Champion Mentality
At this point, we are into the second round of the NBA playoffs after a crazy season of stoppages, playing in a bubble away from all family and friends, social change, and COVID-19. This playoff season has been like none other before it’s time. Whoever, is declared champion at the end of this season, in my opinion, truly deserves all the honor.
When you watch sports you realize that every team, no matter what the previous years have looked like, every team wants to be a champion. Every team wants to raise that trophy at the end of the year, or every team wants to say that they were the best. If you’ve been in sports then you know that feeling as well. And it doesn’t even just have to be sports. If you’re involved in anything that involves some sort of competition, you know what that feeling is like to want to be the best or to be declared a champion. However, to be a champion it takes more than just going to practice and wishful thinking. To be a champion, you have to think like a champion.
And it’s no different in our relationship with God. If we want to be the best man or woman of God we can be, it takes a different way of thinking than a lot of people every get at. We’ve got to think like a champion and ask the question, “What would a Champion do?” When it comes to your faith, are you thinking like a champion? Here are 4 mindsets that a champion carries with them:
1. A Champion Understands the Value of Evaluation
I can remember being a kid and I played lots of sports growing up right. I played basketball. Then my dad really wanted me to play baseball as well, so I played baseball for awhile and then, before you know it, it’s also football season, so I would join football, but never really stuck it out with that, but it was just what everyone does, you know. You just play whatever sport is in season. And as a kid, I loved PE class in school where you could take a week playing all sorts of different things. And then I got to Middle School and suddenly there was no more PE and I was devastated!
But there was this shift as I got older playing sports when suddenly there was a prize to win at the end of the season. Like when we were kids, everyone at the end of the season got a participation trophy or medal and there was never really a champion ever declared. You only celebrated your team. And at the end of the season, you would get together with all the parents and they would bring everyone juices boxes and orange slices, right. But, sports got serious when championships were on the line.
And I can remember that once you started playing in high school, everything was evaluated from the game before. There was a part of practice that became all about watching film and seeing what mistakes were made and trying correct those mistakes. In college, it became even more intensified. Everything was watched and looked at and scrutinized so that we could get better.
What I’ve noticed is that Christians that take growth steps take honest evaluation of their life. When it comes to our spiritual walk with Christ, when we take time to evaluate where were at with God, it allows us to take serious steps towards becoming more like Christ.
Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves. 2 Cor. 13:5 (NLT)
We’re called to evaluate our lives. That’s a championship principle. Look at your life and decide what things are out of place. Prune away things we find no value in. Have you evaluated your life lately? Have you ever evaluated your day? Week? Are you spending enough time with Jesus? What about your Relationships? Friendships? How you date or who you date?
As you begin to evaluate your life, you will notice some things that maybe need to change. You can find value in certain things and other things that are going to be detrimental. So get rid of them. And you’ll be able to find great benefit from making corrections in your life based on your evaluations.
One of the greatest resources we have is the church. God provided the church for us as a way to allow other people into the evaluation process. It’s a huge value to you to allow other people into your life and say to them, “Hey I want you to evaluate my life and point out things that aren’t right.” It’s a lot like having a trainer or a coach in your life. They can help make you better and point out things that you aren’t doing correctly. I hope that you have friends and coaches in your life that you allow to provide constructive criticism in your life to help make you better.
People who take time to evaluate their life take huge steps in their relationship with God. They are the type of people who’s faith is real and they are championing their faith.
2. A champion is ready in-season and out-of-season
As I was saying earlier, I would played different sports all throughout the year. And when it was basketball season, I only played basketball. When it was baseball season, I would never play basketball because it was now baseball season. I only played sports during that sport season. But as I got older things changed. Things got serious when I got to high school and you suddenly had off season preparation. We basketball conditioning during the off season, and then you had summer league, and it became even more intense when I was playing in college. It was all consuming. The best athletes in their sports were guys who wouldn’t take time off during the off season, but would continually practice and make themselves better during the off season.
The same can be said about our spiritual lives. The bible tells us that there is not a season necessarily for the Christian life, but we’re called to be ready in season and out of season. Paul talks about this when he’s writing to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:2:
Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. (ESV)
What Paul is saying is that there is not a season to be ready in the game, and then a season of rest where you can relax and do whatever you want as a Christian, but the championship mindset is to be ready in season and out of season.
I guarantee you that the best teams out there right now are the teams that prepare in the offseason. They’re in the gym lifting weights, they are conditioning, they are working to get better. I saw this in my own athletic career. It was always during the off season that I actually became a better individual player. It was during those times where I could concentrate on my ball handling, or my shot, or my agility and speed. During the season, your too busy focusing on playing as a team and you are running drills and running through plays, so as a player you don’t make a ton of improvements, but it’s in the off season that you still work and continue to get better. You make the greatest improvements in the offseason.
The same is true for you in your faith. You don’t just turn on your faith during worship time at church, or Sunday mornings you suddenly start praying and reading your bibles. The greatest shift in your spiritual walk begins to take place when you realize that you can’t compartmentalize your faith. There’s not a church life and then a Friday Night life. Instead there’s just the Christian life. And we are to be ready in season and out of season. For you, right now is the time for you to recognize this and to become a champion of your faith. There is no off season, but lets be ready at all times.
3. A champion understands that momentum matters
If you’ve been in a game or watched a big game you’ve seen this happen. Things are going great for one team, or one team is struggling, and out of nowhere theres a change in momentum. Someone makes a big play. They hit a big shot, or catch a great pass, or make a great defensive play, and suddenly the momentum shifts.
There can be momentum in your spiritual life as well. Every day there is momentum to the decisions that you make. Every single day you have the ability to start your day with a win. For instance, what do you do first when you wake up in the morning? What if you took some time to read your bible first thing? What if the first thing you did when you woke up was spent time in prayer? Decisions like this are a great way to start your day. It’s like the snowball effect and you will see better decisions build throughout your day when you take intentional steps to make a difference in your day. See, you can’t control all of the things that will come at you throughout the day, but build momentum by taking control of the decisions that you can make that will make a difference. That momentum will carry into your daily life.
I believe some people walk around with the mindset of, “I’ll take God seriously later when I get older, or I have kids. But that creates momentum in the opposite direction for your life. By the time your later rolls around, you’ve created so much negative momentum that it becomes nearly impossible to turn your life back around. You’ve lost too much ground, and it doesn’t work that way.
Think about the decisions you make today and what kind of momentum they create for you down the road. You are creating momentum towards the type of behavior you will exhibit later.
Paul writes about this idea of how our small decisions create momentum in the bible. I want you guys to see this in 1 Corinthians 10:31:
So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. (ESV)
Paul was really emphasizing that its about the the small, basic things in life. That you can make a difference in the way you eat and drink, you can do it for the glory of God. The small decisions that we make throughout a day carry momentum into other decisions that we make along the way. And a champion understands how important momentum is. A champion understands that momentum matters.
4. A champion has a different mindset
Champions think different. Champions look at the world differently. And let me use this illustration to help you guys understand what I mean. If you know anything about the game of basketball then you know that no matter how good of a player you become, you will always be compared to the greatest player of all time, Michael Jordan. No matter how many other great basketball players are out there, whether it’s Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry, KD, Anthony Davis, you name it, they are all compared to the greatness of Michael Jordan. But take a look at this quote from Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Michael Jordan was the greatest, but encountered many failures. But he didn’t let his failures defeat him. In fact, he used his failures as a way of to motivate him. They pushed him forward. And his teammates and coaches would take notice of Michael Jordan’s mindset when it came to failure and believe that it was what made him so great. But this idea of using failure to motivate you doesn’t originate from sports. It’s actually seen all throughout scripture. We see it time and time again how the grace that Jesus offers allows us to press on despite our failures and gives us the opportunity to improve.
Again Paul talks about this idea as well. He knew that he wasn’t perfect and he talks about his shortcomings and his inability to operate as a champion every day, but he talks about how he improved upon it and how his mindset was different.
Philippians 3- 12 Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own; because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. 15 Let those of us who are mature think this way… (ESV).
So what Paul is saying is that there is a veteran mindset. There is a mature mindset that those mature in their faith take where you forget about what took place yesterday and you press on towards tomorrow. A mindset where you forget about the mistakes from yesterday, because God’s grace is new every morning, and God has a prize waiting for us in eternity. So, I want to ask you, “Do you have a championship mindset?” Do you live your life the way Paul says, to forget about yesterday.
It doesn’t matter what your past looks like, because Jesus has made a way. His mercies are new every morning. He grace is made perfect in our weakness. And he has a prize waiting for us on the other side if we will simply press on like a champion.
These mindsets are mindsets that are only true of those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior. If you haven’t made that decision yet, then you are still living in defeat. But you know what, Christ has won the victory already for us as long as we’ve accepted him.
That’s the Championship Mentality of a champion of your faith.
-Pastor Jay Dunston