptied Himself and died on the cross on our behalf.  I would propose that the cross is the template through which we should view God.  We see a trinitarian shape in the cross of Jesus.  We see the Father send the Son, the Son freely offer up Himself as the sacrifice, and the Spirit strengthen the Son in this mission.

So how can the cross help us with interpreting the Bible? 

    First of all, the cross tells us how serious sin really is.  Isaiah 53 tells us that we are healed by His stripes and He was crushed for iniquity.  Sin really is that bad.  When we look at the Exodus and Conquest of the land we can understand a little better why God tries to drill into the head of knotty head Israel that he means business about purity and holiness.  God is a loving Father that knows best.  He knows that sin will destroy us.  It is the darkness of sin that drapes over the cross and drives Jesus to say, “My God, My God why have your forsaken me?”  Jesus is one that knew no sin but became sin on our behalf.  So when we look at the Bible’s prohibition against sexual sin, anger, discord, and impurity we can just look to the cross and see how bad sin really is.

    Lastly, the cross displays the love of God.  The cross cries out that God loves so much that He does the reaching.  God does the saving.  It tells us that grace is the only way we can get out of the pit.  God has stoop down, get in the mud, and draw us out.  God takes us out and cleans us up.  The cross tells us that there is no way a little ‘works righteousness’ is part of God’s plan.  There will be no boot strap saving but a radical grace that sends the Son into the world to be a ransom.  The cross displays to us that God does not want anyone to perish but to come to a knowledge of the truth.

 This love also helps us understand the doctrine of Hell.  So many people have a difficult time with the idea that a loving God would send people to Hell.  We should remember that love is about choice.  God loves us so radically that He gives us a free will to choose Him.  When someone is sentenced to Hell, in essence, God is saying to the sinner, “Your will be done.”  Sinful folks do not want to be in the presence of God for eternity.  Heaven would be miserable for those that do not love God for what He did for them in Christ.  God in his love allows those people to make the final choice to be alienated from Him for eternity. 

So I propose to you a new tool in interpreting the Bible.  I call it he hermeneutic of the Cross of Jesus. 

Interesting Times

There is a Chinese proverb that says something like, “may you live in interesting times.”  I would say that many Christians would agree that we live in interesting times. 

Many have been shook to the core by the ruling on marriage by the Supreme Court.  I am not shocked in the least.  The seeds for this revolution in identity, marriage, and morality have been sown many years ago.  This post is lengthy and it reflects my own struggles.  Realize that these are areas where I fall short so I am preaching to myself also. 

The question we should be asking is, “How did we get here?” and “What is our response?” 

We are at this moment because of apathy and a lack of love.  Now you may think that sounds crazy that a lack of love has lead us to a moral decline in our country.  What I mean by love is Biblical love.  Love means that I care enough about a person to share the truth with them.  If I know that their lifestyle is destructive and that they are not in fellowship with their Creator, I should have enough love to tell them.  Love means that I will tell you the truth in a compassionate way realizing that you may hate me for that.  Love means that I will still be your friend even if my ‘truth telling’ has caused you to be upset with me.  Love means I will pray for my enemies.

Here is the problem with loving our enemies, we are so worried about offending people that we will never have any enemies to love. 

 Apathy is the other great elephant in the room that we must discuss.  Christians have become lazy and really don’t care until they realize Rome is on fire.  It is at that moment that we spring into action.  Here are some signs of the problem; you drive by a ball park on Sunday and it packed full of Christians playing some type of sport and the church parking lot is nearly empty.  We see people’s enthusiasm for a sports team is more fervent than their love for Jesus.  People would rather worship the god of personal peace and affluence instead of the living God of Heaven.  When the early Church wanted to make a difference they worshipped.  Notice in Acts 4:31 that when persecution arose it was worship that brought action.  Worship is an act of spiritual warfare that we take for granted.  But apathy doesn’t end there.  We are apathetic about reading Scripture.  2 Timothy 3:16 says that Scripture is God breathed.  The same breath that brought life to man in Genesis 2:7 brings life to us through the word in Scripture.  The Hebrew writer says that the word of God is living and active.  Many Christians cannot form a response to the gay marriage debate because they don’t even know that the Bible teaches on the subject. 

What is our response?

Of course it would make sense that we should start with Love.  It is the love that Jesus had when he gave His life as a ransom.  He came to serve and not be served.  We must be willing to get in the mud and love people that may disgust us.  We vehemently disagree with people on the issue of gay marriage but we have to engage them and teach them the truth.  We can’t teach them the truth from afar.  We can ‘loft’ Bible verse bombs from some place far off.  We must evangelize by meeting, befriending, and teaching them.  That is true love.  True love is knowing the salvation you have in Jesus and wanting to share it with others.  True love is seeing everyone as being made in the image of God and wanting them to reach the fulness of life. 

We must have courage.  God has given us a spirit of power not of timidity.  Recently, I was studying Revelation 21 and noticed that in verse 8 that those that will go into Hell will be the ‘cowardly’.  I realized that I never considered that an attribute of the ungodly is cowardice.  I then remembered how much the Bible says about courage.  How many times have you read, “be of good courage’?  We must be like the Peter and John before the Sanhedrin and be bold in our proclamation.  We need Christians that understand the Gospel is a proclamation of truth and not something to be apologized for.  I believe the Gospel is like a lion.  What I mean is that no one has to defend a lion but only has to unleash the lion.   It is time for the Gospel to challenge every strata of our society. 

The Christian Roots of Religious Freedom

Most of us remember our Western Civilization courses in college or a World History class in high school. In those situations we learned about the evil of Christians over the ages and how the institutionalized Church persecuted everyone else. Enlightenment thinkers, such as Edward Gibbon, were taken at face value when he asserted that raw power was supported by religious authorities at the expense of the common man. This is a very truncated and dangerous view of history. Protestants and Evangelicals have swallowed this way of thinking ‘hook line and sinker’ and failed to realize that the Enlightenment writers that they take for the gospel truth had an axe to grind against the Christian faith. The truth is much more complex than what we have been taught. I am not defending the atrocities people have committed in the name of Christ against other religious groups at times in history. What I am proposing is a fresh look at the roots and wellspring of our Christian forefathers in their teachings on religious freedom. I am proposing that Christianity is the very root of Christian freedom. This is such a timely subject due to the rise of a type of radical secularism and the intolerance of radical Islam. We must be courageous people and thinking people in these interesting times. It would also do us well to understand the underpinnings of our religious freedom that was birthed at the founding of our country.

       We must turn back to the earliest Christians to see how the ideas of religious freedom trickled down to the founding fathers of our own country. The earliest followers of Christ were persecuted by a pagan empire but the tide was changing by 300 years after the death of the last Apostle. Not long after the fiercest persecution of Diocletian an emperor would come to power named Constantine, and he would issue the Edict of Milan. The Edict of Milan was a turning point in history in that it would be one of the first statements of religious tolerance of its kind. Contrary to popular belief, it did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire but made it a tolerated religion. But how did this way of thinking come about? Who shaped this idea of religious freedom? Was it the pagan Romans that so many believe were enlightened versus those backwards Christians?

     Fresh voices of religious toleration can be found in early Christian leaders such as Tertullian. Tetrullian stated in the early 200’s AD that it is a “fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions.” This was a revolutionary concept in the Roman Empire at that time. The Imperial Cult of Rome was fine with you worshipping your own gods or as long as you accepted the Roman pantheon of gods, as well as the Emperor as a living god. What Tertullian was calling for was a much more extreme form of religious freedom. Tertullian would actually be quoted by Thomas Jefferson during the 18th century to defend the right to religious freedom.


      Another shining light of religious freedom from the beginnings of Christianity was Lactantius. Lactantius lived into the early 300’s and acted as an advisor for Constantine. Lantantius stated the following: “Religion is to be defended not by putting to death, but by dying, not by cruelty but by patience, not by an impious act but by faith […] For if you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, and by tortures, and by doing evil, it will not be defended but polluted and profaned. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion, for if the mind of the worshipper turns away it is carried off and nothing remains.” One can see the influence of Lactantius on the thinking of Constantine. Constantine in writing to the Eastern Provinces stated the following: “contest for immortality must be undertaken voluntarily and not with compulsion.”


 It was this radical view of religious freedom that was first birthed from the earliest thinkers in the Church. Here is a synopsis of what Christian thinking gave us as a nation as we look at religious freedom:


 1) Faith is a matter of an inward choice and should never be coerced or forced. This would rule out an official state religion that makes all other expressions of faith illegal.


 2) There are two realms in your experience. There is the spiritual dimension and the material world. Now, this is not to be confused as deism or what Francis Schaeffer called the ‘fact value dichotomy’ We know that we are integrated beings of flesh and spirit and what we do in the body matters. The point I am making here is more in line with what Abraham Kuyper called sphere sovereignty. In the sphere sovereignty paradigm one understands that there is the role of the Church and the role of the state. Actually, Kuyper had three spheres of influence that each had sovereignty. He added the family as the third sphere. The church exercises the keys of excommunication, the state wields the sword, and the family has the rod of discipline. One should not bleed into the other. For the state to take on the role of the Church or the Church to take on the role of the state leads to a blurring of lines that God never intended.


 In this time of uncertainty about our own religious freedom in our country we should gladly turn back the pages of time and drink deep from the wisdom of the early Christian thinkers. As Christians we should stand on the solid ground that religious freedom is a non-negotiable. Also, the state has no right to declare secular humanism as the official state religion of America. We need to do the tough work of asking how does the Church inform government and how does the government ensure religious freedom? How do we have an open market place of ideas while not drifting into relativism?