It all starts innocently enough…an unplayable lie, your ball behind a tree or under a bush. “Well if this tree or bush wasn’t here, or if they’d mow this rough, I’d have an open shot.” So, you use your favorite club, the foot wedge, and “move” your ball to a “playable lie”.
Or perhaps, you are playing with someone who continually uses mulligans anywhere and everywhere they see fit. Or maybe you don’t count that extra stroke for a lost ball because the rough in our opinion, isn’t cut sufficiently. Or maybe we disregard the out-of-bounds marker because of our philosophical objection to unnatural hazards.
As a good friend who was also a pastor before going to his reward once told me, “how will you know if you’re getting better if you don’t write down every stroke.” Since that time, I have done my best to always keep an accurate account of my score and take my medicine when I hit a bad shot.
So, here’s the thought…we begin giving ourselves certain exemptions from the rules of golf. Not to say that we become too obvious about it; we honor the tee markers, we don’t use the “hand wedge”, or give ourselves putts “outside the leather”. But what we DO is we slip into the habit of ever so subtly bending the rules. And the one thing we improve isn’t our game, but our skill of rationalizing, trying to justify our actions.
Sure, we don’t do it that often, and yes, we give ourselves a break every now and then…what’s the harm as long as no one gets hurt? Besides, it’s only a game, right?
Yes, it’s only a game, but more than most games, you have to ask yourself, doesn’t the way we play the game reflect the way we live off the course? And this is especially true when it comes to our rationalizing. You show me one golfer who always has ready excuses for “explaining” bad shots, and I’ll show you an accountant who doctors the books, or a contractor who inflates material costs, or a parent who doesn’t follow through on his promises.
In the game of golf, such rationalizing leads to cheating. In life, it leads to sin. You know, sin isn’t just the bad things we do or the things we don’t or fail to do. It is that subtle thought process that leads us toward that harmful behavior.
As in the rules of golf, we often twist the Christian faith to suit ourselves, and in the process warp God’s divine truth upon which our faith is founded.
Let’s talk about grace for a moment. God’s unmerited favor. God sent His son Jesus so that this grace would supplant law as the power that governs our relationships. Jesus was the perfect embodiment of God’s grace. This good news, that we call “the gospel”, is that wonderful, great gift that Jesus brought into the world.
Paul taught, “the more I sin, the more grace I get, what a deal”. But you know, he doesn’t pull any punches when he went on to say, “By no means”! If we understand God’s grace at all, and then truly receive it, we are changed! We are no longer held captive to sin.
And to accept this gift of grace is to purpose in our heart that we die to sin, and we can’t do that without first dying to the rationalizing process that comes before the sin itself.
This is all part of Paul’s theme that we are justified, or saved, not with our own efforts, but with the grace of God, which we received through faith in Jesus Christ.