Profit Through Excellence

August 24

GAME PLAN FOR SHARING HOPE!

How would you feel if you had no one to cheer you in life? A few years ago a Christian high school in Grapevine, Texas, got fired up to cheer an opposing football team -- made up of teenagers from a nearby correctional facility.

Instead of being treated like criminals, players on the Gainesville Tornados team ran on to the field through a 40-yard spirit line of hundreds of cheering strangers -- families and friends from the Grapevine Faith Christian School who committed to cheering these young men throughout the game by name. That act of kindness gave these kids an evening of hope!

Christians have a powerful playbook for spreading hope to people who feel discarded. It's called the Bible. What's your game plan TODAY for sharing God's hope?

By the way, that Friday night football game has led to a movement! See the One Heart Project which provides at-risk and incarcerated youth a second chance! -- Mike Huckabee



Wherever you live in the world, you’ve probably heard of the Harlem Globetrotters. Though they are now the beloved ‘clowns’ of basketball, it was not always that way. The young men who were part of the team lived up to the scriptural admonition, “All that your hand finds to do, do it as unto the Lord,” Ecclesiastes 9:10. The Globetrotters began because blacks were not allowed to perform in the NBA but they usually defeated the NBA teams they played against. It was said by Blake Eskin that the team was, “a bastion of black athletic excellence.”

They were good enough to win the Chicago Herald American's World Professional Tournament in 1940 (the winner of which was generally recognized as the best professional team in the world), and talented enough to defeat the future NBA champions in an exhibition game in 1948. That championship Minneapolis Lakers team was led by George Mikan, at 6' 10" basketball's first overpowering big man who, before Wilt Chamberlain, was considered the greatest center to play the game.

Prejudice, to pre-judge, is a wrong that has been addressed and settled in the United States. Few people dispute Martin Luther King’s admonition to judge a man by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin. Certainly the current NBA would not be the powerhouse organization that it is if it were not for the outstanding black athletes who dominate the sport.

But none of that is of any consequence if those same men, highly touted and richly remunerated for their prowess on the basketball court do not take the same step of faith that the most humble and inept among us must take to receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior . These great and stellar athletes must recognize the truth that all must see: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" (See Mark 8:36.)