“But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” — Matthew 6:33-34

Seeking God First

The give-and-take nature of our society has a significant impact on the sports world, specifically in the area of contracts. Every year, baseball players and teams go through the arbitration process to have an independent party decide how much the players deserve to be paid based on their performance. Players in every sport will hold out, sometimes missing regular-season games. Most of the time, they’re doing so because they feel they deserve a new and improved contract.

One of the dangers of living in our society is that we can start applying this same thought process to our relationship with God. We can find ourselves thinking if we do something for God, God will do something for us in return. The beauty and the challenge of our relationship with God is that it’s based entirely out of unconditional love. We can’t do anything to deserve His grace and can’t do anything to make Him stop loving us. I think that can be really hard to accept sometimes.

Instead of trying to earn anything from God, I want to challenge you to focus instead on trusting Him completely and working to find His will for your life. He knows what’s best for us. We just need to follow His will. When we focus on that, everything else will take care of itself. 

– Joshua Doering

If you would like to submit a reader devotional, please email all submissions to jason@sportsspectrum.com