Can’t Get to the Parking Lot Fast Enough

For a long time, I’ve been telling people competitive sports are incompatible with Christianity. In America, this is like saying God himself is evil, because American men almost literally worship athletes, and the sports industry is their church. It makes people very angry. It really upsets the guys who have the mistaken impression that football is a great tool for building good Christians.

It is true, however. Our sick, deranged obsession with sports comes to us from the Greeks. They also exalted athletes and even treated them as gods after their victories. The Greeks were not Christians. This should be obvious. They worshiped childish false gods and decorated their front yards with statues featuring permanent erections, and they considered these statues sacred, not unlike the bizarre nudes found in many Catholic churches.

Today I got some wonderful confirmation.

I dreamed I was back in prep school. I was in history class. My teacher was Mr. Thomas. He taught me in ninth grade. Now that I think about it, he was the football coach.

Mr. Thomas was not a very nice guy. He wasn’t extremely abusive, but he was an angry leftist, and he was a little bit of a bully. Example: students complained that he kneed football players because he didn’t believe they were wearing protection.

I just realized how odd it was that he was a sports coach. He was about 5’7″ and maybe 260.

In the dream, I had already graduated from high school and college. For some reason, I was repeating high school.

You can imagine how much interest I had in my second tour. I didn’t need another high school diploma, so I had no reason to do any work or show up at school.

Mr. Thomas had given us a novel to read. It was about a Revolutionary War hero. Fiction. He had told us to write term papers about it. Odd, but this was a dream.

The paper was due the next day. I had done nothing whatsoever. I felt I had to do something by the next day in order to avoid failing. That was all I cared about. I was not interested in writing a good paper. I just didn’t want to be yelled at.

I was in the classroom with the other students, but Mr. Thomas was not there. He was late. I decided to take the time to use my laptop to see if I could learn anything about the guy in the book.

I searched the web very quickly. I made the mouse fly. I went to site after site. I made a lot of typing errors, so I went to sites that were not helpful. One site had something to do with sex. It showed a realistic cartoon lady who was wearing a short transparent nightgown with nothing underneath, and she was evidently familiar with a practice attributed to people from Brazil.

Somehow, my classmates were able to see what I was doing on a huge display. I told them I had gone to the dirty website by accident. In case they were wondering.

At my school, we had an unwritten rule, and the rule was that if a teacher was late, we could leave after a certain amount of time. I think it was 20 minutes. We got tired of waiting for Mr. Thomas.

A security guard came in. He was dressed more or less like a cop. He was a nice guy. A little nerdy. Glasses and a short beard. He wore an old-fashioned police hat.

We told him what was going on, and he told us to go home.

I was thrilled. Best news I could have asked for. I got up to leave.

My desk was like an elementary school desk in that it had a lid on hinges. It was bigger, of course. I opened it and saw that it was full of my belongings. I couldn’t take them home in one load.

By now, the guard had turned into a custodian. He wore a grey shirt with his name on the left breast pocket. Somehow I knew his name was Zeke. Ezekiel.

I asked Zeke if he or someone else would be around to let me into the room later to get my stuff. He said someone would be there.

I didn’t expect to return. I wondered if Mr. Thomas was dead. I guess he is, now.

When I woke up, I didn’t know whether the dream meant anything or not, so I prayed for revelation.

What is high school for? It prepares you for employment, and if you’re ambitious, it prepares you for self-exaltation in a prestigious, lucrative occupation. My school always sent a big percentage of students to Ivy League and Ivy-League-adjacent schools, and a lot of them went on to make big money.

In the dream, I had no ambition at all. Why would I? I didn’t need money, and the thought of getting a job and having to work was horrifying to me, as returning to prison would horrify an ex-con. This is my attitude in real life, as it should be. God has, with extraordinary generosity and patience, given me an easy life. Also, I know from past experience that no matter where I work, I will be blackballed, cheated, robbed, and undermined. Satan runs that world. It even happened to me at church. It’s part of Satan’s world.

The purpose of the dream was to get me thinking about ambition and to confirm that my attitude toward it was a gift from God.

I went to the Bible and the web to look around.

God expressly condemns ambition in many verses. I was relieved to see that.

Let’s start with Galatians 5. Look it up, and you will see that selfish ambition is a work of the flesh. The Greek word for it is eritheia.

Before you hit the keyboard and tell me that wanting to be a preacher or something similar is not a selfish ambition, let me point out that it very often is. Preaching is a great job. It can make you a millionaire, and you never have to do anything right. You can keep teaching things that don’t work, and when your victims complain that their lives aren’t getting better, you just tell them they’re not doing it right, or you say it’s an attack of the devil, and they will keep giving you money. This even works if you are caught in a motel room with a prostitute after getting another preacher removed from the pulpit for adultery.

Priests are often ambitious. Same for cardinals. Popes are often glory hounds; look at Francis. It’s not just a Protestant problem.

At Trinity Church in Miami, there was a young man called Chino. After I left Trinity and moved on to a church called New Dawn, Chino visited. He had decided to become a preacher.

He delivered a sermon which got people very stirred up. I thought it was pretty bad. Other people were cheering and clapping.

After the service, a friend of mine told me he had heard a preacher named Jabin Chavez recite the same sermon, nearly word-for-word.

Chino had been indoctrinated by a prosperity church run by a con artist with a family made up largely of con artists. He saw that the preacher lived in a mansion on Golden Beach with a yacht tied up out back. He saw a chance to get his own mansion, so he stole a sermon.

I only single Chino out because I don’t want to type dozens of similar stories, which I could easily do.

What does this have to do with sports? It should be obvious.

Sports are driven by ambition. They’re also driven by gambling, but on a personal level, they are driven by personal ambition.

In sick America, athletes get crazy favor. They get sex with all sorts of very attractive girls and women who won’t have anything to do with non-athletes. They get a grotesque amount of admiration. They get scholarships. They get good grades without doing their own work. They get all sorts of wealth. When they’re young, they get cars and paychecks for no-show jobs. They get bribes from colleges. They end up with free college degrees. Some become professionals and make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The police turn a blind eye to their violent crimes. It’s a cushy existence.

Don’t tell me there is no personal ambition in team sports. If you want your team to do well, great, but you wouldn’t be playing if it didn’t benefit you.

The word eritheia can be used to describe a lot of things. Selfish ambition. Strife. Rivalry. Factionalism. It has been used to describe people who campaign for political office. It describes doing a job purely for mercenary reasons.

Competitive sports promote all of these things. It’s about exalting yourself and abasing others. It’s about division. You or your team against the other guy or guys.

What happens at an athletic event? One person or team leaves in celebration, with memories that will bring them joy all the days of their lives. The other leaves in painful disgrace. Don’t let anyone tell you different. No one goes home thinking, “I played the game ethically. That makes me a winner.” That never happens.

Losers regret their losses all their lives. They fear losing. Many athletes throw up before competitions. Many beat their wives and girlfriends when they lose. They suffer depression. They are often condemned by teammates, relatives, coaches, and fans. These days, “goat” is used to mean “Greatest Of All Time,” but it originally meant an athlete who caused a loss.

If you win an Olympic gold medal, you may go on to extremely lucrative endorsements and appearances. If you win a silver, you end up teaching gym to high school students. Then you spend the rest of your life watching the gold medal people, wishing you weren’t a loser. Blaming yourself. Wondering what you could have done differently. Reliving moments when you made bad choices.

These principles apply to all types of competition. Shooting for a promotion your coworkers also want. Winning an election. Competing with another business. Ambition is divisive.

Don’t tell me we should apply these principles to Christianity, too, because Yeshua said he came to divide. Not true. Yeshua came to divide wrong-thinking people from the righteous. He didn’t come to pit the righteous against the righteous.

Romans 2 says God will render to every man according to his deeds:

To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life:

But unto them that are contentious [eritheias], and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath,

Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile

Second Corinthians 12:20:

For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I would, and that I shall be found unto you such as ye would not: lest there be debates, envyings, wraths, strifes [eritheiai], backbitings, whisperings, swellings, tumults

From the list of works of the flesh in Galatians 5:20:

Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife [eritheia], seditions, heresies. . .

Philippians 1:16-17:

The one preach Christ of contention [eritheia], not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds:

But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.

Philippians 2:3-5:

Let nothing be done through strife [eritheia] or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.

Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus

If you want to see more references, click on this link to a reference site.

It all makes sense. What was the iniquity that got Lucifer expelled from heaven? Ambition. He wanted to compete with God, not because he thought God was wrong and wanted to save others from God, but because he wanted power and admiration.

Ambition is self-exaltation, and God hates self-exaltation. There are endless verses that show this. Here is one: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

To be ambitious is to keep yourself under a curse and make God himself fight you. If you’re a parent, it can destroy your descendants. My dad’s ambition helped destroy my sister, and it harmed me greatly.

Proper Christians don’t compete. They build each other up.

God has shown me how important it is to know your place and love it. I should be glad I get to submit to God. My wife should be glad wives have to submit to husbands. My son should be glad he has to submit to God and his parents.

There are people who have more than I do. Well, God bless them. They generally work hard, which I do not, and they provide all sorts of benefits. Inventions. Products. Helpful services. I wouldn’t trade places with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Much of the current strife in the world is based on ambition; the desire to elevate oneself above one’s proper place and take that which belongs rightly to others. The vicious people who set cities on fire and topple statues are motivated by ambition. They want what better people have, but they want to remain children and, at heart, murderers and criminals.

Ambition does great harm in the church. Ambitious Christians attack and take down Christians who want to do the right things and spread the truth. They amplify their own voices and smother the voices of better people.

The ambitious do the work of their father. They can wear robes and miters, and they can start big TV ministries and claim they brought millions of people to salvation, but they belong to Satan, and they do what he would do if he were in their shoes.

I’m very happy I had this dream. It means I’m doing better than I thought, and it will help me to avoid catastrophic decisions in the future. It will also help me protect my son from catastrophe when he is old enough to listen to me.

I hope this dream is about the rapture. I concern myself all the time with practical matters. How should I deal with wealth in order to make sure my wife and son always have more than enough? What should I do about various business affairs I loathe working on? What will I do about health insurance next year? Where can I find a good contractor to fix minor issues with the house? I hate this stuff. I would be great to be take out of this world with my brothers and sisters so I can let it all go, like the junk in the drawer in my dream.