Victory Celebrations

May 1, 2018

He jumped up from having defeated his opponent, pumped the air, did a Hulk Hogan pec squeeze with a huge “Arrrgh” before the referee raised his hand in the air. My friend Cameron had just won a major jiu jitsu match in Pittsburgh. Today I sat with him at lunch, and asked him about the match. 

“Training was ten times harder than actually fighting. The match was the easy part,” he confided. His opponent was younger and stronger, but Cameron is methodical as well as skilled in his craft. And he works harder, with more intensity than most. He was appropriately pumped over his victory, and it made me wonder.

I think one reason so few Christians get excited about worship is that they haven’t put in the training; so Sunday morning isn’t a victory celebration, but an exercise in defeat that is more humiliating than exhilarating. If we put as much effort into our spiritual training as Cameron put into readying himself for his match, we would be charging around our sanctuaries like the victors in Christ we are meant to be. But we can’t win the match if we don’t train. When Christians don’t know their way around their Bibles, it’s pretty evident they aren’t reading them. When the only kind of prayers we know are the ones printed in church bulletins, it’s pretty evident we aren’t training in prayer. When we never share our faith with anyone, it’s pretty evident we are more infatuated with the idea of church than we are lovers of Christ.

Cameron’s fight, and his victory celebration was a good lesson for me. I am thankful for his friendship, and that God speaks to us through many means, even a jiu jitsu match.