TCW Short Take 4: Super Bowl, Sports, and the Worldview that Drives It

There are many, many things to take away from this story, but I just want to point out three here to close the program. First of all, this is a horrible tragedy. Kids, children lost their fathers and their mothers.

Colby had three other kids. There was a mother the coach of the team was on. The flight, none of her kids or her husband weren't. Her husband was quoted as saying, the hardest thing for me now is just how do I do this?

How do I go forward without my children's mother? I mean, you can just imagine what that would be like. Mothers lost their children in this thing. Nine people unexpectedly died. The families of those who are dealing with this complete grief and shock in their life need to be prayed for. They need to be prayed for that they would come to understand who God is, and that death happens to all of us, and that there's an urgency. There's a call. There's a command to get right with God before that happens.

Number two thing to take away is we don't know. You don't know when you are going to die, but you will die, and I will die at some point. That is, it is a point that a man wants to die, the Bible says, and the Bible says that you will either go to heaven or hell.

There's the binary system that Aaron Rodgers was talking about. You go there. One of those two places, based on how you answer one question, did you receive or did you reject the person and work of Jesus Christ on your behalf? In other words, did you put your faith in what Jesus did for you on the cross, that he paid the penalty you deserve to pay for your sin? Are you trusting only in holy and that nothing of your own to be right with God in his work, not your own works?

Or have you rejected that and said, no, I have another, but I have a spiritual path, as Aaron Rodgers was saying in that opening interview of the day. That's the fact. We're all going to die, and we're going to stand before God in judgment, the Bible says, and we're going to be sentenced to heaven or hell. We're either going to pay the penalty for our own sins for us, or we're going to have faith that Jesus paid them for us on our behalf. That's really the bottom line here.

So it's not that Kobe Bryant died at age 40. We're all going to die. We're all in the process of dying right now. We just don't know when.

The last thing is this. Death is the great equalizer. You know, the rich and the famous, like Kobe Bryant and the unknown of those other people who are on the helicopter, they take nothing to the grave.

Bryant's multi-millions of dollars in fame could do nothing to keep him from dying at a time that he didn't expect. In other words, you can amass all this fame and fortune in life, but you just die like everyone else. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul? What will a man give in exchange for his soul? Jesus asked that question, and the answer is there's nothing. There's nothing you can do or gain or doesn't profit you anything to gain the whole world if you lose your soul. I don't know what Kobe Bryant, what his beliefs were. I never met the man. I don't know what his heart was the day before the crash, whether he had come to saving faith the last day of his life. I do not know. But the call is for the rest of us who are still living, who are still breathing, who still have this opportunity to get right with God, to do it.

Now to the why question. When there were some tragedies in Israel, just like this was a tragedy, Jesus was asked basically the question, why did God allow this? And Jesus said to them, do you suppose that these Galileans who all died were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. His answer is, look, we're all going to die. We don't know when. The call is to repent and believe in the gospel.