In a sermon a few weeks ago I made the offhand remark that parents should teach their children to win with grace and lose with faith.  Elizabeth Gibbons’ thoughtfully asked through e-mail, “I understand winning with grace, but how can we lose with faith?”  This is a great question for us all, and I want to spend the next several columns fleshing out my too brief e-mail answer to Elizabeth’s question.  So thanks, Elizabeth, for listening critically and asking a really helpful question.  In the next several blogs I will cover:

1. Winning with Grace         
2. Having a desire to win
3. Having a worthwhile goal
4. Developing a strategy for winning
5. Taking responsibility with gratitude
6. Losing with Faith
7. Things worth losing
8. Possessing the faith to learn from a loss
9. Winners lose without becoming losers

             Our text for these blogs will be I Corinthians 9:24, “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize?  Run in such a way that you may win.”  This verse is not just about winning at sports but about the importance at winning at life and, in particular, winning at the Christian life. 

 WIN WITH GRACE BY HAVING THE DESIRE TO WIN

            One of my favorite questions to ask ministers in interviews is, “How competitive are you?”  I enjoy asking the question because only about two in a hundred are comfortable with whatever answer they give.  What I’d love to hear is, “I’m competitive.  I like to win.”  Most of them are apologetic about wanting to win, even if they do, as if the desire to win were some kind of a character flaw.  God speaks to us through Paul and makes it clear that Christians are to develop the desire and ability to win at whatever game they enter. 

             Look at 1 Corinthians 9:24 again.  Obviously, running is a command which means it is neither natural nor universal to do so.  You must choose both to enter the race and to run.  It also means that in the games you enter, you are to expend all the energy and effort you have in order to try to win.  For the Christian life, he is saying, “Don’t just get in the race to get a T-shirt, get in to win.”  Today because so many people want everyone to feel affirmed we diminish the importance of winning so no one will feel like a loser when they don’t win.  According to this passage of Scripture, anyone who takes winning casually at marriage, church, school, business, friendship, or following Christ is destined to lose.  We will see in a later column that this doesn’t mean you have to win, but it does mean you must run in order to win. 

             So, do you want to win with grace?  That’s the first step – wanting to.  If you just want to be in the game or if you want someone else to do the hard work and the heavy lifting, stop right now and ask God to give you the desire to run the races in your life in order to win.