Trophies

For several years in the fall I would help a group of friends put on a Road Rally.  For those of you who are not familiar, a road rally is a game where the participants solve puzzles and riddles whose answers correspond to a certain location.  They then travel to those locations and collect verification that they were there and so on.  It is a lot of fun and for some groups, quite competitive.

As we plan the annual road rally, at some point we think of the awards that we will give out. And often those awards are trophies.  Now the road rally is a low budget operation, so we usually get the trophies from a thrift store for about a dollar each.  And there is usually no shortage of supply.  Go into your local thrift store and you find a shelf full of tall monuments of marble and metallic plastic that were once presented with great fanfare.  I imagine that after we pass  them out at the end of the road rally they will end up back at the thrift store in fairly short order.

Speaking of trophies, a friend of mine tells a story of two plaques hanging on his parent's wall.  The plaques look identical except for the inscriptions.  The first plaque was given to his father by the school district for whom he worked acknowledging 30 years of service as a teacher and congratulating him on a well earned retirement.  The second was awarded to his sister for winning the third grade spelling bee.  

We all know that the size of the trophy is not related to their significance.  Nobel Prizes, Olympic Gold Medals and Academy Awards are not particularly big in size, but they mark a pinnacle of achievement in their respective fields.  On the other hand we sometimes see monster sized trophies given out for events that while they are important to the participants, they are definitely not the Olympics.

Trophies, plaques, certificates, declarations, they are all physical representations of accomplishments or appreciation.  And while the trophy is nice, most people see through it and recognize what it really means.  When we give a child a trophy that they can hardly lift, we all still know that they have made a child sized accomplishment.  

As Christians we need to make sure that we aren't surrounding ourselves with disproportionate trophies.  Here is what I mean.  We can surround ourselves with the trappings of a Christian life.  We can go to church every Sunday, make generous donations to the right causes, we can share Christian Memes on social media, we can go out of our way to display our beliefs to those around us.  But, the true measure of our faith is not these outward trappings, it is the way that we live our lives.

The greatest acknowledgement of God's grace in our life is that we live our life in a way that His will is reflected through our actions and decisions.

Watch this video from Pastor Chris.

We acknowledge God by living our lives for Him.  By allowing the Holy Spirit to direct our lives we become a trophy for God.  We become the physical representation of the grace that is available to all who acknowledge Him.