Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Does God Help Your Kids’ Team Win?

baseball-kids“Please let us win” was the my sum total of my petition to the God who create the universe. I wanted nothing more than to win that little league championship game. I was firmly convinced that second place was for losers. Moreover being a well-trained sinner, I found pregame prayers to be calming.

I am sure that the little two-field complex located at the Little Rock Boys’ and Girls’ Club was hotbed for such game-day prayers. Had there been a sports prayer monitor over the field, I am sure the dugouts would have shown up as bright red as boys and girls pleaded for victory.

Although I have not donned a batter’s helmet, velcroed my Franklin batting gloves, and stepped into the batter’s box in some time, I have no doubt that children all across America on every kind of sporting field are asking God for victory.

I believe we should encourage our kids to pray for victory for little championships and soccer tournaments are ruled by God. Moses reminds us all of God’s ultimately sovereignty in Deuteronomy 32:39 writing,

See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I would and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.

The God of the Bible is our God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reigns supreme. God gives success and he sends failure. God gives health and sends sickness. No one can go against his will or frustrate his plans. No little league team can win without his permission. No soccer team can lose without his divine decree. God gave your daughter her first place trophy and ordained for your son to be on the team that never wins a game. Everything that happens in the universe, including our children’s seemingly insignificant games rest firmly in the hands of God. He rules the stars and knows when sparrows die (Matt. 10:29). He raises up kingdom and brings them down. He punishes sinners and mercifully restores them. He creates dynasties and sends sanctions. Thus, we should encourage our kids to pray for victory and to thank God for championship rings.

While we all recognize that our God reigns supreme, we still have to do something about all the rival prayers being tossed up to heaven before kickoff.  The great Peyton Manning famously touched on this dilemma when he said,

If the Colts were playing the Cowboys and I prayed for the Colts and Troy Aikman prayed for the Cowboys, wouldn’t that make it a standoff?

Such prayers do not create a standoff. But, they do reveal the divine reality that success on the field has nothing to do with our earthly righteousness.

My beloved Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2016 because God was being merciful to me and to generations of players and fans. But the Cubs organization and their fans were not more holy than the fans of the other 31 major league baseball teams in 2016. Ben Zobrist had a great testimony. But there are Christians scatters all throughout the league. Plus some of the Cubs players were not the nicest guys in the world evidenced by their affairs and complaints. The Cubs won because God decided to bless them over the other teams.

cubs free use

I cannot tell you why. Nor can I explain why God made the Cubs slog through a rough patch spanning a 108 years. Our human wants, desires, or impulses do not force God’s hand. He does not tally up the prayers and give victory to them team that talked to him the most. He chooses who wins according to his righteous, just, loving and good character. God does that which brings him the most glory. God ordains the team to win that will bring him the most glory. There is no standoff because God always knows which outcome will bring him the most glory. He always chooses that result.

If God chooses our kids’ team, we should celebrate. But we should celebrate humbly, realizing that all the skills, all the incredible catches, great hits, and must see moments came from above. Neither our kids nor we are inherently better than the kids on the other side of the field. God gave us the victory.

And when we lose, God gives us the loss. He ordains that our kid will strike out, drop the fly ball, and twist his ankle. All things comes from his hand.

I missed this reality as a child. I truly equated God’s favor with the wins and loss column. But God’s favor is not tied to earthly wins. His favor is tied to the cross and salvation. All who have Christ are truly blessed regardless how the championship game goes. God’s divine love is not measured by our sporting goals. His love is measured by the cross.

We should encourage our kids to pray for God to bless their sporting efforts. More importantly, we should encourage our kids to pray that God uses their sporting endeavors to grow their faith. We should help our kids to trust Christ through both victory and defeat, teaching them to humbly depend on God in every circumstance. God ordains our kids perfect game and their ligament tears.

Are you ready to live our Deuteronomy 32:39?

Peter Witkowski Book Reviews

Is Our Church Healthy: A Review of Nine Marks Of A Health Church

church-healthyDo you attend a healthy church? To answer this question, we first have to know what a healthy church is. In an age where church means everything from programs to personal interest stories, knowing the marks of a health church is increasingly hard target to find much less hit. Even the traditional markers of people, money, and buildings can be deceptive because Paul explicitly warns that in 2 Timothy 4:3

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions

A church may have a large budget, a fuller parking lot and magnificent facilities and still be an extremely unhealthy church because the gospel is not preached.

71Mark Dever wrote Nine Marks of a Healthy Church seeking to help people like you and me to understand what God has designed the church to be. Pastor Mark tackles the subjects of expositional preaching, biblical theology, the gospel, conversion, evangelism, church membership, church discipline, discipleship, and leadership with 295 pages of plainly written words. Each chapter addresses the above marks of a healthy church with biblical conviction and practical insight that is as helpful as it is easy to read.

If you are a children’s leader, a lay leader or a member, I encourage you to read of copy of this book for we all have a responsibility to care for our church. As the great British preacher, Martin Lloyd Jones said,

Unless we, as individual Christians are feeling a grave concern about the state of the Church and the wold today, then we are very poor Christians indeed (p.8). 

Whether or not your pastor preaches the Word as it appears on the page or forces the Word to fit his agenda will greatly influence the spiritual maturity of your congregation. Your churches decision to not discipline the married couple heading to divorce court will great influence your ability to disciple your friends. Your church’s decision to place a high value on church membership will greatly alter how you baptize. How your church approaches these nine mark will reveal much about your churches character and health.

We need to know how to to evaluate all these things in more if we hope to have healthy, godly church. All church members have a God given responsibility to guide and direct their church. Mark writes,

Whether in selecting teachers or paying for them, in approving their teaching, or in simply consenting to listen to them repeatedly and happily, the congregation that Paul envisioned here was culpable for the false teaching that they endured and sponsored.  - p.237 

nine marks

God’s  calls all of us to maintain the health of our local church. Shirking our duty does not free us from our responsibility.

If we love our church, we will be passionate about our church’s health and future. And if we hope to wisely encourage or rebuke our church leaders and our church body, we must have a firm grasp of what doctrines and practices define a healthy church.

If you desire to know more about the church and about how to encourage your church towards gospel health, I encourage you to read Nine Marks of a Health Church.

Click here to order your copy 

Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Hope For Hopeless Christians

sad-adultA bunch of hopeless people. This is what you will find as you make eye contact with the people sitting in your church pews. You will be greeted by smile after smile that is nothing more than a cheap movie set façade. Turn the corner and you will realize there is no firm foundation of joy. All that exists is some thin piece of painted plywood held up by two supports of flimsy church culture.

The hearts around you and me are hurting, struggling, and hopeless.

Many of us Christians gave up on the idea of the sufficiency of the Scriptures. We took up God’s script with interest when we first heard about the king of heaven. We eagerly followed every divine word of Scripture up to the base of the cross.

But as we left the cross and began the next scene of our life, we felt that the script was inadequate. The lines mentioned nothing about anorexia, ADHD, and our many other problems. Perhaps the script was no longer useful.

joseph-gonzalez-273526We addressed our concerns to local co-director. He heard our complaints and empathized with us, but agreed that the God’s script was actually kind of lacking. He patted us on the back and ushered us out of his office offering a few trite words encouraging designed to keep us reading and praying.

And so we conclude that the gospel that saves us essentially ends at salvation and will only pick up again at heaven. In the meantime, we improve things as best we can, trying to determine God’s will for our life by asking our heart, “what do you think is best?”

Quite naturally the heart that has put down the Scriptures and devoted itself to the study of itself, pop-culture, and modern thought, finds only cultural wisdom.

Our culture’s mindset is one of hopelessness. There is no hope for the sex addict, for the far too thing teenage girl, and for the out-of-control kid. Sure, we can toss some medicine and therapy their way. But at the end of the day, we can only medicate them. We cannot cure them.

And Christians who are more defined by their sin than their savior are going to be helpless. They cannot hope to be anything else. If God cannot help us with our problems, then we really are hopeless.

This is where all the lonely people come from.

Thankfully, we do not have to remain in this state of hopelessness. God does not call us to be facades. He calls us to build full and vibrant lives on his Word. The script does not end at conversion. That is the point when the plot gets really good. At conversion, we get the power of Christ to overcome our sins. The story of our life goes from being one of failure to one of success, because the hero Christ has arrived and empowered us with his helper, the Holy Spirit. Paul said it this way,

No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with temptation he will also provided the way of escape that you may be able to endure it.

– 1 Corinthians 10:13.

The message of the Bible is that you are sinners redeemed by grace. If you are stressed to the point of panic attacks, cannot handle you porn addiction, and cannot control your body weight, the Bible is for you. Dive into it, find a biblical counselor or a godly pastor, and you will see that there is a way of escape. God rescues his people.

Your ultimate problem and my ultimate problem when I think life is hopeless is our theology. The divine script is not wrong. We simply misread the text with our modern, sinful eyes.

To overcome our stress, worries, and depressions, we need to dive into God’s script. As Paul told the Corinthians,

Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come – 1 Corinthians 10:11.

We like the New Testament believers live in the last age. Living in the last age does not imply the Bible is outdated. Rather, Paul says the Bible is full. We have all the stories of the Old and New Testament precisely because they are relevant to our lives today. The show us how to repent of sinful idols and how to refocus on Christ. The Scriptures are never more, relevant, important, and helpful than now.

All those fake smiles in our church by the power of Christ could one day be real and meaningful.

If you have more questions about how the Bible applies to your life or about how you or your church could start practicing the disciplines of grace, please reach out to me. I would love to help.