Underground ReLOVEution

OK, so I'm gonna try this. I hope it doesn't crash and burn. If at the end of this post you think I'm a super nerd, well, you're probably right.

I love baseball. Like I'm a weird fanatic. Besides reading my Bible and learning about Jesus, most of my time consists of reading about the Mariners and baseball in general. Some people geek out over video games, other people about movies, I'm a geek when it comes to baseball. This doesn't mean a thing except I wanted to bring the two together, Jesus and Baseball. This may not make sense to some of you, but let me give it a shot.

Over the last few years there has been a lot of controversy about steroids in baseball. Different studies and investigations have come to light that show that a good portion of players over the last 10+ years have been using steroids heavily and there has been a bunch of reactions. Some people shrug their shoulders and continue to watch, others berate the players for their bad behavior, and still others look at the commissioner, the owners, and the media and get angry at them. I won't get into my full opinion because most of you just don't care, but I want to talk about something else.

If the IRS sent out a letter to all American citizens and told them that they weren't going to be auditing anyone on their taxes and that they just expected people to pay their taxes honestly, how many people would do it? How many people do you think would actually pay their taxes if they knew that no one was watching and that there was no punishment if they fudged the numbers or didn't pay at all. This is the exact situation that the commissioner created and the owners created by not testing players for banned substance. Everyone had their hands in the steroid scandal and everyone inside the game knew about what was going on but let it happen because they were making money off of the players hitting lots of homeruns. Now the facts come to light and the owners and commissioner act self-righteous and point fingers at the players and say how bad they are.

Back to our original question. How many would be honest if there was no repercussions? This was the situation that baseball found itself in for the last ten years. No one was checking in on it and so the players did everything they could to perform at a higher level and make a bigger paycheck.

So, what does this have to do with Jesus? Well, my point is that this is what to expect for people who don't know Jesus.

Romans 1 talks about how sin is where people exchange the truth of God for a lie and worship and serve the creature (created things) rather than the Creator. So sin is a worship issue. What happens is people have a "functional hell" this is something that people feel would be their hell if it happened. For some it would be to lonely, for others it is to be unvaluable, for others it is to be poor or without status and for others it is to be ignored. Essentially it is something that we make a hell for us. Then what we do is find a functional savior to save us from our hell. For people who don't want to be lonely, they will worship a relationship or a friendship. They figure that this boyfriend will save them from loneliness or will make them feel valued. Others will make money their functional savior. They will try and get the biggest salary or the biggest house to make them feel valuable and so they worship at the feet of money so they can be saved from their functional hell.

For these baseball players, I'm assuming their functional savior was money or fame. They wanted to feel valuable and so they worshiped at the feet of their athletic ability so that they could be saved from their hell of being poor and being unimportant. Instead of worshiping Jesus, they took steroids. Now their sin wasn't the action, but rather was their wrong worship.

In Romans 1, Paul goes on to explain that because people sinned in not worshiping Jesus, then all of these other things came out. Because of their wrong worship, "they were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." (Romans 1:29-32 ESV). You see, our tendency is to view sin as bad things you do. So if you smoke, drink, sleep around, lie, cheat or murder, you are a bad person, but if you don't do those things, you are a good person.
For you students, people will look at you and say "they are good kids, they don't drink, smoke, or sleep around and they go to youth group every week. Yeah, maybe they are overly competative or very extroverted, but that's not a bad thing." What they aren't seeing is that within your heart, you are sinning by not worshiping Jesus. Your competativeness isn't a sin, but the fact that it comes out of a heart that is competative because it wants to be valuable and worships at winning instead of worshiping Jesus. Being extroverted isn't a sin, but it comes from a heart that wants to be loved by and finding value in people rather than trusting in Jesus. The person who rapes because he wants to be loved and the person who is just overly flirty becasue she wants to be loved and noticed both have the same sin. They both worship something other than Jesus to fulfill their functinal savior role.

This is why God can say that all sin is equal. In reality, if a white lie and murder are both sins, there is no way that God can see them the same, but if Jesus sees our hearts and our wrong worship, he can say that.

Another way to look at it is that bad action is a symptom of the disease of sin. If you have a cold, you know because of the symptoms. You have a cough, a runny nose, a sore throat, always tired, etc. These symptoms tell you something is wrong inside of you. In the same way, if you had a cancer and you were always tired and had headaches and got nautious, the real disease is the cancer, not the symptoms. If you spent all your time dealing with the symptoms and never dealt with the disease, you wouldn't get very far. In the same way, if you keep trying to change your behaviours and don't deal with the underlying worship issues, you're wasting your time. That's why we call ourselves the Underground, because we want to deal with heart issues, and not surfacy behaviour issues.

Back to steroids. This is what we should expect. I'm not trying to make a claim that these baseball players aren't saved, I don't know. All I know is that if people don't have Jesus, their only hope is to worship created things to fill in the void and to solve their problems. Even Christians struggle with wrong worship and so what we need to remember is that our hope doesn't come from a girlfriend, a paycheck, our athletic ability, or our jobs, but rather our hope is in Jesus, that he is the only Savior that will last.

Jesus wins.