God's Coaching #346

God's Coaching #346

Imagine if you had to watch sports without saying a word. That wouldn’t be much fun, would it? How would you celebrate a great play or yell at the referees for a bad call? Admit it: you’ve yelled—or, at the very least, complained—at a referee’s call while watching a game on TV. Maybe you’ve even done it while attending a game in person. It doesn’t matter what sport—we’ve all done it.

Some people get really creative at what they yell at a referee. Simply booing isn’t enough for these folks. See if any of these examples sound familiar:

• “Hey, ref, if you had one more eye, you’d be a Cyclops!”

• “Hey, ref, how much is the other team paying you?”

• “My grandmother sees better than you!”

And so on . . .

What’s the Score?

Yep, we can get pretty creative (and unkind) when we are convinced a referee has blown a call. Why do we act this way? Do we really think that we know better than referees, even though they are highly trained professionals who typically make the call a few feet from the play? If you think about it that way, it sounds kind of silly.

But pride makes us act silly. We often think we know more than we do. Compared to God, or to referees, our knowledge is extremely limited. We don’t even know what will happen to us one minute from now. God is omniscient, or all-knowing. First John 3:20 says, “He knows everything.” He never learns or forgets. He never scratches his head while trying to remember something. His knowledge never changes. This is a critically important truth for us to understand. If we believe our knowledge is superior to God’s, or at least is sufficient without him in certain situations, we could easily argue that we don’t need God. But that would be a terrible error that would harm our lives in countless ways.

The more we understand that God is all-knowing, the better off we will be. It will help us worship him and trust him. It will help us persevere through difficult trials. It will give us hope for the present and the future. And it might even help us forgive referees.

On the Ball

Next time you’re at the library, try to count how many books there are. Then consider this: all the knowledge in those books is only a small fraction of what God knows.

Coach’s Comment

He knows everything. 1 John 3:20