30 Daily Football Devotionals

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Use this team devotional as a short Bible study or exercise during one of your regular team meetings. For You From the Word The following attachments are devotionals created by Sportsfaith writer Shawn Leibegott to help coaches teach athletes not only about Christ but about important characteristics all athletes should develop. Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. ( Hebrews 3:13, NIV) For You To Think About He added: “The Corinthians refused to take penalties because they believed that if you take a penalty, you accept that cheating is part of football.” BYU officially joins the conference on July 1, 2023, and all of the festivities leading up to Saturday’s big day are deemed “Big Week.” It started Sunday night with players and coaches from BYU’s athletic department speaking inside the Marriott Center for a devotional.

Be Prepared! It’s not about winning, it’s about being prepared. Being prepared is being ready when God opens doors. Having a passion to prepare will help you face the battle as an athlete so that challenges are embraced…never feared. Sitake opened his talk with a “Go Cougs” message to those attending the Marriott Center and later said, “It’s going to be one of those talks.” Paul also explains that believers are called to a personal and passionate commitment to their shared gospel mission. The believer’s life represents their unique and strategic ministry opportunity to serve and grow by making much of Jesus in every circumstance. No one else can do your job of glorifying Jesus with your life. Sanctification depends on humble faith that embraces the actual life that God has given us. After all, “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble” (1 Pet. 5:5). For if anything is clear in Scripture, it is that in sanctification is a community project and there is never any room for pride.

Help us to encourage one another. We do not want our team to become hardened to each other but rather we want to be soft and open to each other so You can use us best. Remind us daily to appreciate the strengths You have placed on this team. Begin with me. I consider football the ultimate team sport, and I cannot help but draw parallels between football, the church, and Christian sanctification. For the Christian, humbly accepting one’s role, trusting your team, and doing your job with all your heart, should have a familiar ring. The apostle Paul describes the church as a unified body with many interdependent parts bound together in a common mission of spiritual war. Paul himself sees a connection as he continues his exhortation to Timothy. After the example of the soldier, Paul moves on to the example of an athlete with the same kind of commendation (2 Timothy 2:5). If the soldier fights with focus, the athlete only wins if he plays by the rules. Both of these examples, along with the painstaking work of a farmer, represent the character that Paul says Timothy should emulate.

And we lie. Human beings are weasels. One researcher claims that the average person tells a lie one out of every five interactions. This study, which broke ground a couple years ago, says that all this lying amounts to us being lied to between 10–200 times daily. Again, this is not really news. Lying has flourished since the fall. But there is something to note about the accessibility of information we experience now. While the influence of faith on football has sometimes been seen as divisive, many of the country’s clubs emerged from church groups, according to Peter Lupson, author of Thank God for Football. Published in 2006, his book charts the religious roots of many big clubs, among them Aston Villa and Barnsley. Jesus sees their doubt. He knows that when we doubt we have a choice between obedience and disobedience. When we doubt, obedience is not not doubting. Sometimes we will have doubts—it is part of the Christian life. Yet when we doubt, do we continue to obey? Do we put ourselves in places where God can continue to speak to us—in our small group, at church, in prayer, in Scripture? Even though the disciples are struggling with doubt, they have already obeyed Jesus by coming to the mountain in Galilee to meet with him. They need help with their unbelief.Looking for opportunities to apply these fundamentals in your life can not only make a difference for you, but it will make a difference in the lives of others. Making disciples takes risk. Relationships are risky. But do you know what? Jesus has given you the authority. And Jesus himself will be with you. The kingdom is coming. As N T Wright notes, “Every time we say the words ‘Our father…’ we are pleading for that day to be soon, and pledging ourselves to work to bring it closer.” Deep Routes contains twenty-one football-related lessons that apply the fundamental principles of American football to the Christian life. It is a daily devotional from a Biblical perspective with a football theme. The author, a professional educator and head football coach, wrote the book about spiritual principles drawn from football situations. It's designed for the sports fan, the young student-athlete, the coach, or as a men's Bible study tool. does care about our lives, and in his infinite wisdom he may cause one outcome or another. As a paraphrase of Proverbs reads, “We toss the coin, but it is the Lord who controls its decision” (Proverbs 16:33 LB). Yet, even beyond the coin toss, a football victory isn’t necessarily an indication that one team lived better or prayed harder. Mr Primus believes the Christian message of ‘love thy neighbour’ can help to stamp out racism in the stands.“How about finding out about that person next to you and understanding that shouting out racist terms or to discriminate isn’t right?”

My Christian faith is based on making a difference, of serving that model we have of Jesus during his 33 years on this earth.” Why? Because while “warrior culture” is dangerous, warrior instinct is endangered, and football stands as one of the last bastions of its enduring good. What Is Warrior Instinct?

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Strong affiliations in football have sometimes been linked to religious rivalries, but Ms Pepinster hopes such sectarianism is disappearing. Comparing that with religious belief, she added: “When you have religious belief, you’re a participant in something, you have those beliefs. Christianity calls upon you to act on those beliefs and, as a football fan, I’m called upon to not just watch but to really get behind the team.” What is the heart of the Christian faith? Our central mission? Today we meet Jesus at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel. A lot has happened in 28 chapters. Jesus was born. He lived an incredible life. Then he died. Three days later, he rose from the grave. He was healed and whole and every inch the Savior his disciples hoped he was—and then he told them to go to Galilee and wait for him there.

When the church began and a man named Paul traveled around to help churches get started, he worked with a variety of people to share the message of Jesus. Paul describes one person, Titus, not just as another person on the team, but as someone he could trust: “As for Titus, he is my partner and co-worker among you; as for our brothers, they are representatives of the churches and an honor to Christ” ( 2 Corinthians 8:23). Pray for opportunities to build relationships, to deepen relationships, to make disciples and then seek these opportunities out. When I was in early high school, our small Bible study wanted to grow. So we prayed that we would get more members. We prayed every week. But I never, ever asked anyone to join that year. Neither did any of the other members. I remember one day having this dream that a bus full of high schoolers would just show up. I don’t know how, because I sure wasn’t going to ask anyone. Legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was reported to tell his teams, “It is not the will to win the matters—everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that matters.” I have heard another coach say that growth comes from making yourself do what you need to do when you do not want to do it, and to do so consistently enough that you want to do it. Walking in line with the gospel does not come to us naturally or intuitively. Rather, we are involved in the daily process of becoming who we are in Christ. Jesus is Lord! Our natural desires are not Lord. In Ephesians, Paul exhorts the believer, “put off the old self” and “put on the new self” (Eph. 4:22, 24). This process of learning to live in accordance to our new identity in Christ is a daily and progressive struggle. I heard a sports psychologist say, “We don’t rise to the occasion, we sink to the level of our daily habits.” That is good counsel for athletes and Christians who want to grow. The inches we need are everywhere around us. On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that's gonna make the difference between winning and losing!" Other Christian footballers who harness their faith as a power for good include poverty campaigner and Manchester United star Marcus Rashford, according to Hannah Rich, senior researcher at Theos think tank.She said: “He has said very publicly that he’s driven by his personal experience of growing up in poverty but also by his faith.It isn’t just for the headlines. There are a lot of other players putting their faith into practice at a local level really quietly, but really brilliantly.” Football is also a team game that demands individual practice. Every player has a specific role that, when executed properly, leads to team achievement. And that proper execution is the result of extreme training. Behind every move of every player is hours of work — of drills and sweat and pain — that ultimately targets one thing: team wins. Seriously. Make no mistake about it. Integral to football is real, tangible moments when personal comfort yields to a greater cause. The team wins because the team members sacrifice. They wear out their bodies for something bigger than their pain. The More Perfect Display