Week 24 | She Gives Them Confidence

Have you ever played with someone who made you more confident just because they were on your team?

Paige Buekers plays basketball for the University of Connecticut. She was the number 1 player in the country in high school and won the National Player of the Year award as a freshman. She is a great basketball player, and by all accounts, a great person.

But like many athletes, Paige has had to battle through injuries. Early in her sophomore season, Paige missed over 2 months of the season because of a knee injury. During that time, UConn's women's basketball team, one of the most dominant teams in the sport over the last 20 years, dropped out of the top-10 rankings for the first time in 17 years.

Their head coach, Geno Auriemma, said, "When we lost her, a lot of other players really felt that loss hard because it puts so much on their shoulders. They began to understand just how much Paige does for them."

He then said, "She gives them confidence. Teams' confidence sometimes wavers; it goes up and down. But if you have somebody like Paige on the floor whose confidence never wavers, it is infectious and the rest of the team knows there won't be any droughts."

One player and one person can make a big difference, and in our lives, that one person is Jesus. No matter how fierce the opponent, we can have confidence that Jesus will be there with us and for us. We won't win every battle, but we will be okay as long as He is on our team.

There is a story in the Bible about a centurion, a Roman military officer, whose faith in Jesus made a big difference (Matthew 8:5-13).

When Jesus finished his famous Sermon on the Mount, He went into a town called Capernaum where the centurion asked for His help. His servant was paralyzed at home and suffering terribly, and Jesus asked if He should come and heal him. The centurion told Jesus: 

“Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it."

When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him:

“Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

This story tells me two things. First, it tells me that our confidence, no matter how down and out we might feel, and no matter how overmatched we might think we are in a game, we have a God who will always stop and take the time to help us if we are willing to ask.

It also tells me that we can have so much faith and confidence in Jesus that we can ask Him for ANYTHING, and he can provide. Not only did the centurion have enough faith to ask Jesus to heal his servant, the centurion had enough faith to tell Jesus that He didn't need to come to his house to heal His son - Jesus could do it from where He was, without seeing the servant and without the servant seeing Him, because of His power and authority.

It takes enough faith for someone to ask a man to heal the sick, cursed, and dying. It takes even more faith for someone to believe that Jesus could heal his servant from where He stood. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).

Faith is trusting something, even if we can't see it.

Jesus wants us to have faith in Him. He wants us to live a great life, full of love, joy, and peace. He wants us to have confidence. He wants us to believe in ourselves. 

Because of this one centurion and his story being shared in the Bible, we know we can have and play with confidence, belief, and faith in Jesus, and through our faith and belief and trust in God, we too can make those around us better.

THIS WEEK

1 - Who is one person or teammate that you have been around or played with who gave you confidence or made you better?

2 - What are 1-3 things that they did to give you confidence or make you better?

3 - Who is someone you can give confidence to or make better?

4 - What is a Bible verse you can lean on this week?

God wants us to have confidence in life, for God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, love, and of self-discipline (2nd Timothy 1-7).

For a Google doc version of this devo, click here: She Gives Them Confidence.