The Super Bowl everyone expected

Super Bowl 45 is now in the books.  The Green Bay Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers by a score of 31-25.  It was a very exciting game.  As I said in the title, this was the Super Bowl that everyone expected, and we were not disappointed.

Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers for their victory.  I also wanted to congratulate the Pittsburgh Steelers; great job to get back to the big game again!  They played with great heart.

I love watching the Super Bowl’s postgame.  It was great to hear Greg Jennings declare “to God be the glory” both at the beginning and at the end of his interview.  Some people don’t like it when sports players do that.  But Jennings was practicing Proverbs 3:6, “In all your ways acknowledge him [that is, of course, God].”

Let me take a moment and dash a false perception.  God doesn’t affect the outcome of the game so that the team with the most Christians wins, so they can then glorify Him on the postgame show.  He doesn’t magically make the football bounce a certain way to favor one team over the other. (Furthermore, there are no fickle “football gods” either, as I’ve heard; that’s just lunacy).  The God of the universe has bigger fish to fry.  He has much bigger and much more important things to deal with in the universe than to alter the course of a trivial football game.  A football team wins a game by outplaying the other team, period.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not suggesting that God doesn’t care about football at all.  I thought that Coach Grant Taylor (the main character in the film “Facing the Giants”) put it best.  In one scene in the movie, he is addressing his team, about to make a paradigm shift.  He says, “I’m here to present you with a new team philosophy.  I think that football is just one of the tools we use to honor God.”  “So you think God does care about football?”  A player asked.  “I think He cares about your faith.  He cares about where your heart is.  If you can live your faith out on the football field then, yes, God cares about football because He cares about you.”

Later on in the scene, the coach says, “If we win, we praise Him; and if we lose, we praise Him.”  That’s what Greg Jennings did; he praised God for the win, so kudos to him for doing so.  Now if only more Christians in the NFL would publicly praise God in the midst of a difficult loss.  Pray for God to raise up such bold individuals.

Kevin Bauer

(1 Corinthians 10:31)