I can still remember my coach’s old mantra, “How you practice is how you’ll play.” If you goof off in practice, you will goof off in the game; but if you take practice seriously and treat it as if it is the game, then when the whistle blows you will do what has become second nature. How you practice is how you will play.
John would agree with my coach, but he was more concerned with how Christians practice in the game of life. In 1 John 3:7 the Apostle wrote, “Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous.”
Let no one deceive you. This is common sense stuff, so don’t listen to the false teachers that will tell you otherwise. You must practice righteousness if you want to be righteous. You must make a habit of doing the right thing, every time, even when no one is looking. Day in and day out we must do the right thing because Jesus is righteous, and we should be as well. What you practice is how you’ll live.
In v.8 John continued: “Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.”
Whether you realize it or not, you are either practicing righteousness or unrighteousness. Whichever one you do the most (how you practice) determines what kind of life you live (how you play). The small compromises you might be making right now could end up becoming the pattern of your life, leading you to do worse things more often.
And before you brush off your sin saying, “Jesus died so that all that stuff can be forgiven,” you need to understand that Jesus died so that we can be set free from that stuff. Salvation is not seeing how much bad we can do and still go to heaven, it is about being delivered from the sin that once separated us from God.
How you practice is how you’ll play, and practice makes perfect. We are either getting better at sin or better at righteousness. The MVP in sin is one trophy you don’t want to earn.
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