The Savior Who Would Not Become Our Advantage
Chapter 1: When We Ask Jesus to Help Us Win
The room is loud even though only three people are in it. The television is turned up too high. A football game has reached the final two minutes. One person stands near the couch, another paces between the kitchen and the living room, and someone else pretends not to care while checking the score every few seconds. The team needs a touchdown. The season may turn on one drive. Someone says, “Come on, God. Just let us have this one.” That prayer sounds small, but it carries a larger hope. We often want God to prove He is with us by helping our side win.
That is part of what makes watching the faith-based story of Jesus joining the Denver Broncos coaching staff such a revealing idea. The premise sounds almost playful at first. Jesus enters a professional football organization. Coaches wonder what He can teach. Players wonder whether His presence will make them better. Fans wonder whether the team will finally become unstoppable. Yet the deeper question is not whether Jesus can help a football team win. The deeper question is what happens when Jesus refuses to let winning become the measure of His presence.
That question reaches far beyond football. It reaches the manager waiting for a promotion, the parent hoping a child earns a scholarship, the family praying for a medical result, and the tired person asking God to make one hard season finally turn around. It also connects naturally with the deeper Christian reflection on what happens when we try to use Jesus for our own success, because many sincere believers do not reject Jesus. We do something more subtle. We welcome Him as long as He strengthens the outcome we already want.
Most of us would never say, “Jesus exists to improve my plans.” We know better than that, so we use more respectful language. We ask Him to bless the work, open the right door, give us favor, protect our position, increase our influence, and help us finish what we started. None of those prayers are automatically wrong. The problem begins when we quietly decide that a good outcome will prove God is near, while a disappointing outcome will suggest He has stepped away. At that point, faith starts behaving like a scoreboard.
The scoreboard may be a final score, but it can also be a bank balance, a medical report, a job title, a subscriber count, a court decision, a repaired relationship, or the opinion of people whose approval matters to us. We say we trust God, but what we often mean is that we trust Him to move the number in the direction we prefer. When the number rises, we call it blessing. When it falls, we begin asking what went wrong.
The fictional idea of Jesus becoming an assistant coach works because professional football makes this habit easier to see. Every week, the result is public. Someone wins and someone loses. Coaches are praised or blamed. Players are celebrated, traded, benched, injured, promoted, and replaced. Performance is studied frame by frame, and value is discussed as though a human life can be summarized by statistics and salary. Then Jesus enters that world, and our first instinct is to imagine that His team would become unbeatable.
Surely Jesus would know the perfect play. Surely He could see the defense before it shifted. Surely players would become stronger, wiser, calmer, and more disciplined. Surely His presence would give one organization an advantage no opponent could match. That picture feels exciting, but it misunderstands both Jesus and the human heart.
Jesus did not come to become our advantage over other people. He did not enter the world to make our side more powerful, our reputation safer, or our success more impressive. He came to reveal the Father, call people into truth, forgive sin, restore the broken, confront pride, and lead human beings into a life that cannot be measured by winning alone. Once that is understood, the entire meaning of the story changes.
If Jesus walks into a football building, the most important thing may not happen on the field. It may happen when a veteran player realizes he has treated his family like a distraction from his career. It may happen when a young player admits that he is terrified of being cut, or when a coach recognizes that leadership has become another name for control. It may happen when a grieving man stops using anger to hide how much he misses his brother. None of those moments appear in the standings, and they may not help the team win on Sunday. They still matter to Jesus.
This is where the perspective must shift. We often ask whether Jesus can help us succeed. A more honest question is whether we are willing to let Jesus redefine success. That sounds spiritual until it becomes practical.
A man sits in his car outside his house after work. He has just learned that someone younger received the promotion he expected. He spent months praying for the position. He believes he worked harder, stayed later, and carried responsibilities no one noticed. Before going inside, he grips the steering wheel and tells God the decision is unfair. The pain is real, and the disappointment deserves honesty. There is nothing holy about pretending the promotion did not matter.
Still, another question waits beneath the frustration. Was the promotion the only way his faithfulness could count? If God does not reverse the decision, were the months of honest work wasted? If the title goes to someone else, has God abandoned him? If he is never publicly rewarded, can he still believe that character matters? Many people quietly lose their footing here. They do not stop believing in God completely. They begin believing that God must explain Himself through outcomes.
We want the promotion because we need the income. We want the treatment to work because we love the person who is sick. We want the marriage repaired because we do not want the family to break. We want the team to win because joy has been scarce and we need something to celebrate. These desires are deeply human. Faith becomes fragile, however, when we make the desired result carry more weight than it can hold.
A win can bring relief without telling us who we are. A promotion can change our income without proving our life has meaning. A repaired relationship can bring joy without becoming the only evidence that God hears prayer. A good medical report can calm fear without becoming the foundation of God’s love. The trouble is not that we want good things. The trouble is that we ask those good things to answer questions that are too large for any scoreboard: Am I seen? Am I loved? Did my effort matter? Is God still with me?
The assistant coach image becomes powerful when Jesus refuses to answer those questions through victory. He does not stand on the sideline as a secret weapon. He stands near people whose fear has shaped the way they compete. He sees the player who believes one bad game will expose him as worthless. He sees the coach who thinks losing control will make everyone discover he is not enough. He sees the worker whose name no one knows until something goes wrong. He sees the family member waiting at home while the person they love keeps choosing work over presence.
He does not begin by promising that everyone will keep their role. He begins by telling the truth. That may be why people sometimes resist the real Jesus even while saying they want Him close. We want help, but He brings truth. We want protection from consequences, but He brings mercy that does not always remove consequences. We want Him to secure the future, while He asks us to trust the Father inside uncertainty.
A woman lies awake at two in the morning with a notebook beside the bed. She has written every bill due before the next paycheck, and the numbers do not work. She prays because she does not know what else to do. She asks God for money, opportunity, relief, and a door she cannot yet see. Those requests are honest, and she should bring them.
Jesus may also meet her in a place she did not expect. He may confront the shame that keeps her from telling her family the truth. He may give her courage to ask for help, show her that needing support does not make her a failure, or lead her to make a difficult change she hoped to avoid. He may not make the numbers disappear by morning. The uncomfortable question is whether His presence would still count.
We have learned to look for God mainly in rescue. We are slower to recognize Him in exposure, correction, restraint, patience, confession, and the decision to stop pretending. In a sports story, we naturally expect the major spiritual moment to happen before the final play. The team gathers, Jesus speaks, the players find courage, the impossible becomes possible, and the crowd erupts. That kind of ending feels satisfying because it joins faith to visible success.
Real spiritual growth is often much quieter. A player tells the medical staff that his knee moved even though nobody else noticed. A coach admits that he used concern for the team to hide fear for his job. A father tells his son, “I am proud of you,” before the game instead of waiting to see how he performs. A veteran runs a route that opens space for someone else, knowing the ball will not come to him. A man answers the phone while love still has time to speak. No crowd may recognize those decisions, but heaven does not need a crowd to make them significant.
This is the reframe at the center of the entire idea: Jesus does not join our team so our team can defeat everyone else. Jesus enters our lives so the parts of us ruled by fear, pride, shame, and control no longer get to call every play. That is a different kind of victory.
It may not improve the record immediately. In fact, truth can make life feel less stable before it makes us free. The honest conversation may expose a problem. The confession may carry consequences. The boundary may disappoint someone. The choice to stop pretending may cost money, status, access, or applause. We often imagine obedience as the path that leads to the better outcome. Sometimes obedience is the better outcome.
That realization is difficult because it removes our ability to bargain with God. We want honesty to guarantee that the deal works, forgiveness to guarantee that the relationship returns, service to guarantee that someone notices, and trust to guarantee that fear disappears. We may even assume that following Jesus should force the season to turn around. But Jesus never promised that obedience would become a tool for controlling the result. He promised that the truth would make us free, and freedom is not the same as getting everything we wanted.
A father may apologize to his adult daughter and still discover that trust returns slowly. A worker may act with integrity and still lose the position. A patient may pray with courage and still receive a hard diagnosis. A team may learn humility, protect one another, and still miss the postseason. If we believe faith only counts when the ending looks successful, we will miss much of what Jesus is doing.
He may be saving a person from becoming cruel while they wait. He may be teaching someone to receive help instead of performing strength. He may be removing the belief that usefulness creates worth, restoring a family one honest evening at a time, or showing a leader that control is not the same as care. Those changes are not consolation prizes. They reach the center of a human life.
The person watching the final two minutes of the game may still pray for a touchdown. That is fine. God is not offended by our hopes, and faith does not require emotional distance from the things we love. The prayer can simply become larger. We can hope for the win while asking God not to let us believe victory proves He loves one side more. We can ask Him to help players compete without turning one another into enemies, keep failure from becoming the end of someone’s worth, and keep success from becoming pride. We can ask Him to help us enjoy the game without asking it to heal everything inside us.
That kind of prayer does not make football less meaningful. It places football back inside its proper meaning. The same is true for work, money, health, family, influence, and every other place where we keep a private score. We can ask for the job without making the title our identity. We can pray for healing while recognizing God’s presence in the hospital room. We can work toward reconciliation without forcing another person to move at our pace. We can hope for success without treating someone else’s success as a threat, and we can want a good ending without demanding that God prove Himself through it.
This kind of faith is harder to promote because it does not promise constant upward movement. It promises something deeper: a life that remains rooted when outcomes change. That is what Jesus brings into the imagined football building. He does not offer a perfect season, a supernatural playbook, or proof that one team has God on its side. He brings truth strong enough to stand when the crowd becomes quiet.
A person is not loved because he remains useful. A smaller role does not mean he has been forgotten. Another person being chosen does not make him rejected, and a disappointing result does not prove God has abandoned him. Fear may have controlled him, but mercy has not moved beyond his reach. Those truths do not remove competition, pain, responsibility, or consequence. They change the place from which a person faces them.
The veteran can compete without needing the younger player to fail. The coach can lead without pretending uncertainty is weakness. The father can love his child without turning every conversation into correction. The worker can serve without believing invisibility means worthlessness. The believer can pray for victory without confusing victory with God.
That is why the idea of Jesus as an assistant coach can carry more spiritual weight than it first appears to hold. It places Him inside a world where value is constantly measured and asks whether we will let Him challenge the measurement itself. Most people do not need Jesus merely added to the sideline of the life they already planned. We need Him to interrupt the belief that our life can be understood by the scoreboard.
We need to understand that the Father’s love is not a performance bonus. Faithfulness matters even when it creates no highlight, and serving someone else may be the most important play we make. The deeper invitation is not to ask Jesus to help us win. It is to let Jesus show us what winning has been unable to give us.
The game may still matter. The job, diagnosis, relationship, and difficult decision may still matter. None of them, however, can carry the full weight of identity. That weight belongs somewhere stronger. It belongs in the love of the Father, which does not rise and fall with the score.
Chapter 2: When Faith Stops Acting Like Insurance
The call comes at 4:17 on a Thursday afternoon.
A mother is standing in the pharmacy aisle comparing two bottles of cough medicine when the school counselor tells her that her son has been suspended. There was a fight. Another student was hurt. Her son says he did not start it, but the school has video. The mother leaves the cart where it is and drives across town with her hands tight on the steering wheel. She has prayed over that boy since before he was born. She has taken him to church, sat beside him through counseling, changed work shifts, limited his phone, and tried to keep him close to people who would help him. By the time she reaches the school, one question has begun pushing against all the others: God, after everything I have done, why did You let this happen?
That question is more common than most Christians admit. It does not always come from selfishness. Often it comes from exhaustion. We have tried to do the right thing, and somewhere along the way we began expecting faithfulness to function like insurance. We believed that prayer, obedience, service, sacrifice, and good intentions would protect us from certain kinds of pain. We may not have said it aloud, but we carried the policy in our hearts. If I raise my children in faith, they will make wise choices. If I honor my marriage, it will survive. If I work honestly, I will not be pushed aside. If I serve God, He will keep the worst thing from happening.
Then the thing we thought was covered arrives.
The child rebels. The marriage fractures. The company eliminates the position. The medical test returns with words we never wanted to hear. The person we helped turns against us. The ministry closes. The opportunity disappears. In those moments, we do not only grieve the event. We feel as though a contract has been broken.
This is where a deeper perspective shift becomes necessary. Faith was never meant to become a shield against every painful outcome. It was meant to become the ground beneath us when outcomes cannot be controlled. That difference is not small. It changes how we understand prayer, obedience, disappointment, and even the presence of Jesus.
Many people want Jesus near for the same reason a team might want a gifted assistant coach. We believe His presence should make us more prepared, more protected, and more likely to succeed. We expect better decisions, stronger relationships, clearer direction, and fewer disasters. Again, those hopes are understandable. Walking with Jesus should shape the way we live. Wisdom matters. Character matters. Prayer matters. Obedience matters. But none of them turn life into a system where good behavior guarantees the result we prefer.
The New Testament never presents Jesus as a man who helps people avoid every hard road. He calls people into truth, and truth often leads them into places they would rather not go. He asks fishermen to leave familiar work. He tells a wealthy young man that the possession protecting his identity has become a chain. He allows a grieving family to sit inside the reality of death before they understand what He is doing. He warns His followers that love, faithfulness, and courage will not always be rewarded by the crowd.
That does not mean Jesus enjoys suffering or withholds compassion. It means His purpose is larger than making our circumstances comfortable. He is not training us to become better at controlling life. He is teaching us how to live faithfully when control fails.
This is one of the sharpest differences between using Jesus and following Jesus. When we use Jesus, we measure His value by what changes around us. When we follow Jesus, we allow Him to change what rules within us. The first approach asks, “Did He fix the situation?” The second asks, “Am I becoming truthful, merciful, courageous, and free inside the situation?” One question is not always wrong, but it is incomplete. If we only look for outward rescue, we may miss the inward deliverance already taking place.
Consider a man who has spent years being the dependable person in his family. He handles the bills, drives aging parents to appointments, answers late-night calls, repairs what breaks, and lends money he does not really have. Everyone says they do not know what they would do without him. He takes pride in that sentence because it makes his exhaustion feel meaningful.
Then he develops a health problem that forces him to stop. He cannot drive for several weeks. He needs help carrying groceries. He has to ask his sister to manage their mother’s appointments and his neighbor to take out the trash. He prays for quick healing because he wants the pain gone, but also because he cannot stand becoming the person who needs something.
If Jesus only functions as an advantage, then healing is the only acceptable answer. The man must be restored quickly so he can return to being useful. But what if Jesus is also exposing a belief that has ruled him for decades? What if he has confused being needed with being loved? What if his constant service has become a way to avoid the vulnerability of receiving? The physical limitation is not good merely because it teaches a lesson. Pain should not be romanticized. Yet even there, Jesus may be doing something deeper than returning the man to his old role.
He may be teaching him that dependence is not humiliation. He may be giving other family members room to grow. He may be revealing that love can remain when usefulness decreases. That work will not appear on a medical chart, but it can save a life from a prison that success never touched.
The disciples often wanted Jesus to secure visible outcomes. Two of them asked for the highest positions beside Him. Others argued about who was greatest. At one point, they wanted to call down destruction on people who rejected them. They were not walking away from Jesus. They were trying to fit Him inside their hunger for status, victory, and control.
Jesus kept changing the question.
Instead of helping them rise above everyone else, He placed a child among them. Instead of giving them authority to destroy opponents, He corrected their spirit. Instead of defining greatness by rank, He spoke about service. He did not simply improve their plan. He challenged the part of them that needed the plan to prove their importance.
That is what makes Jesus difficult to reduce to a motivational figure. A motivational figure helps us reach our goals. Jesus sometimes asks whether the goal has become our master. A motivational message tells us we can win if we believe strongly enough. Jesus may ask whether we can remain faithful when we do not win. A performance culture tells us to prove doubters wrong. Jesus may ask us to love people without needing their defeat to validate us.
This does not create passive Christians. It creates people whose courage is not controlled by applause. A person who no longer needs every outcome to confirm identity can take honest risks. He can apologize without calculating whether the apology will restore his image. She can tell the truth at work without needing to be celebrated for integrity. Parents can love a struggling child without treating that child’s behavior as proof that they failed. Leaders can make difficult decisions without pretending certainty. Believers can pray boldly while leaving the result with God.
That last part is where many of us become uncomfortable. We like bold prayer when boldness means confidence that the desired answer will arrive. Biblical boldness is deeper. It brings the whole need before God without pretending we control His response. It is honest enough to ask for healing, provision, restoration, justice, and opportunity. It is also humble enough to say that God remains God when the answer takes a form we did not choose.
A woman sits in a hospital parking garage after visiting her older brother. He has been receiving treatment for months, and the doctors are no longer talking about recovery in the same way. Her church friends have sent messages saying they are believing for a miracle. She wants to believe too, but each message creates new pressure. She begins to fear that admitting how serious the illness has become will sound faithless.
So she tells everyone she is standing strong.
Inside the car, she is not strong. She is frightened, angry, and tired of cheerful sentences. She has begun to avoid prayer because she thinks prayer requires confidence she cannot produce.
What would it mean for Jesus to meet her there without turning faith into insurance? It would mean she can ask for healing and still tell the truth about fear. It would mean her brother’s life is not reduced to whether treatment succeeds. It would mean God’s presence is not proved only by a reversal of the diagnosis. It would mean tears are not evidence of weak belief.
Perhaps the most faithful prayer she can offer is, “Jesus, I want him to live. I am afraid he may die. I do not know how to hold both things. Stay with us.”
That prayer does not surrender hope. It removes performance from hope. It stops asking the woman to sound certain so God will act. It allows her to become a daughter speaking honestly to the Father.
We often carry a hidden belief that the right spiritual attitude earns a better outcome. If we remain positive, speak correctly, avoid doubt, and pray with enough confidence, the situation should turn. That idea can make suffering lonelier. People begin editing their pain because they fear that honest fear will cancel faith.
But Jesus did not ask people to hide what was true before approaching Him. The blind called out because they knew they could not see. A desperate father admitted that belief and unbelief lived together inside him. Grieving sisters spoke directly about what they believed Jesus could have prevented. Their honesty did not disqualify them from His compassion.
Faith is not pretending the danger is smaller than it is. Faith is bringing the real danger into the presence of God without allowing it to define God’s character.
This is why a football story about Jesus should not end with a perfect season. If His presence automatically created victory, the story would strengthen the very misunderstanding it should challenge. It would teach that Jesus is most useful when He improves the scoreboard. The deeper story allows the team to lose, struggle, face injury, make poor decisions, and remain uncertain. Jesus does not fail because the record remains imperfect. His work is visible in the men who stop lying, ask forgiveness, protect one another, receive help, and choose truth when truth costs something.
The same is true in our lives. A marriage counselor may help two people speak honestly, yet the marriage may still end. A doctor may provide excellent treatment, yet the body may not respond. A parent may love faithfully, yet an adult child may continue making destructive choices. A worker may act with integrity and still be laid off. These outcomes matter. They carry real grief. They are not erased by a spiritual lesson.
Still, pain does not get the final authority to define whether faithfulness mattered.
The parent who refuses to manipulate a child has chosen love, even if the child remains distant. The worker who tells the truth has acted with integrity, even if the company rewards someone else. The spouse who sets a necessary boundary has acted with courage, even if reconciliation does not follow immediately. The patient who receives help without shame has taken a spiritual step, even if recovery remains slow.
This perspective does not make disappointment painless. It keeps disappointment from becoming God.
There is a difference between grieving an outcome and worshiping it. We grieve because the thing mattered. We worship it when we decide that without it, life has no meaning and God has no goodness. That line can be difficult to see, especially when the need is serious. Yet it matters.
A person can desperately want the job and still refuse to make the employer the judge of human worth. A family can plead for healing and still know the person in the hospital is more than a diagnosis. A team can prepare to win without treating defeat as spiritual rejection. A believer can ask God for a specific answer without reducing God to the answer.
Following Jesus means allowing Him to remain Lord when He does not become our advantage.
That sentence is easy to admire and hard to live. It becomes real when the phone call goes badly, the test result remains unclear, the relationship does not return, or the opportunity closes. In those moments, faith cannot survive on slogans. It needs a stronger foundation.
The foundation is not that everything will work out in the way we mean when we say those words. The foundation is that God does not abandon us inside what has not worked out. His love is not waiting at the successful end of the story. It is present in the hallway, the car, the pharmacy aisle, the empty office, and the long drive home.
The mother entering the school counselor’s office may discover that her son did start the fight. She may feel embarrassed, angry, and afraid for his future. She may need to enforce consequences and admit that prayer did not prevent the moment she feared. None of that means her years of love were wasted.
Perhaps faithfulness now looks different. It may mean refusing to defend what was wrong. It may mean listening before speaking, apologizing to the injured student’s family, accepting the suspension, and helping her son face what happened without telling him that one failure has become his identity. She may need to release the belief that being a faithful mother guarantees a trouble-free child.
Jesus may not help her escape the meeting.
He may help her enter it without fear choosing every word.
That is not a smaller miracle.
It is the beginning of freedom from a faith built like insurance. It is the moment she stops asking whether God protected her from every painful outcome and begins discovering whether His presence can hold her inside the one that came.
Your friend,
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