Faith Matters | The substitutes for what God promises us never deliver
As an old Washington Redskins fan, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve cheered for a Super Bowl winning team.
The Redskins won the Super Bowl in the 1987 season. The ‘real’ players weren’t being paid enough, bless their hearts, and went on strike. The NFL owners were emphatic the games must go on so the teams had to pick up old college players or players that had been cut from the team.
The bottom line, none of the guys picked up were currently playing football.
For example, the Redskins center was teaching high school gym in Virginia. A receiver was living with his parents in N.Y. Their right tackle was working as a security guard at a 7-Eleven in Southeast D.C. And the backup quarter back came from a halfway house where he’d been serving the remainder of a sentence on a drug conviction. He showed up to practice in an orange jumpsuit and shackles.
All the teams were in the same position. They ran high school football plays and even drew up new plays in the huddle. And it showed. Their quality of play earned them nicknames like: The Chicago Spare Bears, the New Orleans Saint Elsewheres, the San Francisco Phony-Niners and, my team, the Washington Scab-skins.
As a result, the attendance at most NFL games plummeted to less than 10,000. Most people didn’t want to watch a bunch of substitutes play football. But, for three weeks, the owners persisted.
Sometimes I think we are like the NFL owners, in that we persist in substituting the real thing God offers for that which is of lesser quality. The Bible calls this idolatry.
You likely don’t have an altar in your home where you bow to little stone or wooden idols. Our idols are more subtle than that. They usually show up in the way we try to satisfy our desires apart from God. He gave us the desire for food, intimacy, rest, security, love, etc. Because He gave us those desires He’s also the best source to satisfy those desires. Our idols are those things with which we try to satisfy our desires apart from God. They’re the subsitutes.
And they never work. The substitutes never deliver what they promise. We end up right back where we started. We still have the same needs. Now sometimes just greater.
Jesus wants to give you what you need. He wants you to have the real thing. He wants the desires of your heart to be satisfied. Remember, He gave you those desires. He doesn’t want you to waste your years chasing a substitute that will never deliver. He loves you enough to help you avoid the pain that comes with looking to something else to satisfy what only He can satisfy.
My Scab-skins did win the three games they played in the 1987 season. But if the real players hadn’t returned, I doubt they would have won the Super Bowl. As good as they seem in the moment, substitutes just don’t deliver.
Faith Matters is written by members of the Bradenton area clerical community. Phillip Hamm is senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Palmetto.