Rivals

PC vs MAC

Xbox vs. Playstation vs. Wii

Texas vs. Texas A&M

iPhone vs Android

Pepsi vs Coca Cola

I am sure you could list a bunch of other rivals throughout life. And the list could get really personal for me. My high school’s biggest Rival was the Fayetteville Bulldogs. Every year our game was billed as the battle of the Dogs. It was a week filled with tons of trash talking and us vs them statements. I wasn’t friends with any of them. However, my first week of college, I meet several of them, and discovered we had a lot in common. We became great friends.

It is crazy, but any rivalry is going to lead to winner vs loser attitudes which clouds our judgment.

I remember 100’s of commercials growing up about how x number of people choose coke over Pepsi in taste test. I remember taste tests being held in grocery stores, at the state fair, and other venues. Everyone had a preference. You were either with them or against them. Who is the winner in your book?

Pepsi or Coke, PC or Mac, or Texas or Texas A&M.

As Debra talked about in her Sermon on Sunday, “us” vs “them” has been around since the beginning of time. It is recorded throughout our biblical history. What I find profoundly challenging is that “us” vs “them” or “winner” and “loser” attitudes might be part of human nature, but it is not what God intends. In fact, Jesus came into the world to teach of a different reality. A world in which there is no partiality, no winners or losers, but a world where every knee will bow, every tongue confess, that Jesus is Lord. We are all children of God, we are all family, we are all part of “us”, and there is no “them”.
I think the challenge for us is to begin to see or dream of the unity we have in God, father, son, and spirit. Think about it.

Can you imagine what it might be if we didn’t talk about others as “them”, and ourselves as “us”?

Can you imagine what it would be like if we saw our neighbor not as them, but as us?

Can you imagine Aggies and Longhorns living in harmony?

Seriously what if we stopped talking about the other Christians, or the other churches, and we started talking about the body of Christ, about our brothers and sisters in Christ? What if we didn’t see others in the world, but saw brothers and sisters?

What rivalry do you need to let go for the sake of the Gospel?