By Graham Daniels
General Director of Christians in Sport
This article appears in the Fall 2024 issue of the FCA Donor Publication. The FCA publication is a gift from our FCA staff to all donors giving $50 or more annually. For more information about giving, visit here.
Former tennis star Andre Agassi made a powerful statement in his autobiography, Open:
“Winning changes nothing. Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.”1
This statement captures a reality that all talented athletes understand. If we base our personal fulfilment on performance, both winning and losing become issues. The late Tim Keller extended this notion to the whole of our lives when he wrote:
“If you make work your identity and succeed, it’ll go to your head. If you fail, it’ll go to your heart.”2
The solution to the problem of basing our self-value on performance is found in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is a liberating truth that only by separating self-worth from personal achievements can we find true fulfilment. As six-time Olympic chaplain Ashley Null put it:
“Only love has the power to make human beings feel truly significant, not achievement. Only knowing that they are loved regardless of their current performance has the power to make Olympians feel emotionally whole.”3
The heart of the Good News of Jesus Christ is that God’s love for us is always received, never achieved. This truth provides a deep sense of reassurance. Indeed, the Gospel has two critical aspects that help us grasp the reality of God’s remarkable love in our day-to-day lives. These two truths are unpacked by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 2:8-10. First, we have received (not achieved) salvation through the finished work of Jesus Christ: “For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—not from works, so that no one can boast” (verses 8-9).
Secondly, Paul explains that every aspect of our lives has been specifically tailored for us by God: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do” (verse 10).
Martin Luther, one of the leaders of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, explained how these truths in Ephesians 2:8-10 work in tandem. Luther showed how the God who has saved us (verses 8-9) has simultaneously gifted each individual with a unique and specific combination of talents and relationships. Luther calls this our “station” or “vocation.”4
We can apply this to coaches and athletes by saying that God has saved us and also gifted us a lane in which we will run our personal race in Christ’s Sports School of Discipleship. As we consider how to steward our lives, it is vital to grasp the truth that God had a plan to save us and use our lane in life to pour out His life-changing love upon us in our daily highs and lows. God’s sovereign plan is deeply personal, designed to make each of us feel valued and significant.
God will use everything that sport throws at us to fill our lives with His loving presence. The assurance that God has a gracious plan for our lives makes it possible to embrace the highs and lows of the athletic vocation, including success and victory, failure and defeat, and fitness and injury. Indeed, with Ashley Null, we can dare to say:
“Those same thousands of opportunities to feel shame in sport also give God countless moments to speak to His children, to push back the darkness from around them, to root His promises in their hearts while in the heat of battle, to be at work in them so that they lean more into their calling, competing with an ever increasing sense of God’s eternal assurance of His love and their worth."5
So consider your salvation and every single daily aspect of your life as a gift from God. The more you do so, the more you can use the vocational opportunities He has provided to embrace His ongoing and loving work in the ups and downs of your life.
Prayer: Lord, please help me know my lane, stay in my lane and welcome Your offer to run the race in which You are ever present with me. Amen.
BIO: Dr. Graham Daniels is the general director of Christians in Sport, a United Kingdom-based charity that aims to reach the world of sport for Christ by working with athletes in competitive and elite sport. Daniels, a former professional soccer player who lives in Cambridge, is also a director of the Cambridge United Football Club in England, and he holds associate staff member positions at St. Andrew the Great Church and Ridley Hall Theological College in Cambridge.
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Works cited:
1 Andre Agassi, Open: An Autobiography (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 167.
2 Matt Smethurst, “50 Quotes from Tim Keller (1950–2023),” The Gospel Coalition (website), May 19, 2023, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/50-quotes-tim-keller/.
3 Ashley Null, “Reformation Pastoral Care in the Olympic Village,” in Sports Chaplaincy: Trends, Issues and Debates, ed. Andrew Parker, Nick J. Watson, and John B. White, (London: Routledge, 2016), 124.
4 Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, Why the Reformation Still Matters (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2016), 160.
5 Ashley Null, “Towards a Theology of Competitive Sport,” The Journal of the Christian Society for Kinesiology, Leisure and Sports Studies, vol. 7, issue 2 (2022), https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=jcskls.