The Litmus Test of Childlike Trust and Purpose

Job 12:9-12 is an interesting passage to bring into athletics, but I think the message becomes much stronger when we stay closer to what Job is actually saying. Job isn't teaching that every creature consciously knows God as its Father, and he isn't primarily talking about our spiritual connection with all living things. Job is responding to his friends and pointing to creation as evidence that God's power and sovereignty are obvious. The animals, birds, earth, and fish testify that life itself is in God's hands.

Job 12:9-10 (ESV) says, “Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind.”

That's a much heavier truth than the original idea of interconnectedness because Job is talking about dependence. Everything living depends on God for life, including the athlete who has spent years developing their body, the coach who believes preparation can solve almost anything, and the competitor who's used to controlling as much of the outcome as possible. Athletics trains us to prepare, work, adjust, and take responsibility, and I believe strongly in all of those things, but faith reminds us that control has limits. We aren't self-made, self-sustaining, or nearly as independent as we sometimes convince ourselves we are.

That can be difficult for competitive people because we're taught to trust preparation. If you want to get stronger, lift. If you want to improve your skill, train it. If conditioning is poor, fix it. If you lose, study what happened and make adjustments. That mindset serves athletes incredibly well, but eventually life gives every one of us something we can't fix by working harder. Injury, disappointment, uncertainty, loss, unanswered prayer, and circumstances completely outside our control have a way of exposing how much confidence we've placed in our own ability to manage everything.

Job certainly understood that kind of disruption. By chapter 12, he had experienced catastrophic loss and was responding to friends who kept trying to explain his suffering to him. We shouldn't turn Job into a story about an athlete learning to trust the process because that's nowhere close to the weight of what the book is addressing. What Job does give us is an honest picture of somebody who believes in God while wrestling with enormous questions about what God is allowing.

That's important because Christian athletes sometimes get the message that strong faith means never questioning anything. If you're confused, hurt, angry, or wondering why God allowed something to happen, somebody will eventually tell you to stop questioning and just have more faith. Job makes that argument pretty difficult to defend because the book is filled with Job asking hard questions, grieving, arguing, and trying to understand what he can't understand.

There is a difference, though, between bringing our questions to God and deciding God can't be trusted unless He gives us satisfactory answers. Faith doesn't require shutting down our brains or pretending confusion doesn't exist, but it does require humility when we reach the limits of what we can understand. Job eventually learns that there are realities about God's wisdom, power, and governance of creation that he simply can't see from where he's standing. That doesn't answer every question Job asks, and that's part of the point.

Athletes encounter a much smaller version of that tension all the time. You can do everything right and still not get the result you wanted. You can train hard and get injured, compete well and lose, be a great teammate and sit the bench, or pray desperately for an opportunity that never comes. Faith isn't weakened because you're disappointed or because you ask God why. The danger comes when our relationship with God quietly becomes conditional on Him giving us the outcome we believe we've earned.

That's where trust becomes real because trusting God is easy when His plans happen to look exactly like ours.

Matthew 18:3 is also worth bringing into this conversation, but Jesus isn't telling believers to become childlike in the sense of being free from skepticism, asking fewer questions, or blindly accepting everything. In Matthew 18, the disciples had asked Jesus who was greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and Jesus brought a child into their midst.

Matthew 18:3 through 4 (ESV) says, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

The emphasis is humility, not intellectual simplicity. In the first century, children didn't carry the social status we often associate with them today, so Jesus was confronting the disciples' obsession with greatness by pointing toward dependence and humility. That actually has a tremendous application for athletes because sports constantly encourage people to establish where they rank. Who starts, who scores, who gets recruited, who earns the award, who has the scholarship, who has the followers, and who gets recognized can become an exhausting scoreboard for personal importance.

Jesus flips that thinking completely. The disciples wanted to know who was greatest, and Jesus started talking about becoming humble.

For Christian athletes and coaches, childlike faith shouldn't mean becoming naive or refusing to wrestle with difficult questions. It means remembering our position before God. We can be confident without pretending we're in control, competitive without making ourselves the center of everything, and ambitious without believing our accomplishments make us more important than somebody else.

I also think we need to be careful with the idea that Job teaches us we're spiritually bound to every living thing. Scripture absolutely teaches that creation belongs to God and displays His power and wisdom, and Christians should treat God's creation responsibly. Job 12, however, isn't teaching a spiritual unity between humans, animals, plants, teammates, and competitors. Job is pointing toward the Creator by looking at what He created.

That distinction matters because the focus belongs on God, not on creation itself.

For athletes, that brings us back to something incredibly basic that sports can make us forget. Your body is an incredible gift, but it isn't God. Your ability is a gift, but it isn't God. Your sport can provide relationships, opportunities, purpose, discipline, and experiences that shape your life, but it was never meant to carry your identity or become the thing you trust most.

The same applies to relationships within a team. Trusting God should affect how we treat teammates and competitors, but not because Job teaches that we're spiritually connected to them through creation. It affects those relationships because our faith is supposed to change our character. If I claim to follow Christ, that should show up in the way I compete, communicate, handle disappointment, treat people who can't do anything for me, and respond when somebody else receives the opportunity I wanted.

That's where athletics becomes a pretty effective character test. It's easy to talk about humility until somebody challenges your position, easy to talk about trust until you lose control of the outcome, and easy to talk about faith until God doesn't answer the prayer the way you wanted Him to.

Job 12 reminds me that the hand of the Lord is bigger than the little world I'm trying desperately to control. Matthew 18 reminds me that following Christ requires humility rather than an obsession with becoming greater than everybody around me. Together, those truths challenge athletes and coaches to work hard and compete fiercely while remembering that neither our strength nor our understanding makes us self-sufficient.

I don't want athletes to stop asking questions, stop competing, or stop chasing difficult goals. I want them to become secure enough in their faith that they can do all of those things without needing to control every answer and every outcome. There will be moments when we don't understand what God is doing, and there will be seasons when what He's allowing makes absolutely no sense from where we're standing.

Childlike trust isn't pretending those questions don't exist. It's having enough humility to keep trusting God when they do.