Competitiveness – Performance and the Player’s Mindset
 

Vince Lombardi once said ‘Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is’. This illustrates something that many Christians who play sport are criticised for; that the nature of competition is inherently ‘un-Christian’. The train of thought for such an assertion is usually along the lines that trying to better someone in a competitive situation involves trying to raise yourself up as you push them down – something that is the very opposite of Christ’s humble example.

I want to argue that wanting to win is not necessarily an ‘un-Christian’ activity, and that it’s often a wrong idea of the place of rewards in the Christian life that leads to this mistake. However I also want to say that if we make winning our ‘everything’ then we are committing a grave sin; whenever you make anything your everything you’ve made it your God and as such it becomes an idol set-up to ‘compete’ with the real and living God, which is as wrong as it gets. But wanting to win in right measure is a right desire for the proper reward of the activity you are engaged in.

Many Christians think of the Christian life as one of duty where we do the right things just because we ‘should’. Indeed many Christians think that any notion of a reward for an action actually makes that action wrong. The problem is that the Bible is full of the motivation of rewards. Just think of the beatitudes in Mathew’s gospel e.g. ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God’ (5:7-8). The plain reading of the statement is that Jesus gives us the incentive to be pure in heart with the motivation of seeing God. Or think of the motivation by Jesus to accept him ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11:28). Motivations are an essential part of life because without them we wouldn’t do anything. As the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said ‘Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.’

The crucial things is to realise that some motivations are good and some motivations are bad and what makes it good or bad is the relationship the reward has to the activity. So desiring to get married for money is a bad motivation, but desiring to get married for love is a good motivation – why? Because mutual love is the proper reward of marriage whereas money is not. Similarly winning is the proper reward for competition; it is the natural end of two people, or two teams competing against each other. Both parties go into the competition in the full and accepted knowledge that there will be one winner and one loser and indeed without the incentive of winning the game becomes something altogether different. To say that wanting to win is inherently un-Christian is a bit like accusing a farmer of being inherently un-Christian for wanting to enjoy the fruits of his harvest.

Where a desire for winning can become un-Christian or against God, is when it becomes the ‘supreme desire’ because then it becomes our God, and this is where Christians should be profoundly distinctive. All around us people do make winning ‘their everything’, such that when they win they feel great about themselves and when they lose they are unable to live with themselves. But we have a relationship with the real and living God and so winning is just one more good gift that he loving can give to us and can also in his good pleasure take away. As the line from the film goes (with a different ending) ‘On any given Sunday you can win or lose…’ but it’s whether you can give thanks to God whatever the result that shows whether you’re treating winning in a Christian way or not.

Pete