Real American Heroes

“One point I’d like to make to the young guys in the audience.  They often think that, man, if I could just make it to the NFL and play professional football, life couldn’t be any better.  Everything would be all right and I’m going to put everything into doing that.

“But I’ve got a little news for you.  That’s not necessarily the case.  I was at the Super Bowl this year and there was an article in the local newspaper that kind of shocked me.  I knew it to a certain extent but I couldn’t believe it when I actually saw it in print.  This reporter wrote about what actually happens to our players in the NFL after they finish playing the game.  Did you know that 78 percent of NFL players, within one year after they retire, either file for bankruptcy, unemployment or divorce?  I didn’t believe it.

“I called our NFL office and told them that the guy who wrote that story was exaggerating.  They shocked me by saying that it wasn’t an exaggeration.  In that Super Bowl that you watched a few months ago, there were 106 players on the field that day – 53 on each team.  If they all retired today, chances are that, by this time next year, 80 of them would file for bankruptcy, unemployment or divorce.  And that’s hard to believe.  But what it tells us is that football is not life.

“Football can characterize life.  But it just happens faster.  If you come into football at 21-years old, you’re a baby in the NFL.  At 25, you are middle age.  At 29, you’re a senior citizen.  Things happen fast.  The average life span of an NFL player is about 3.7 years.  So after about six years, you’ve seen a lifetime of things.  And what you have to understand is that it’s not how you start but how you finish.  That’s what really tells the story of your life.  You can have a great career and still wind up as one of those statistics.  One of those 78 percent.  So what you have to do is apply those championship principles that we were talking about and you have to apply them to how you live.  That’s what that chapel speaker was trying to say that day.  That’s what Jesus was trying to say in all of his parables.  You’ve got to take these principles that I’m talking about and you have to apply them to what really matters.  Don’t just win games.  Don’t just have a successful business career and end up as one of those stats.  It’s how you finish that counts.

“If you only remember one thing that I say today, remember this: If you don’t have a relationship with Christ, the end of the story is not going to be pretty.  No matter how good things look now, no matter how you feel, no matter what type of status that you have, if you don’t know Jesus Christ as your Savior, your story is not going to have a happy ending.  You can be an all-pro in the NFL and have everything in the world going for you.  But if you don’t have that rock solid relationship with Christ, the movie is going to have a sad ending and you’re going to be crying at the end.  On the other hand, if you do have a relationship with Christ, you need to ask yourself how God can use you to become a part of that team.

“Just like a football team God, too, is trying to build a winning team and he doesn’t need all-stars; He needs those people with the heart of a champion.  The same things that we discussed earlier are the same things that are going to make a great team for Christ and eternity.

“You have to be convinced of the truth of the Gospel.  You have to understand that Christ died for our sins and that He died not just to be our Savior but he also died so that he could be the center of our lives.  And if you understand that, then you have to be committed to it.  You have to be sold out to it.  Regardless of the role that God wants you to play.  We’d all like to be the quarterback.  We’d all like to be the star.  We’d all like to be the guy who gets all the attention.  But God may just want you to come off the bench.  And you can’t say, ‘That’s not for me.  I can’t come off the bench.’

“You’ve got to say, ‘If that’s what you want, if that’s what it’s going to take to make us a winning team, then bring me off the bench because I’m convinced of your plan and your program.’

You’ve also got to be a little steadfast and a little stubborn.  Just like that verse in I Corinthians 15:58 says, stand firm and don’t be moved, even when it’s not popular.  I know I’ve lost a lot of jobs that I’ve applied for because the owners asked me ‘Is getting to the