- This article is taken from Christians in Sport dated 5 December 2008 -

You want to stay among those you play with and be in the sport culture but you also want to be distinctive and different for Christ. But you know from painful past experience that sometimes when you’re in the thick of the fun and the banter off the pitch that you can say or do things that are not how Christ wants you to live. You feel torn. Should you just finish the game on the pitch and then go home – at least then you won’t be compromised but also you won’t be shining Christ’s light before men? Or should you stay stuck in but risk being no different to those you long to see in Christ? It’s a painful dilemma. How can you stay in the game when you’re off the pitch?

The reality is that Christ doesn’t want his people to come out of the world. He says in his great prayer in John 17: “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one”. However equally he wants his people to be distinctive, only two verses later in the same prayer he asks God the Father to “Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth” (17:17). To sanctify something is to make it set-apart or distinctive. So Jesus understands the tension between being in the culture and being distinctive, but he prays for both!

How do we reconcile this tension? Is there really a way of being in the culture but not being compromised by the culture?

The key to seeing how this is possible is to see that with each part of Jesus’ prayer there is tangible help. First he prays “my prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one”. Jesus is praying that God the Father will protect each and every one of his people from the devil whose desire is to tempt us and coerce us into compromise. He must surely have in mind the great provision of God’s Spirit who not only helps us but actually lives inside us strengthening us when we feel weak, prompting us when we forget God’s standards, and picking us up when we stumble.

Second Jesus prays “sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth”. Jesus is pointing us to the second great help to stay distinctive; his word the Bible. In Ephesians 6 the Bible is described as ‘the sword of the Spirit the word of truth’. The word of God is like a sword in that it cuts through the confusion and temptations that swirl around us and shows us the clear and perfect way of following Christ. As we read the Bible it warns us to the challenges we’ll face, equips us to face them, and wonderfully shows us that even when we get it wrong Christ has died for us so that we’re forgiven.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to be taking particular issues that crop up in the sports culture off the pitch. Issues like drink, banter, sex, and money and we’ll be asking the question ‘how do you stay in the game when you’re off the pitch’; that is how do you stay in the culture to win the culture for Christ but equally how do you remain distinctively Christian? But underpinning all that we look at will be these two great helpers in the fight – the Spirit of God and the word of truth. So if you’re finding the fight difficult then make sure that you’re using God’s resources by reading his word and relying on His Spirit. And as we do that let’s stay in the game when we’re off the pitch, knowing that God’s given us everything we need to be distinctive for Him.