A Champion?

Someone once told me that “a champion is a person down on their knees, covered in sweat, gasping for breath … while no one is looking.”  The image is meant to convey someone doing something strenuous by themselves, for themselves, that improves them and not in front of others so they can benefit from their viewing their hard work.  I actually liked the saying at first.  It seems selfless and motivated.  We all admire that person who is willing to sacrifice to make themselves better and we admire them more when they do it solely for them to be better and not because they had to or wanted everyone to see them.  The simple fact is everyone wants to improve something about who they are and usually we haven’t worked hard on our on to change it.  So we admire that person who is self-motivated and who works to the point of exhaustion and pain to improve.

But to put so much emphasis on physical condition and beauty is, as Solomon says, “vanity”.  Beyond its desire to omit all things Godly, the single most influential aspect of our society that leads man away from God is the absolute stress on physical shape and appearance.  This is conditioned into the brain at every opportunity by a Godless society.  The evil searches and seeks for every entry into our conscious to promote, shove, cast, seep, and lure to tempt us to believe that this is the single most important thing about another person.  The damage from this is deep, affecting people their whole life, it changes their behavior and ruins their relationships, both existing and the could-have-been. 

The movie, Shallow Hal, does the best job of any current entertainment to describe how a guy seeing the world from a purely physical point-of-view is contrast from seeing the world from a beauty of a person’s soul point-of-view.  The concept of determining the worth of a girl based solely on her looks was drilled into my head in middle school.  Seemingly all the time, every guy was looking and evaluating every girl in this way all the time.  I remember not understanding what they were saying, but as the constant bombardment continues and our desire to be accepted rules, we quickly learn to catch up to and embrace what everyone thinks is important.  Then, without knowing it, our conscious has been retaught what is important and we only see people this way.  We become as the harlots in Proverbs 6 who reduce a man to a piece of bread.  A person no longer has value beyond what we hope to get from them.   

This happens everyday millions of times to every person and most don’t even know it.  Every commercial, every sitcom, every movie, every magazine ad, every online ad, every newspaper ad, and in every retail store, we are “taught” through a massive assault to see a person’s physical condition and make a decision about the person on that input.  This is not Godly.  Upon seeing Jesse’s son Eliab the prophet Samuel exclaimed “Surely the Lord’s appointed is before him!”  Obviously he looked like a king.  But God replied, “Do not look at his appearance or at his physical stature, because I have refused him. For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”  As God sees a man so should we and we can’t see the depth of a person until we get to know their heart.

So then, what is a champion?  “A champion is a man down on his knees, submitting himself fully before God; desiring to have an unconquerable love for God, His Spirit, His wisdom, and His character above all that exists in Creation; asking God to provide continually the bread of life, Christ, so he might live … when he is alone, but especially when everyone is looking.”