In our pragmatic age, we tend to reduce the value of everything to its quantitative usefulness. So, we justify our participation in sports because it puts us in contact with our community. It enables evangelism. We lift weights because “bodily training is of some value,” albeit primarily for this life (1 Tim 4:8). Strength training helps us stay active longer in the service of Christ. There are valid, utilitarian reasons for athletic activity.
More foundationally, Christians should consider whether sports have any inherent value. Are there any non-utilitarian reasons to play sports at all?
Sports as we understand them are far from a major topic in Scripture. However, there is scriptural evidence for the goodness of recreation. When properly ordered, recreational sports can be a way to delight in God’s good creation.
The tragedy of so much of American sports culture is that it is often more work than play. This is obviously true of the professional athletes who compete for large sums of money. Yet the loss of play hasn’t stopped at the professional level. Youth sports have become more serious as young athletes hope to hone their skills to get a college scholarship. Despite having little possibility of remuneration, many adults train for years, tracking their workouts meticulously. They strive to beat their 5K race times and get past the next time barrier. The disappointment at the finish line of many “fun runs” is audible.
College scholarships and self-improvement are not bad reasons to play sports. But if we focus only on utilitarian value, we may miss an opportunity to delight in the goodness of play itself.
It may seem strange to think of it this way, but God delights in the superfluous. We get so invested in our existence as part of creation that we sometimes forget that the universe is unnecessary. Yet, though he needed nothing to complete his perfection, God spoke everything into existence for his own glory.
The wondrous, interconnected design of God’s creation is dazzling to observe. Indeed, as the Psalmist reminds us, “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord” (Ps. 19:1). Creation reveals the invisible attributes of God, much like a human craftsman’s personality shines through her creations (Rom 1:20). The reflection of God’s glory is one of the reasons that God made the world.
God also created the world for his own delight, apart from our wonder. In Psalm 104, the author, as he extols the goodness of God’s creation and his providence for it, drops a hint of the value of the superfluous. The sea “teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great,” he writes (Ps. 104:25). In the midst of that teeming creation is “Leviathan, which [God] formed to play in it” (Ps. 104:26).
We don’t know for certain what Leviathan is or was. Yet we have evidence that God created something for the express purpose of playing in the deep. Creation has value beyond its material usefulness. Suddenly the playfulness of dolphins, the wrestling of kittens, and the normal human desire to laugh and joke makes sense.[4] There is more to these behaviors than evolutionary adaption. Play can glorify God.
In the sports movie, Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell famously says, “I believe God that made me for a purpose . . . But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.” Though that exchange was largely fictionalized, that sentiment seems to reflect Liddell’s attitude toward sports. He used his athletic talent for evangelism and coordinated races while in a prison camp to raise morale. Yet above all, his athletic participation seemed to be driven by a delight in the activity.
We need to go beyond utilitarian arguments for sports and remember that God put us in this world for more than our usefulness. He put us here to delight in him (Ps 37:4). One way we can do that is through recreational sports, especially when we treat them as a form of play.
By all means, we should hit the gym to get fit. It’s part of stewarding our bodies well. We should play neighborhood basketball games to cheerfully win. Yet we should also be willing to play sports for sheer delight. Just as God delighted as Leviathan plays in the deep, so he delights when we humans spend an evening playing softball with friends just for fun.
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