(Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash)
One of my favorite traditions in the world of college football is that of neutral site rivalry games. That’s something that is so unique in sports, and you really don’t have a lot of examples of other sports doing anything similar.
Occasionally you’ll have a college basketball game on a battleship or on a military base somewhere around the world, which is cool, and you’ve recently had Major League Baseball games on single-use fields on military installations in the country, but I’m talking about recurring, annual events between the same two teams that are not held on either team’s campus. And no, the frequent Clemson/Bama championship games don’t count.
My favorite of these, for obvious reasons, is the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party (and yes, I will call it that), the annual game between the University of Georgia Bulldogs and the University of Florida Gators on the banks of the St. John’s River in Jacksonville, FL. That is one of the coolest environments in the world for a football game, and the only place outside of Sanford Stadium that I would regularly enjoy watching the Dawgs play.
But another great neutral site rivalry is the classic Red River Shootout, another name that’s been sanitized by media in recent years. This legendary rivalry takes place every year in Dallas, TX at the old Cotton Bowl Stadium as part of the Texas State Fair. The opponents: Texas and Oklahoma.
Much like Georgia-Florida, the Texas-Oklahoma rivalry is rather heated and transcends the stadium it takes place in. It extends to every sport, every alum, every day of the year. There have been violent altercations and disputes over game results and all manner of nastiness shared between these two teams over the years.
The 1999 edition of the Red River Shootout, however, happens to hold one of my favorite stories from the annals of college football. It was a game that would ultimately be a Who’s Who in college football, with Mack Brown and Bob Stoops as the head coaches and Mike Leach and Tom Herman serving as two of the assistants on opposing sides.
Leach is really the focus of this story, too, because he is the one who created a fake play script to fool the Texas staff into thinking they knew what was coming. Because of that fake script, the Longhorn defense wound up giving up 17 unanswered points to Oklahoma in the first quarter alone.
Menus and fake play sheets. Paper truly is a steer’s greatest enemy. (Photo by Thomas Evans on Unsplash)
Texas would go on to win the game, astoundingly, but not until after trailing their bitterest rival in a down year.
Sometimes, you just have to get it right.
The Texas coaches thought they had a great plan, they thought they’d been handed a cheat-sheet, but in reality they had been duped.
It was one time when they really should have been more careful and just stuck to what they knew.
I’m going to throw out an insanely obvious, and likely somewhat cheesy, segue now and say that there are often times in life where we just have to get things right. There can be no room for error.
One of those areas where we just have to get it right is when we talk about sin.
Now, it isn’t popular to talk about sin. And I’m not surprised. Who wants to have someone walking up behind them at work and saying, “Hey. Genius. You’re doing that wrong.” Then multiply that by a few factors and you’ve got the conversation surrounding sin.
“Hey. Genius. You’re doing life wrong. You know, that thing you’ve been doing your whole life? You’re doing it wrong.”
People don’t like to talk about sin, and I don’t blame them for that, but that doesn’t give us a pass on discussing it.
In all honesty, the Bible is actually pretty clear on what is sinful behavior and what isn’t. And it’s not just behaviors. There are sinful attitudes and sinful thoughts and sinful mindsets. Sometimes, it isn’t even about what we do. It’s about what we don’t do. Not doing something can be a sin, too.
I’m not really going to talk about individual sins right now, just the concept in general and how we talk about it.
The first mistake we can make is to just not talk about sin. Remember when I said that sometimes the things we don’t do can be counted as sin? Similar concept.
If we just ignore sin in our own lives, in other people’s lives, and in the world around us, then we are doing everyone a disservice. One of the most popular complaints against Christians in our world today is that we don’t do enough to combat injustice in the world.
But no matter what people tell you, blindly swinging a sword around isn’t justice, either. We’d generally call that murder. (Photo by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird on Unsplash)
That’s a failure to address sin! God hates injustice. Now, we can disagree at times on what really are injustices. When I was a kid, I thought that any time my parents punished me it was an injustice. Just because someone shouts “Injustice!”, that doesn’t necessarily mean that an injustice is taking place.
However, the possibility that someone is wrong about injustice doesn’t get us off the hook. We need to examine the situation and decide for ourselves, based on what we know of God’s heart and Scripture, whether or not there really is an injustice at play. And then we need to faithfully speak out against injustice when we see it and recognize it.
I know that’s a huge responsibility. It can be daunting to feel that you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. At the very least, pray for justice. If you don’t know for sure what justice looks like, pray that God will be just. But if you do know, then you need to act accordingly.
Talking about sin is one thing, but getting it right is another altogether. The second mistake we can make regarding sin is to lie about it.
It is so tempting, isn’t it, to say kind, soothing things about sin. It is so tempting to make people feel at ease with their sin. Because, again, nobody wants to talk about sin. It’s uncomfortable and awkward and people won’t like you if you do.
But we can’t lie about it!
Then this message came to me from the Lord: “Son of man, prophesy against the false prophets of Israel who are inventing their own prophecies. Say to them, ‘Listen to the word of the Lord. This is what the Sovereign Lord says: What sorrow awaits the false prophets who are following their own imaginations and have seen nothing at all!’
“O people of Israel, these prophets of yours are like jackals digging in the ruins. They have done nothing to repair the breaks in the walls around the nation. They have not helped it to stand firm in battle on the day of the Lord. Instead, they have told lies and made false predictions. They say, ‘This message is from the Lord,’ even though the Lord never sent them. And yet they expect him to fulfill their prophecies! 7 Can your visions be anything but false if you claim, ‘This message is from the Lord,’ when I have not even spoken to you?
“Therefore, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Because what you say is false and your visions are a lie, I will stand against you, says the Sovereign Lord. I will raise my fist against all the prophets who see false visions and make lying predictions, and they will be banished from the community of Israel. I will blot their names from Israel’s record books, and they will never again set foot in their own land. Then you will know that I am the Sovereign Lord.
“This will happen because these evil prophets deceive my people by saying, ‘All is peaceful’ when there is no peace at all! It’s as if the people have built a flimsy wall, and these prophets are trying to reinforce it by covering it with whitewash! Tell these whitewashers that their wall will soon fall down. A heavy rainstorm will undermine it; great hailstones and mighty winds will knock it down. And when the wall falls, the people will cry out, ‘What happened to your whitewash?’
“Therefore, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will sweep away your whitewashed wall with a storm of indignation, with a great flood of anger, and with hailstones of fury. I will break down your wall right to its foundation, and when it falls, it will crush you. Then you will know that I am the Lord. At last my anger against the wall and those who covered it with whitewash will be satisfied. Then I will say to you: ‘The wall and those who whitewashed it are both gone. They were lying prophets who claimed peace would come to Jerusalem when there was no peace. I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken!’”
Ezekiel 13:1-16 (NLT)
I know that was a long passage, so let me summarize. God is mad at false prophets who have been telling the people in Jerusalem, “Peace, Peace! There is nothing but peace between us and God! Everything is okay!” But then in the very last verse there, God explicitly says, “…there was no peace.” Judea had been sinning against God for decades, and God kept warning them that He was getting tired of it.
I may have mentioned recently that I’ve been reading through the Bible in order for a while now, and so much of the Old Testament is about this very issue. So many of the Old Testament prophets are saying, “Hey, guys. God isn’t happy with us. Y’all need to get your act together. (Paraphrase)”
But the people chose to listen instead to the false prophets who said, “Naaaaaaah. We’re cool. (Maybe a paraphrase)”
I wonder if any of y’all picked out that phrase “whitewash” in the passage above. When I was a kid, I remember reading in the New Testament where Jesus calls the Pharisees “whitewashed sepulchers. (Matt. 23:27)” I thought that sounded like a good thing, as in “washed as white as snow.” Turns out, whitewash is the exact opposite.
Whitewash is plaster. All that whitewash does is cover things up. So what God was saying here is that the false prophets are trying to build a protective wall of plaster. How well is that going to hold up? Discounting the fact that nothing can stand up to God’s power, I imagine plaster alone has about the worst chance of holding up.
That’s what we are doing if we lie to people and tell them that their sin is okay. That is what we are doing if we choose to make people feel happy about their sin rather than explain to them the truth of what God’s Word says.
Then some of the leaders of Israel visited me, and while they were sitting with me, this message came to me from the Lord: “Son of man, these leaders have set up idols in their hearts. They have embraced things that will make them fall into sin. Why should I listen to their requests? Tell them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: The people of Israel have set up idols in their hearts and fallen into sin, and then they go to a prophet asking for a message. So I, the Lord, will give them the kind of answer their great idolatry deserves. I will do this to capture the minds and hearts of all my people who have turned from me to worship their detestable idols.’”
Ezekiel 14:1-5 (NLT)
Now here’s the thing. Sometimes, we aren’t actually the one to blame. If we are honest with people and they don’t really want to hear what we have to say, that’s on them.
The leaders of Israel went to see the prophet Ezekiel, but they weren’t really all that interested in hearing what he had to say, or what the Lord had to say. It was an obligation to them. Elsewhere in Ezekiel, the sinful people of Jerusalem are described as seeking out Ezekiel for entertainment rather than instruction.
Ultimately, people are responsible for their own actions, but we have to be sure that we are delivering the truth to them all the same.
Fact is, God holds us responsible if we don’t deliver the truth.
Once again a message came to me from the Lord: “Son of man, give your people this message: ‘When I bring an army against a country, the people of that land choose one of their own to be a watchman. When the watchman sees the enemy coming, he sounds the alarm to warn the people. Then if those who hear the alarm refuse to take action, it is their own fault if they die. They heard the alarm but ignored it, so the responsibility is theirs. If they had listened to the warning, they could have saved their lives. But if the watchman sees the enemy coming and doesn’t sound the alarm to warn the people, he is responsible for their captivity. They will die in their sins, but I will hold the watchman responsible for their deaths.’
“Now, son of man, I am making you a watchman for the people of Israel. Therefore, listen to what I say and warn them for me. If I announce that some wicked people are sure to die and you fail to tell them to change their ways, then they will die in their sins, and I will hold you responsible for their deaths. But if you warn them to repent and they don’t repent, they will die in their sins, but you will have saved yourself.”
Ezekiel 33:1-9
If we know the truth, and we don’t tell people, then we are partly responsible for what happens to them. How does that hit you?
God has called us to be Watchmen. Not like the magazine that those people will leave at your doorstep after you hear them knocking and then pretend you’re not home. But God has called us to keep an eye out for the people He has entrusted to us. He has called us to share the truth with people.
If we know the truth, and we refuse to share it, then we are neglecting the needs of those around us. It is just like if we went driving through the desert with a 15-gallon tank of water, but we passed every thirsty soul we saw without offering aid.
We have the resources to provide people with hope, and part of that starts with being open and honest about what sin is and what we can do about it.