This fall, a classroom full of Christian college athletes read The Christian Athlete and came back with over twenty questions for me. I connect with this class once a semester and the athlete’s questions always challenge me, keep me sharp, and help me keep a pulse on what today’s college athletes are wrestling with.
It’s why I keep saying yes to these rapid fire sessions over Zoom.
Because what they are asking are not abstract theology questions, but from young men and women who are in it right now. These are athletes sitting on benches, overthinking a loss, wondering if it’s ok to celebrate after a win (and where is the line when it becomes prideful), and athletes watching a final season tick away.
Below are fifteen of the best, along with my response to each, lightly edited, of course. Some answers are short. A few are honest admissions that I didn’t say something as clearly as I should have the first time. And as I told the class, all of these responses come from a guy who loves sport and is still learning how to honor God in it.
I’ve organized the questions into four movements that represent what’s commonly referred to as the pastoral cycle: what athletes are carrying, what ought to drive us, what it all means, and how we respond.
What athletes are carrying
1. How do I tell healthy pressure from unhealthy pressure?
“How can we tell the difference between healthy pressure that pushes us to improve and unhealthy pressure that controls our identity, both as an athlete and in everyday life? Is this something you struggled with as an athlete or coach?”
As a coach, I talk about this with athletes a lot. I want them to understand that nerves are part of the experience! But we have to learn the skill of differentiating between what’s healthy (pushes us towards excellence) and unhealthy (paralyzes us with fear).
Healthy pressure views competition as an opportunity. Yes, we may be nervous, but underneath the nerves is real excitement about the challenge. Unhealthy pressure views competition as a threat. There’s genuine fear about the result, or about not playing well.
This was the story of my athletic life. I ran scared and competed scared. I often buckled under pressure. Most of that was because I lacked the tools to integrate my faith into my sport. Today I run more freely than I ever have. What’s the difference? I’ve learned how to approach sport as opportunity instead of identity. And that’s made all the difference.
I’ve learned to let go of ego and identity, and I just run because I love it. I wish I had learned that perspective in college.
2. How do I glorify God when I’ve let my team down?
“How can an athlete continue to glorify God when they feel like they have failed, disappointed, or let down their team and coaches?”
I’m a sports guy. I believe sport is life with the volume turned up. Because of that, what happens in sport often feels like a bigger deal than it really is. That’s okay, but perspective matters here. So let me meet you where you are before I offer some biblical perspective.
My wife uses a phrase all the time: naming it tames it. When we name something, it loses its power over us. So a step forward might be as simple as going to your coaches and teammates and saying, “Hey, I blew it. I’m sorry. I want to do better, and I’m going to work at it. But I need you to keep believing in me and helping me get there.”
Now let’s get biblical. Peter denied Jesus, and God still used him. David committed adultery and arranged the death of Bathsheba's husband, and God still used him. Moses was a murderer, and God still used him. Paul persecuted Christians, Jonah ran from God, Samson was blinded by lust—and God still used them.
So you played a bad game, or had a season you’d like to forget. I’m not minimizing the hurt. But in the grand scheme of God’s eternal purposes, He can still use you, and probably is, to bring Him glory.
You asked how to glorify God in it, so let’s get practical, even if it doesn’t feel especially spiritual:
Own it with others, and commit to getting better.
Separate the performance from the person.
Use the hardship as an opportunity to run to God and cry out for help instead of running from him.
3. How do I stay team-first when I think I deserve to play?
“As a college soccer player, it can be difficult to stay confident when you feel you deserve more playing time and the coach keeps you on the bench. How can you keep working through it with God and keep a team-first mentality?”
That’s a really hard reality. You love your sport, you’re good at it, and for whatever reason your coach’s assessment of you doesn’t line up with your own. So you don’t play.
That stinks.
My encouragement is this. When you’re not playing, keep asking, What does it look like to add maximum value while I’m off the field? And when you do get in, whether it’s for one minute or ten, give full effort. Don’t let a small amount of playing time shrink your level of effort.
4. How do I know whether to persevere or walk away?
“You mention that God can place you in a season of injury to prepare you for the future, and that the same applies to seasons of losing, struggling despite hard work, or riding the bench. What advice would you give a Christian athlete who is trying to discern whether a trial is something to persevere through, or a sign that God is calling them away from their sport onto a different path?”
This is a discernment question, right? How do we know whether God wants us to stay in it and learn from it, or hit the eject button altogether? Here are a few diagnostic questions I’d ask myself:
Is wanting to be done a new feeling, or has it been stirring for a while?
Do I still enjoy my sport, or do I dread showing up?
Is there something outside of sport I’m more excited to direct my energy toward?
Am I staying in sport because I feel pressure from others?
Listen, I love sports. I really do. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about a game. If you don’t love it anymore, and especially if it’s becoming toxic for you, I think it’s okay to step away.
Just know that it’s a big decision, and it usually comes with some finality. Once you decide you’re done, you’re done—and someone else gets the spot.
What ought to drive us
5. Can I pursue individual success without pride creeping in?
“How can a Christian athlete tell the difference between using their God-given abilities to glorify God and using those same abilities to gain personal recognition? Is it possible to pursue individual success without allowing pride to become part of the motivation?”
Let me tell you how this works for me, and how I discern the difference in my own heart.
I want to be the best coach I can be, because the better I get, the better I’m able to serve athletes. But I’ve noticed that when my runners and teams do well, I carry myself differently in the community. I walk a little taller and with a little more confidence. Why? Because I think I’m a big deal.
That’s something I need to keep recognizing and repenting of right away. I feel proud of myself and my team directly after it’s done. But when I am with my peers later in the day or in the week, I feel like I am someone more worthy than I was a few days ago—because sports somehow validated my identity. And that’s how I diagnose pride. When I’m outside the competitive space, among my peers, do I let team success make me feel vindicated in the eyes of others?
6. Is it prideful to want to be the best on my team?
“You say practice is about others and not ourselves. So is it okay for a Christian to work hard to be the best on their team while still giving the glory to God? Or is it prideful to want to be the best, even if we give God the glory for the opportunity to work that hard?”
Let me add some clarity. Practice is about more than you, but certainly not less than you.
You absolutely should walk into practice focused on getting better. Part of what it means to glorify God in practice is to go through the reps as if you were doing it for the Lord. And that means there needs to be a good amount of focus on what you are doing. But what I’m arguing for in that chapter is a new metric in your athletic life. In practice, begin to notice others and actually see them, just like Jesus did.
So no, it isn’t inherently prideful to want to be the best. It becomes prideful when we want to be the best because the “audience of one” we care most about is ourselves.
7. Isn’t giving God the glory the right way to deflect praise?
“In Chapter 1, you talk about prideful redirection. You said the right way to handle praise is to get the attention off yourself. But when people praise and congratulate you, isn’t giving all glory to God taking it off you and pointing it to God? Isn't that an athlete’s way of telling them to stop praising them and praise God instead?”
Can I be honest? I wish I hadn’t put that part in the book the way I did. It’s been confusing for a lot of people, because the picture in my head when I wrote it came from a few particular situations where I made assumptions about people’s motives.
What you’re describing is redirection, and it absolutely glorifies God. When I talk about prideful redirection, I mean a heart posture where the athlete says one thing—pointing the praise toward God—while believing in their heart that they’re still a big deal and deserve people’s praise. It’s not something that you can really detect from the outside looking in. It takes a growing sense of self awareness. But the truth is, very few of us will actually be put in a situation where this scenario would play itself out.
8. How do I keep the crowd from worshiping me?
“What would it look like for an athlete to get the crowd to stop worshiping them, the way Paul and Barnabas did?”
Let’s make a distinction first. In Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas were being worshiped as gods. Modern athletics sometimes elevates athletes to elite status in our culture, but hardly godlike. Still, I like the question, so I’ll play along. Two answers worth considering.
First, you can refrain from pumping up the crowd and egging them on. Let them do what they are going to do, and keep bringing your motivation back to honoring God without allowing the noise dictate your momentum.
Second, here’s what I tell my runners when people talk about how well the team is doing: Smell the perfume, but don't drink it. And I get that from Proverbs 25, which warns that honey is good, but too much of it will make you sick (vv. 16, 27). What’s the point? It feels good when people affirm us, but we just need to make sure we’re not letting it go to our head and feeding our pride.
9. Shouldn’t God come first and sports second?
“In Chapter 14, you talk about changing our focus after we retire. Why don’t we put our focus on God while we are playing our sport? Why can’t we put God first and have sports be the other thing we do?”
This is a good conversation to have, because it gets at priorities. I think you’re asking, “Shouldn’t we make God our number one priority right now, while we’re playing, and let sport come second?”
Here’s my response: God shouldn’t just be our number one priority and after that we move on to numbers two and three. God should always be the priority. And whatever we do—sports, work, relationships, church involvement, or yard work—those are the spaces where we continually learn how to honor him and live out what it looks like for Him to be THE priority in that specific context.
What it all means
10. If two Christians both pray to win, what is God doing?
“If two Christian athletes both believe God is guiding them to success, but only one can win, how should they understand God’s role in the outcome?”
I know we talk a lot about being blessed when we win in sports. But if you read the Sermon on the Mount, it sure seems like the most blessed people are the losers of the world. So I would start with a few questions:
Is it possible that losing can actually be more of a blessing than winning?
What is it about winning that makes us think God’s favor is on it?
Is it possible that God can be glorified and honored through both outcomes at the same time? That in His foreknowledge, He knew what was best for one athlete was to win and for the other to lose, and He brought them together on that particular day to accomplish both ends at once?
At the end of the day, I think we falsely assume God’s favor rests on the victor. And I think we have a bigger God than that. So, both athletes can believe God is guiding them to success—but one of those athletes will inevitably be wrong. And God will still use the result for both of their good and His glory.
11. Is trusting God’s plan just a way of forcing meaning onto pain?
“How do we distinguish between trusting his plan and simply trying to find meaning in something that may never make sense to us?”
I’ve been studying Moses in Exodus, and I think he gives us a good example of how to do this well. Especially early in his calling to be God’s spokesperson, Moses was confused about what God was up to. But he also trusted God. And he was also confused. And he also trusted God.
It was this constant back-and-forth, where both realities existed at the same time. But Moses was honest about both before God, and it led to a beautiful relationship between them.
I know that might feel like an unsatisfying answer. But I think honestly holding both in tension before God is actually the point because it draws us closer to him by inviting Him into the pain.
12. How do I know sport is what God wants me to give my time to?
“With so many opportunities and gifts in life, how do we know that sports specifically are what God wants us to give our time to, so that we can become excellent in them?”
I will answer that, but first I want to point out that I don’t think the pursuit of excellence is the highest good of sport. I think sport’s highest good is that it’s a good gift from God that we get to enjoy as humans. And a lot of people enjoy sports!
But, can we be honest? A lot of them also stink at them.
So to your question. If you enjoy your sport—and God has created you with a physical body and the coordination to play it better than most—I think it’s fair to say this: for most people, it’s a wise use of your time to keep showing up in spaces where your passions and giftings collide.
How we respond
13. How is the daily grind of practice an act of worship?
“Most athletes spend far more time in practice than in competition, and practice is often where motivation fades because no one is watching and nothing is on the line. How should a Christian athlete think about the daily grind of practice as an act of worship?”
Worship begins with attention to God’s presence. I mention this in the book, that I can be singing in church while my thoughts are on my fantasy football team. It looks like worship, because I’m doing the right things externally, but my heart isn’t focused on God.
So in the daily grind of practice, worship looks like continually finding ways to remember and recognize that God is present, and that He wants relationship with you in those moments.
14. How do I balance my freedom with a teammate’s conscience?
“In Chapter 10, you define giving glory to God as ‘thinking and acting in a way that pleases God and draws attention to who he is.’ In light of passages like Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8:7–13, which talk about differing consciences among Christians, how do you balance personal liberty with the responsibility not to cause others to stumble? Especially in a team setting, where your decision in a gray area affects teammates who might see it differently?”
Sometimes glorifying God means confidently exercising the freedom we have in Christ. Other times, it means voluntarily surrendering that freedom for the sake of someone else. And when those two come into tension, love should be the deciding factor.
That’s why I think Galatians 5:13 is such a helpful summary of the whole conversation: “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.”
For some of you wondering what this question is getting at, imagine this scenario:
There is one Christian athlete who has no personal conviction against a particular genre of music. One of their teammates, though, finds that music spiritually troubling because of its content or associations. The first athlete may have the freedom to listen to it, but insisting on playing it in the locker room simply because they have that freedom misses the larger calling to love their teammate. In this case, choosing different music isn’t a compromise of conviction—it’s an expression of love.
At the same time, voluntarily limiting our freedom is different from letting someone else control our conscience. Christian maturity involves both. It’s being willing to sacrifice our preferences for others, and learning not to make our personal preferences the standard for everyone else.
This is especially relevant in competitive sports, where teammates come from different churches, families, and theological traditions. A healthy Christian team should be a place where athletes can develop personal convictions without feeling pressured to conform to every teammate's convictions.
It also offers a powerful contrast to the culture of competitive athletics. Sports often teach us to assert our rights and put ourselves first. But the gospel calls us to a radically different posture. The gospel declares I may have every right to do this, but I love my teammate enough to choose otherwise.
15. How do I prepare for life after sports during my final season?
“As a college athlete approaching the end of my soccer career, how can I prepare myself now for life after sports so that I’m not caught off guard when it ends, while still pursuing excellence, competing to win, and making the most of my final season?”
First, you can prepare all you want, but for many athletes who love playing and competing, retirement is still a shock to the system.
Maybe this isn’t the advice you are looking for, but this is what I would tell myself as a college senior: Spend less time right now focusing on what’s next, and more time being fully present in practice and competition. Soak it all in and enjoy it while you have it. I would remind myself not to get so focused on what the transition will look like that you miss the chance to be fully present in a sport you enjoy. College athletics is a gift few people get to experience so steward it well as long as you can.
Then, when your sport is done, there is a helpful book a friend of mine (Jonathan VanHorn) wrote called The SHIFT. It’s geared toward helping college and pro athletes make the transition from sport to the rest of life.
Post Classroom Reflection
Underneath almost every one is the same question: Does God care about what’s happening to me in my sport, and how do I honor him in it?
It’s a great question. And it’s the question that drove me to write the book they are currently reading. Their questions reminded me that the modern day athlete still isn’t content with a faith that shows up only when the competition is over. They want a faith that informs everything they do as an athlete—from the bench, to the film room, through the bad game, and all the way to the last competition of their career. And the good news for them is that God wants that for them. Christian athlete, there are answers to your questions and your wonderings. Keep asking.
