Coaching stories have certainly proliferated during the March basketball blitz, but coaching applies to much more than just basketball. Recently I read an article on coaching sales people. In it, the author was explaining how the sales manager’s primary job was to coach the sales team. He asked the question, “How do we raise the bar and more effectively coach sales people?” Then he laid out these gold nuggets, he said you raise the bar for your sales people when you “change beliefs, change attitudes, change behaviors and therefore change results.”
Those are rock solid principles that apply to every kind of group. Results are the direct outcome of our actions. Our actions are determined by what we believe and how we feel about what we believe. So the real key to coaching is to change what people believe!
That’s exactly what Jesus did. Jesus changed what people believed - - about God, about others, about righteousness, about eternal life, about everything! Then He commanded His disciples to do the same thing all over the world, “teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you...” (Mat. 28:20).
One of the problems currently in the church is found in the voices of those who wrongly declare that growth of the church will come when the church learns to be more welcoming of the world. More welcoming of sin? Conversion itself is turning in repentance from the beliefs, attitudes and actions of the world to God! (1 Pet. 4:1-3) Those who want the church to be more worldly are just “tools” of Satan trying to destroy the church, not help it.
Our youth need good coaching to help them move away from the constant worldly values coming at them from TV, school, friends and social media, not embrace them. They can’t be faithful Christians if they’re filled with the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of the world. And wake up folks, the pull of the world is getting stronger, not weaker! We need good coaching more than ever to get in the game!!
Good “coaching” is never really finished. Even believers can be pulled back into the actions of the world. Peter described them like this, “For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning.” (2 Pet. 2:20). It’s the job of elders, preachers, teachers, parents and all godly members to use our influence to keep coaching one another all the way to the end of the season of life.
-Tim Orbison