In July 1961, Vince Lombardi kicked off the first day of training camp for the 38 players on his Green Bay Packers football team. The prior season had ended in a heartbreaking loss to the Philadelphia Eagles after blowing a lead in the 4th quarter of the NFL Championship Game.
When the players came in to start training camp, they expected to immediately begin where they left off and work on ways to advance their game and learn fancy new ways to win the championship in the new season. When they sat down and began, Vince Lombardi held up a football and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football!”
He then had everyone open up their playbooks and start on page one, where they began to learn the fundamentals – blocking, tackling, throwing, catching, etc. That was clearly not what they expected as players who were at the top of their game.
If those elite athletes needed to be reminded of the basics, how much more do we? Of course, in this case, I’m talking about the basics of the Christian life. At our two shelters, Faith Mission and Faith Refuge, we serve men, women and children from every conceivable background. Especially when it comes to their spiritual lives. Maybe you know what I mean when I say that some of them know just enough to be dangerous. In other words, they have heard a lot of things, some of which may not be the truth.
To us, that is the basics or the football if you will. The truth. Jesus said about Himself, I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except by Me.
To us, nothing is more important than sharing the truth from God’s Word about Jesus Christ with everyone we serve. We don’t get too worried about denominations or religious practices. It is all about introducing them to Jesus. With a foundation in Christ, all the other things will get straightened out. But we have to start there. One guy we served put it this way. “I thought I had a drug problem when I came here, but what I really had was a spiritual deficiency. I needed Jesus.”
