A Brand New Season

Author: Barbara Olson
May 31, 2022
Seahawks fans groaned at hearing that Russell Wilson was traded to the Denver Broncos…who could the team sign or draft that is as good as #3?  Now the hype begins as the Seahawks and the Broncos are scheduled to meet each other in week 1 of Monday Night Football…obviously the NFL wanted to get fans excited and the powers at be put this showdown on the docket quickly…just in case Seattle was going to have a less than stellar season.  But I digress…
Regardless of how poorly our NFL teams may have performed in the past season, each gets a new chance at the upcoming Super Bowl.  Each team has a clean slate, and every team whether good or bad in the past, has a win-loss record of 0-0 again.  While some teams may still be reveling in their glory of the past season, other teams have hope that this year will be different.
During the off-season, teams trade, fire, and hire.  Certainly those teams with non-winning records are banking on the prospect that the players obtained through the recent NFL draft will make the difference between another losing year and a trip to Disneyland after the Super Bowl.
How do the stories of each of these “bad” teams and our lives parallel? 

Each one of us has made mistakes. We are often embarrassed and ashamed of the mistakes that we've made in the past. Sometimes they are simply the result of bad choices that carry drastic consequences. Sometimes they are secret sins we carry inside of us. The weight of sin makes us feel like we are unworthy and unredeemable. We feel because of our bad performance in the past perhaps God could never love us.

The good news for us today is that God truly is the ultimate fan for our lives. It doesn't matter how badly we've played in the past. In fact, God doesn't care how badly we've played at all because what He really wants is our heart. And through it all, the Lord is faithful and is always in the stands cheering for us. The Bible says that the Lord and all His angels rejoice whenever one person turns his heart to Him. And like a fan in the stands, the Lord is always there and always cheering loudly for us. Like a good coach, God is patient and humble in directing us, always whispering quietly to us, telling us how to make a right play.  And unlike profit-motivated team owners, He will never trade us or fire us no matter how badly we've been playing.

So right now in the life of each of us, it doesn't matter if our decisions have led to failure after failure, and we feel so full of sin that we think we should never go back to church, talk to God, or ever possibly label ourselves a Christian. The good news for us is that, just like those teams trying again for a Super Bowl, God not only can, but wants to wipe our records clean. With the Lord, we can always start over and have a brand new season. All we have to do is ask.

We can remember the promises of God in 1st Corinthians chapter 15:
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.“

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