Follow Up, Part 2: Looking at the Scoreboard

Jesus says in Luke 6:40 (NLTse) Students are not greater than their teacher. But the student who is fully trained will become like the teacher. Paul echoes this in 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NLTse) saying, So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord–who is the Spirit–makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.

Christianity is not about attending church, or “living a good life” or being “good enough.” It is not about knowing all the right answers in Sunday School class, or having a solid grasp on theology—though none of those things are bad or unhealthy in themselves. When it comes down to it, it is about love: loving God through Jesus Christ, and living out that love for God by loving our neighbor as yourself.

Grace, mercy, compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience, bearing one another’s burdens, forgiveness, are not properly learned through reading, listening to good sermons, or by reading Scripture. You cannot pray your way into these qualities. You can learn a lot about them by those means. Scripture may tell you where you need to grow and that those qualities look like, prayer may be a way by which we repent that we do not have those qualities yet, or express that we want those qualities in greater measure. But they do not grow them. They come by practice. They are caught, not taught.

In John C. Maxwell’s book, The 17 Laws of Teamwork, Law #11 is “The Law of the Scoreboard.” Simply put, Maxwell asserts that a team needs to know exactly how they are doing if they are going to make the right choices, make the right adjustments to their strategy, and decide on effective counters to surmount obstacles if they are going to succeed. In sports, the scoreboard gives the objective and impartial reality of how you are doing.

One of the “scoreboards” that God provides us to see just how well we are doing at learning to love others the way He loves us is by connecting us to people who are broken, lost, and outcast.

I think this gets to the heart of the matter of why we are so often afraid to relate to the broken, the lost, and the outcast. We are afraid of what it will show us about ourselves. We may think we are gracious because we are with our friends. We may believe we are loving because we are well loved by those who love us. We may think we are clearly reflecting Christ because we are living a “good moral” life. But when we are put in a position where we are relating to a person who is, for instance struggling with pornography, drugs, alcohol, cutting, or struggling with a particular brand of sin, we find out very quickly just how much like Christ we really are. Jesus says in Matthew 5:46-48 (NLTse)

If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Loving people like Rachael and Michelle who I mentioned in A Tale of Three Women, make me take a good long look in the mirror. It is as if God is saying to me, “Do you want to know what it is like for me to love you Dan, then love these children of mine.” I have to be honest, I do not always like what I see. I often leave these encounters convicted of my own pride. I shake my head thinking how I missed opportunities to share grace and mercy. I see how ungrateful I am in light of God’s love and grace for me. We don’t like seeing the scoreboard, so we do what we can to avoid it.

But on the other side of things, in being willing to love people like Rachael and Michelle, God has helped me grow in humility, meekness, grace, mercy, and compassion in ways both broad and deep that I never see outside of being in such relationships.

I have been learning that I need to listen closely for God’s leading on the truth that He wants shared with them, for the discretion to know what to speak and what not to speak, and to trust Him to bring help, healing, and hope in His way and in His time, not mine. My place is to care. His place is to cure. These lessons have improved my love for my wife and daughters, and they have made me a more effective pastor in my church. In short, the gain far outweighs the pain of being willing to be look up at the scoreboard.