The Gap

Hall of Fame basketball coach John Wooden once said, “A leader’s most powerful ally is his or her own example. There is hypocrisy to the phrase ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ I refused to make demands on my boys that I wasn’t willing to live out in my own life.”

Too often as athletes and coaches, we desire to live a life we know we cannot live. What I mean is that we desire for our external life (the life everyone sees—wins and accomplishments) to be greater than our internal life (our thoughts and desires).

The best definition of hypocrisy I’ve heard is that it is the gap that exists between the public life and the private life—the difference between the external and the internal. God doesn’t want a gap; He wants integrity.

As competitors there is a constant war in our souls. We do not want others to see us as we really are. We are afraid that the gap will be exposed. However, God desires the opposite. He wants us to bring the dark (the things we have buried in our hearts) into the light so He can purify us. Oswald Chambers wrote, “My worth to God in public is only what I am in private.” As a competitor for Christ, be committed to being real—gap free!