Playing by the Rules
A friend of mine, who is a member of the church in another town, talked me into signing up to be an official (“referee”) for high school football. So, I signed up and am having a lot of fun with it. There are many rules to the game of football. (I have a whole book to prove it.) Those rules are what make the game worth watching. When the teams play according to the rules, everyone has an enjoyable experience – the fans, the players, the coaches, the officials. It’s when the players don’t play by the rules that the game becomes taxing. Think back to your childhood for a minute when you or one of your friends decided to make the rules instead of having an objective standard of play for everyone. Basically what happens is that your “game” devolves into a shouting match and free-for-all. No one knows what is happening anymore, and people stop playing because it is too confusing.
The same thing can happen with religion. The Bible gives us a set of “rules,” if you will, (they are really commandments) that we should follow so that we may have unity. When we don’t follow the Lord’s “rules” then we create disunity, we have shouting matches, and people stop “playing” because of the confusion. So many today want to do whatever they want in religion, and this is what creates the difficulties. Instead of seeking to please ourselves, we ought to be seeking to please God. The apostle Paul wrote, “Finally then, brethren, we urge and exhort in the Lord Jesus that you should abound more and more, just as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God” (1 Thessalonians 4:1). This ought to be our aim while playing the “game of life.”