Monday, September 19, 2016

Devotion 9.20.16

(Pastor is on assignment, so I'm back.)

"It was beauty killed the beast." Carl Denham, "King Kong"

I have felt it for sometime, but in reading Ryan Hyatt's post (raiderland.com), as well as having conversations with him, I'm now inclined to say it.  The Big 12, numbering 10 teams, is dying.  The sin that originally cursed the Big 12's demise?  Money.  It exists in football in high numbers.  Greed is part of the game, and you might protest it if you'd like, but there is proof beyond measure (Texas Tech did lower the cost of a bottle of water at the stadium from $5 to $4 while increasing the cost of everything else).

Pride in the form of  greed as the original sin in the Garden (you want to be God when you have everything else) continues to this day in various forms.  In this case, UT got ahead of itself and made an agreement with ESPN (who is now paying a price for that decision according to the Wall Street Journal) and got its own network. Unfortunately, other conferences have their own networks, not individual teams, but UT began the wrecking ball in motion that year.  Texas A&M, Missouri, Nebraska and Colorado left.  A&M may have been the wisest, going to the SEC, because they became a part of a highly publicized conference with its own network AND deepened its recruiting by doing so. 

So, it's now comical to listen to people, mostly from Texas Tech since that's where I am located, talk about proposed expansion with team such as BYU, Cincinnati, and Houston. Bringing those teams in, to hear it, will kill the Big 12.  Hate to say it, but it is already dying. As a Houston graduate, I'm inclined to advise them to stay put.  Their conference is growing in strength, and Houston, a team with a great record dating back to the 1960s, would probably not serve themselves well coming to a conference gasping for air.  "It was greed killed the Big 12."

Football in general, is a sport that may not have the means to survive itself.  Men grow stronger and faster and hit harder in an age where moms put helmets on their children who are learning to ride tricycles.  Yet the sins of the Big 12, and college football in general, are the demise of many programs (turning a blind eye to rules violations, laws, and other such things and the domination of money that creates the greed that leads to poor decisions).  .

So to ourselves.  Do we have the means in this life to save ourselves?  The answer, be it long or short, is no.  We did not overcome our turning away from God and looking to ourselves to become God in the Garden nor can we overcome the impact of sin now.  We can point the finger at football programs and say, "Bunch of greedy people who think they are above rules or the law" and not realize we are in the same boat in the same storm called sin. 

Yet a foundation of our faith is that God provides us with rescue.  Paul writes in Romans 5 that our hope is in the faith given freely from God in Christ.  "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand." (v 1 and 2)

We pray for forgiveness from pride, greed and all the other sins that befall us.  We pray a prayer of thanksgiving in this faith that Christ gives us.

Hope Men's Ministry

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