By Brad Locke
December 9, 2005

(AgapePress) - I'm not convinced that poor discipline is the bane of many sports teams today. I think the main cause of discord is a lack of trust.

Players don't trust that coaches know what's best for them. Ownership doesn't trust management to make the right personnel decisions. Nobody trusts the media.

I cover high school sports, and it's so encouraging to witness the level of trust between player and coach. Not only do most of the athletes I watch trust that the coach knows what he or she's doing, they trust that the discipline handed out is driven by love and a desire to succeed.

A basketball player I talked to for a story I'm working on understood this concept and respected his coach's methods. "Yeah, he hollers at us, and he gets on us, but we need it most of the time," the player said. His coach, who also leads the girls team, has won more than 1,500 games in his career, and he's done it by establishing a trust between himself and his players through love, discipline and showing trust in them to perform what they've learned.

That's another problem sometimes -- coaches not trusting their players. Too often a coach -- say, Mike Martz of the St. Louis Rams -- won't remove himself from the action. He won't let his players play (see the Rams' loss in Super Bowl XXXVI, when Marshall Faulk was left to twiddle his thumbs). What's the point of teaching if you won't let the pupil apply his knowledge and skill?

Mistrust has become all too common in other areas of life. Marriages can be destroyed by mistrust, as can companies and governments. Worse than all that is the way mistrust can destroy a life. Mistrust is essentially what drives a wedge between man and God. We don't think God knows what's best for us, so we look out for No. 1 and, as Frank Sinatra sang, do it our way.

What man fails to recognize is that God's reasons and motives are higher than our own, and He has a perspective that we can't even begin to comprehend. When the immediate results don't satisfy us, we don't stick around for the long-term payoff. We think our finite, worldly wisdom exceeds the infinite wisdom of God.

I've learned the hard way to trust God (not that I do it every time; it's hard). I moved my family 14 hours from home after college, later took a job back in Mississippi that had long-term potential but no guarantees, and had four kids by age 28. You don't survive that without trusting in God (although our motto for a while was "In Visa we trust").

Why is it so hard to trust someone else, especially an authority figure with a good track record of success? And who has a better record than God? Lance Armstrong may have beaten cancer, but Jesus beat Death. We are conditioned to trust little in this world, because this world can be a deceptive and cruel place. We've all been burned by someone or something we trusted in, and so we reason that God is just as liable as anyone to let us down.

But God has never broken a promise. Paul reminds us in I Corinthians 1:20 that "all the promises of God find their Yes in Him." What a beautiful way to put it. It means not only that God will keep His promises, but that only He can fulfill those promises. It's not up to us to finish what God started or to pick up His slack. He will enable us to serve whatever holy purpose is set before us and will see us through it.

If we're trusting in that guidance, He will trust us to obey and glorify Him. Trust and obey. Hey, there's no other way.