We got a lot of feedback about our Professional Sports newsletter. Here is a response I thought you would like:
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Hi Mark, Thank you for the excellent and much needed newsletter about sports. Early on in our parenting, we noticed the craze to involve children, younger and younger, in sports. When you think it through, it splits up the family by driving each child here and there for practices and games, eliminates many family meals together, and replaces the contentment found in the simple things of life, like looking for bugs, reading family books together, visiting the elderly, and serving at home. It greatly competes with a life of serving Christ, who had “no reputation but that of a servant, no beauty that we should desire Him, and was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. The older I get, the more I see that the great enemy of the soul I see is pride. When a child is applauded before a crowd of sports fans and peers, it boosts his belief that he is something great. How will that child ever serve at home, appreciate the Bible, and not despise church? Pride is ever present, and do the young understand the dangers of this enemy? Mark, we cry out to God for help because we live in difficult days where the culture has permeated the church, and if believers are challenged, the criticism is often “legalism.” But was it Peter who said, “I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from earthly lusts which war against the soul?” And in I John, I believe, “love not the world or the things of the world? Finally, when I read that we’re to “walk as Jesus walked,” oh what a responsibility, a calling to be His ambassadors. There is such a disconnect between the life of Christ and the church today. Mark, I don’t exclude our family. We are challenged, if not by sports, it’s by some other area. Pray for Christians parents. We need it, as we have the charge of these souls for a time to teach them the verses to “die daily” instead of living for self. Thank you for being a true friend to us and for sharing hard truths. We sure appreciate you. Proverbs 27:6 Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. God bless you, |
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Many thanks to all of the Christian parents out there who are willing to raise their children God’s way and not the world’s way.
2 Timothy 3:15
And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
Proverbs 22:6
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 4:23
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.
Until the nets are full,
