Wrong game, wrong goal, wrong audience. We’ve got a soccer ball and some tennis racquets and we’re trying to play baseball. We are using all of the normal baseball rules only we are using a soccer ball for the ball and tennis racquets for the bats. And we are taking this very, very seriously. The stands are full of cheering people. The media writes about us and talks about us. Everyone in the stands wishes that they were good enough to be in the big leagues and when they aren’t watching the pros play the game they play in neighborhood leagues. And something’s wrong. No one can quite figure out what it is, but it’s wrong.
Meanwhile there is this really small group of people on another playing field doing something that looks really, really dumb. They have abandoned the tennis racquets and are playing some kind of game where they are only allowed to move the ball by striking it with their feet and heads. And there are only three Persons in the stands and the media is not paying any attention to the whole thing except to mock and ridicule it once in awhile.
The Bible calls the big league game “the world.” The goals of the world are clearly defined in 1 John 2:16: “a craving for physical pleasures, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions (NLT).” Far too many of us wish that we could be in the big leagues (see Michael Jordan – sports; Bill Gates – business & finance; George Clooney – entertainment and being so handsome that many of us would like to slap him). Even if we don’t make it to the big leagues we have a pretty good idea of how we’re doing in relation to our family and friends (the equivalent of the neighborhood leagues). “I’m not doing as well as so-in-so but thank God I’m doing a lot better than cousin Ralph!”
So we go through life focused on the wrong things and caring about the wrong audience (other people) and all too soon it’s all over, our body wears out, we die … and find out that death is merely the end of the beginning. If, along the course of our lives, we become acquainted with the good news of salvation, that Jesus died for our sins and rose again from the dead, and if we believe that, we find ourselves beginning a new stage of existence in a paradise most of us call heaven. If we have ignored, rejected, or blown off the life and work of Jesus Christ we will find ourselves cast into a place described by Jesus Christ as “the outer darkness” where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12 NASB).”
I have a growing conviction that the church has to get back to preaching, in graphic detail, about the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The most horrifying descriptions we have of hell come from the lips of the God-man who gave His life to save us from that horrible fate. That’s right, gentle Jesus had more to say about hell than any other figure in the Bible. Everyone who reads these words and doesn’t believe that Jesus died to save them and then rose from the dead will someday find themselves gnashing their teeth because, at least in part, they had the ultimate answer to life’s ultimate question right in front of them on a computer screen one day and they ignored it. They just blew it off.
But what about the believer, the sincere Christian, who keeps playing baseball with a soccer ball and a tennis racquet? He’ll make it into heaven, but he will “suffer” the “loss” of his “reward” (1 Cor. 3:14, 15). In order to gain that extra, heavenly reward he will have learn to play a different game with different rules with a different audience.
There are three great questions he must learn to ask himself. To what work am I called? To what ministry am I called? And what should my motivation be?
If you are not sure if you are called to the work you are doing, you should just continue in the job you have while being open to God to lead you. What you are actually doing is not nearly as important as why you are doing it and if the Lord has something else for you in time He will make that clear.
As to ministry, every Christian has a gift that is to be used in ministry in the body of Christ. You should regularly attend some sort of Christian assembly and find some way to be of service to that group. Trial and error and prayer will see you to the right place in God’s good time.
In the world’s game there is a hierarchy. Some are great and some are insignificant. In God’s kingdom some will be greater than others, but the final judgment won’t be by the world’s standards. If God has called you to mop floors for a living and help with traffic control in the church parking lot the door to success beyond your wildest dreams lies open before you. If, at the end of each shift, you look back on what you’ve done and offer it to the Lord as an act of worship done for His glory, you are finally playing the right game by the right rules with the right audience. Many another man who seems much greater than you by worldly standards will come across the finish line into heaven just barely saved. His wealth, his position, and his possessions will not benefit him in the life to come because he never got the true issues of life in focus.
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