Not Everybody Wins

Not Everybody Wins

A friend of mine is a former college and professional athlete. He knows what it is to compete at the highest levels: he was integral in one of the greatest comebacks in pro-football history. The same year he experienced that unlikely, glorious, come-from-behind win, he also experienced a very humbling Super Bowl drubbing. This friend likes to say that we are created to compete. But he doesn’t believe for a minute that everybody wins or that everybody should.

If we are indeed created to compete, what kind of message are we sending our kids when we insist that everyone wins? When a mom friend told me that in her kid’s soccer league they don’t even keep score, my first reaction was “Why bother playing?” The “everybody wins” mind-set sends out ripples that extend far beyond the sporting world. I even wonder if our culture’s obsession with pseudo-reality shows like Survivor or American Idol or Top Chef might reveal that abandoning real competition draws us to the unreal kind as remote-control–clutching spectators.

I think my friend is right. I think we are created to compete. And we live in a culture as uncomfortable with real winners and losers as it is with a God who doesn’t give everyone a trophy just because they’re sincere. Instead, he unflinchingly points out two roads. One leads to life, he says, the other to destruction (see Matthew 7:13-14). He insists we cannot serve two masters (see Matthew 6:24).

Not everybody wins. And (news flash!) no one gets out of here alive. But Jesus’ victory over sin and death means that the one who believes in him does ultimately win, even if he or she dies. Someone’s keeping score all right. But not always in the way we think. In the meantime, we are created to run so as to win, to fight the good fight, and to finish the race. Abundant, vibrant, God-honoring, soul-satisfying life is the game you and I were made for, and there are prizes to be had for the men and women who compete for their own joy and God’s glory and to taste with him the victory that he won for us.

In all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.

Romans 8:37, NASB