Here's a golf tip you may have never heard. To move forward, you need to think backwards. What if I told you that same idea might be the key not just to better golf, but to a better life? Hey listeners, my name is Mark, and welcome back to another episode of Shanctification, where we talk about golf, grace, and the beautiful struggle for perfection. Ben Hogan famously once said, reverse every natural instinct, and you'll probably come close to the perfect golf swing. Now, if you've been golfing long enough, I think you probably can relate to that a little bit. Golf is a weird sport. It's a game built on doing the opposite of what feels natural. Want to hit the ball right, swing left. You want to hit it high, swing down on the ball. If you want more distance, slow your swing down. If you want to play well, stop thinking about the 27 swing thoughts in your head. And then there's this. Let me know if this sounds familiar. You're 120 yards out and you hit a hossle rocket to the parking lot. You immediately pull out another ball, you hit it, nonchalantly swing and hit it four feet from the cup. Or how many of us have missed a 10-foot putt, rake it back, and then hit it again right into the hole without even thinking about it. Maybe even one-handed. Nonchalantly, we play so much better than we do when we're taking ourselves seriously. Golf has a way of exposing this truth. Our instincts are not always trustworthy. And if you look at the life of Jesus Christ, he does the exact same thing, just on a bigger scale, on a more important scale. Nothing about him matched any expectations. He wasn't the warrior king that the Jews wanted, he wasn't the political threat that the Romans feared, and he wasn't the religious leader that the Pharisees expected. He came from nowhere, came from no town that anybody had ever heard of. He had very ordinary parents, and he frankly surrounded himself with a bunch of outcasts. And somehow he saved the world by dying for it. The creator of the universe came to die for his broken creation. And even his teachings feel backwards. He says, Your lusts equal adultery. He says, to love your enemies. He says, if you want to be great, then become a servant. If you want to find your life, you must lose it first, and put him above even your family. And then the one that stopped everybody in their tracks, he says, No one comes to the Father except through me. It's not just unconventional, it's uncomfortable. And if we're being honest, this is where we struggle. Because we hear things like, his burden is light, but his commands feel very heavy. So what gives? The answer is something theologians call sanctification. Or if that theologian is a golfer, they might call it sanctification. But it's not instant transformation, it's not instant perfection, it's a process. It's a process of becoming more like Christ over time. It means we've been set apart. It means we've been forgiven. It means we've been redeemed and restored back to our Creator. And now our lives start to reflect that. Not because we have to follow His rules, but because we know His rules are a loving sanctuary for us. But why does that matter? Why is integrity such a big thing in our culture? And why is the lack of integrity so obvious? Think about this. Golf is one of the only sports where you call penalties on yourselves. There's no ref, there's no whistles, just integrity. And what happens at the highest level? You've all experienced this. If you spend enough time in front of the TV or YouTube or social media, millions of people watch in, and nothing gets higher ratings whenever they see an infraction from a pro during a tournament. His caddy goes berserk, the commentators go crazy, the playing partners usually throw up their arms and start quabbling, but it goes viral on social media, and we have so much fun picking apart this pro who quote unquote cheated because they should have integrity for the game. Admittedly, there are certain golfers out there that I enjoy watching on the weekend only because they're kind of known cheaters. And I'm not going to mention any names like Patrick Reed, but I look at him and I'm entertained by how much he tries to bend the rules, how much he tries to convince himself that what he's doing is right, just so he can win him a few more bucks that weekend, add another Bentley to his garage and make himself feel a little bit better. But that cost of integrity, that criticism that I put on him, a lot of us put on him, that's really the Christian life. The world is watching us. They're not expecting perfection, but waiting for us to see how we respond when we fail. But if you're like me, your response to failure, our instinctual thought, is to defend our actions, to justify them, to hide them. But the unconventional response, or the Jesus response, is to own it, bring it into the light, point it to the cross. Because we're not representing perfection, we're representing grace. God came down to earth as a man. He lived a sinless life and he walked amongst his people. But his life was too unconventional, so they killed him for it. So what is our response to that? According to the Bible, it's to share the grace of God with a broken, critical, ever-watching, ever-wondering world looking at us. Even Patrick Reed. Because all of humanity, including ourselves, finally get to a point where we say, thinking forward, at least the way culture wants us to think forward, through the media or advertising or products or social media, just doesn't fill me up like it promised it would. So I've got to think backwards. I've got to think different. And who is this Jesus person who lived a different life, a backwards life? And I think that's the message Jesus was trying to teach us. To move forward, you have to think backwards. You have to think counter-culturally. One of my favorite pastors and authors and theologians is a guy named Francis Chan, and he said it best when he said, something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers. Let that sink in for a minute. Maybe the goal isn't to make life easier or more logical or make sense. Maybe the goal is to live differently so that it only makes sense through Jesus. Hey friends, thank you for joining me on another episode of Shanctification. If you got a second, it would mean the world to me if you could like this, subscribe to this podcast, write a review for this podcast. But more importantly, you probably know somebody who is burned out and exhausted from trying to chase the thing that society is telling them is going to satisfy their soul. Share this podcast with them. This may just be the unconventional way that they get introduced to Jesus. Until next time, keep chasing better.