This Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks will take on the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII in front of an estimated 110 million viewers. From February 7-23, the world will watch as the Winter Olympics unfold in Sochi, Russia. This summer, an estimated 700 million people around the globe will turn their eyes to television screens for the month-long FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Sports capture a huge amount of our time, attention, and economic resources.

There’s no way around it:

Sport has become an idol.

I’m an avid part of the sports machine, both as a participant and as a fan. My story testifies to the ways God met me and captured my heart in the midst of my athletic pursuits. Sports gave me more quality time with my Dad than anything else. Sports taught me to work hard, to lose with grace, to win with humility and to embrace teammates and coaches as family. Sports gave me a tool to bridge language divides while working cross-culturally and gave me a unique avenue to speak life and encouragement into the lives of the young women and youth I’ve coached both on and off the field.

But just as sports can bring life, they can cause death. They can steal the affection of our hearts away from the centrality of Christ. The pursuit of pleasure, entertainment, and fame can numb us to the needs that surround us. If relationships or worship or actively being the hands and feet of Jesus to our community suffers because our emotions and time are so wrapped up in a game or are negatively affected by a win-loss record, then we have a serious problem on our hands.

Sports can inspire goodness and generosity and hard work just as they can endorse hedonism and selfishness and vanity. They can bring us together just as they can cause division. Like anything, they can be distorted and blown out of proportion.

Behind the façade of honest competition, seemingly harmless nationalism, and celebration of athletic achievements, major sporting events have a harrowing dark side. Major tournaments such as the World Cup and Olympics are linked to significant increases in human trafficking, drug smuggling and lingering violence. Three billion people around the world live on less than $2.50 a day, while the average salary for a player in the NHL is $2.4 million per year and members of the world’s athletic elite pocket between $15-75 million annually.

For some, the corruption and challenges provide more than ample reason to walk away or to label the entire industry as a lost cause. To me, it’s a reminder of brokenness and systemic injustice. It challenges me to constantly examine the posture of my heart and the ways I spend my time, money and where I devote my emotional energy.

But it’s also an invitation.

Because when we pray for and talk about cultural renewal, we’re talking about bringing the light of the Kingdom of God into all areas and facets of our culture. We want the Kingdom to unfold in all its brilliance and beauty and life-giving redemption wherever people are. Which means that part of what we’re talking about is sports.

The cultural renewal of sports matters. Fifty-one percent of youth aged 5 to 14 in Canada regularly participate in organized sports, and even more, due to economic restraints, do so in a non-official fashion. If you walk around downtown on a Canucks’ game day, you’d think the blue jerseys were a municipally mandated uniform. Most Canadians can tell you exactly where they were in 2010 when Sidney Crosby scored the golden goal that closed of the Vancouver Olympic Games on an unforgettable high note.

Sports matter to our culture. Therefore, the way we engage in sports matters.

If done well, sport can open the door to relationships, discipleship and the advancement of the Kingdom. Sport is a shared language that can help alleviate racial tension (Remember the Titans, anyone?) and inspire friendship in ethnically diverse communities. The UN has an Office on Sport for Peace and Development because research and practice have shown that sport is a powerful and effective tool for trauma recovery for child soldiers and encourages positive psychological development and mental health in refugee camps and impoverished areas. Within our own province, I’ve seen low-income kids without consistent economic access to community recreation programs game come alive when they have a ball at their feet and the encouragement of coaches who remind them that they matter and they are loved.

The world of sports is huge and complicated. But, here’s the good news: God doesn’t call us to a life separated from the things we enjoy (so long as the things we enjoy are not in opposition to the way he invites us to live). He calls us to a life of freedom and passion and I think he meant for us to take those descriptions seriously. I believe that He invites us to pursue those things with as much love as we can while we keep our eyes locked on Him.

There’s freedom in Christ to cheer loudly. There’s freedom to actively and personally engage with the way our cities love these games. There’s freedom to participate and to coach and to wear our team colours, so long as Christ is always central in our hearts, minds and cheque books. There’s freedom to do what we love, so long as we do what we love with love.

And when we step too far—when the idol of sport emerges and our emotions are swayed by numbers on a scoreboard or our money more readily given to entertainment than mission—there’s grace to repent and go back to the glorious work of redeeming culture and bringing the Kingdom to all things, including the vast and exciting world of sports.