Why the Boston Celtics are under “zero pressure” to repeat

The NBA season began this week, with twenty-nine teams trying to dethrone the Boston Celtics, who won last year’s championship. Are the defending champs nervous?

According to their coach, Joe Mazzulla, the team is under “zero pressure” to repeat. His reasoning caught my eye: “We’re all going to be dead soon, and it really doesn’t matter anymore. So there’s zero pressure.”

I’ve never heard a coach put it that way, but he’s right.

One second on the other side of eternity, the only things we did in this life that will matter are the things that matter for eternity. And winning sports titles are not among them.

The longtime pastor and denominational leader Paul Powell wrote:

Pat Neff, one-time governor of Texas and later president of Baylor University, once said, “All my life I’ve heard preachers tell me to lay up treasures in heaven, but none of them ever told me how to do it. I had to figure it out on my own.

“The only way to get our treasures to heaven is to put them in something that is going there. Cattle, land, houses, stocks and bonds, all have no life and are not going to heaven. Only men and women, boys and girls, are going there.”

If you want to lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, then you’ve got to invest in people.

Dr. Powell and Pat Neff were both correct, of course. But how do we “invest in people”?

Let’s consider a counterintuitive fact that can change our souls and then our world.

“We are far too easily pleased”

The Christian faith has been in the world for two thousand years, yet humanity does not seem to be improving. The same sins that plagued our forebears plague us. We have made progress in outlawing racism and antisemitism, for example, but they are still with us. Sexual sins seem to be even more prevalent and popular these days. A lower percentage of Americans are church members than ever before.

Here’s one reason, according to British writer G. K. Chesterton: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.”

The Christian ideal is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). It is living what Watchman Nee called the “exchanged life” whereby we are “crucified with Christ” so that Christ lives in and through us (Galatians 2:20). It is giving ourselves fully to God “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1).

According to Jesus, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23; my emphasis).

The more we submit ourselves daily to the Lordship of Jesus Christ by surrendering to his Spirit (Ephesians 5:18), the more we experience the Christian ideal as Christ lives and works through us. We become his “body” in the world (1 Corinthians 12:27), “Christians” in the etymological sense—“little Christs.”

This is what God wants for us. This is the “abundant life” Jesus came to give us (John 10:10).

However, as C. S. Lewis observed in The Weight of Glory,

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

“One holy moment at a time”

Here’s my point: when Jesus is living in and through us, he loves others through us with his love. We manifest “love” as the first “fruit” of his Spirit (Galatians 5:22). And we “invest in people” in ways that change their lives and their eternities.

Imagine the difference if even 10 percent of those who claim to follow Jesus were continuing his earthly ministry in this way today. Our Lord “turned the world upside down” beginning with twelve men (Acts 17:6). What could he do with two hundred million? With just you and me?

To begin, let’s strive to know Christ and make him known in every way we can. Let’s focus on the eternal in the temporal. Let’s heed the observation of Frederick Buechner:

We are much involved, all of us, with questions about things that matter a good deal today but will be forgotten by this time tomorrow—the immediate wheres and whens and hows that face us daily at home and at work—but at the same time we tend to lose track of the questions about things that matter always, life-and-death questions about meaning, purpose, and value. To lose track of such deep questions as these is to risk losing track of who we really are in our own depths and where we are really going.

Let’s ask “questions about things that matter always,” then let’s answer them with biblical truth and redemptive compassion. And let’s believe that Jesus is working through us to shape eternal destinies, one soul at a time.

Br. Jim Woodrum of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston observed: “Through Jesus Christ, we hear the gospel message that the kingdom of God is happening now, and it is a process of redeeming and healing the Creation, in which we are being called to participate.”

He continued:

“Jesus is with us and among us, restoring us and all of Creation, and calling us to join him in this sanctifying action, one holy moment at a time, with faith: the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

How will you “join him in this sanctifying action” today?