I preached this past Sunday morning (only my third sermon ever) using football as a backdrop for explaining a couple of concepts. I thought that some of you might enjoy one of the points (I may eventually post the entire sermon in pieces). Keep in mind that this was on New Year’s Eve… the day before the “BIG” game that Arkansas lost to Wisconsin…

Take a look at this picture… notice the grey helmets of the team in white. Their helmets have little stickers placed all over. For those of you who don’t know, these helmets belong to THE Ohio State University’s team (who, by the way, will be playing Florida in the upcoming national championship game). The stickers on the helmet idea was pioneered in the late 1960’s by Woody Hayes, one of their former coaches. These helmet stickers are sometimes referred to as “pride” stickers. Now the point of these stickers was to reward an individual player that made an outstanding play to help his team in a game. So, maybe your kicker makes an open-field tackle to save a touchdown… he would get a sticker on his helmet… or maybe your linebacker puts a really good hit on the other team’s running back causing them to lose significant yardage… he might get a sticker. Eventually, a player’s helmet could begin to have lots of stickers. Fans (and opposing players) could show up to a game and be able to tell which players had been having the most impact for their team by the number of stickers placed on their helmets.

What if we applied the same concept to Christianity? What if you received a sticker for every person that you led to Jesus Christ? What would your helmet look like? Take a second and think of how many stickers would be on your helmet. Would it look like this?

Not bad… would it look like this?

How many of you are thinking that your helmet would look more like this?

For those of you thinking that your helmet would most closely resemble this one, I would like to suggest that you are maybe doing a little better than that… maybe your helmet would look a little more like this one.

If my salvation could be expressed in one sticker that was given out to everyone involved in leading me to the Lord, it would be broken up into hundreds if not thousands of tiny pieces. You see, to use another metaphor, some people have been called to harvest while others are called to plant seeds.

(***NOTE – I read about this study in someone else’s sermon on a different topic and I liked it… I tried to find information about this study and could not confirm that it ever happened, but I liked the idea behind it nonetheless. So, I would like to give proper credit to the study’s authors, but don’t know who they are… this study is not my information!***)

Some years ago, there was a study done by an agricultural school in Iowa. It was reported that production of a hundred bushels of corn from just one acre of land required:

• 4 million pounds of water
• 6,800 pounds of oxygen
• 5,200 pounds of carbon
• 160 pounds of nitrogen
• 125 pounds of potassium
• 75 pounds of yellow sulfur
• Rain and sunshine at the right times

For this yield of corn to happen, many hours of labor were required from the farmer, yet, the report also indicated that only 5% of the produce could be attributed to the efforts of the farmer. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, says in chapter 3, verses 5-9:

(5) Who is Apollos, and who is Paul, that we should be the cause of such quarrels? Why, we’re only servants. Through us God caused you to believe. Each of us did the work the Lord gave us. (6) My job was to plant the seed in your hearts, and Apollos watered it, but it was God, not we, who made it grow. (7) The ones who do the planting or watering aren’t important, but God is important because He is the one who makes the seed grow. (8) The one who plants and the one who waters work as a team with the same purpose. Yet they will be rewarded individually, according to their own hard work. (9) We work together as partners who belong to God. You are God’s field, God’s building – not ours. (NLT)

So, what are YOU bringing to the game? You need to bring a helmet that is consistently gaining more and more “salvation stickers.”

[tags]football, pride, stickers, Ohio State, helmet stickers, Woody Hayes, harvest, planter, Apollos, Paul, Corinthians, salvation[/tags]