Being a coach for many years you recognize the boundary lines that are drawn in the midst of rules. The field isn’t any size you want, the number of players on the field at any given point in time has a requirement. You can’t pick up the basketball and run with it, you have to dribble (with one hand). The idea that there are rules that each team needs to abide by are such a given that for the most part, people don’t question the rules. The enforcement definitely, but no one sits there and argues that my freedom is taken away by only allowing 5 players on a basketball court.
In the course of my time coaching there is witness to a wide variety of ways in which a team lives in the rules but executes freely in the midst of a well-defined system.
You and I as parents set up systems in our homes when we have children. They can’t do everything they want, it’s reasonable and exceptionally useful for them to learn how to comply with whatever order we have laid out for them. At some point in life, they will have teachers, coaches, employers who will do the same for them.
Now if you were the originator of the universe, who planned everything to function in a certain order, would it be a good idea to come to some understanding about the way things work best or is it better to dive headlong into breaking as many rules as possible to your own self-obsessed ends?
I love watching small children play games and make rules. When some kid decides to make up a new rule have you ever seen them make up a rule that gives the advantage to their sibling? Rival? It usually goes like “everyone wearing a green shirt gets to go first.” Guess who has the green shirt?
God’s law is not just some code for the sake of compliance and punishment. God didn’t flip a coin to decide Lying/Truth telling? Heads it is, we’ll go with truth telling. God’s law is a reflection of who he is, God asks us not to lie because he doesn’t lie. Were invited to align who we are with who he is. When we lived aligned with him, everything in life would go better, except we live in a world where many others are choosing to lie too. Now we have to be truth tellers when other people get to lie, that’s sometimes tough.
Nevertheless, the invitation is to think the way David thought who loved God’s law, meditated on it day and not. Not for the sake being a book nerd or arrogant in regard to the law, but for the sake of truly knowing the God who has put this universe into existence and knows the best way for people to live in it. There is freedom in sports because everyone can’t do whatever they want. Gods’ world works the same kind of way, yet there is a lot of fist shaking. Live in the freedom of the game.
Truth, Grace, and Time 