The three teammates you need to have in place to tackle you …

As a kid, I learned in school to memorize, “The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.”

With that insightful tidbit locked away in my memory, I’ve always been able to determine my directions — as long as I could see the sun.

But have you ever been in a situation where you were just turned around because you had lost an accurate (or any!) sense of direction?

Maybe you thought you were headed in the right direction, but you were going the wrong way?

That happened in spectacular (and embarrassing) fashion to one Fairfield (California) High School football player during a game against rival Rodriguez High School back in 2019. USA Today reported this about the misdirected play:

“At some point during the game, Fairfield picked off a pass from Rodriguez. But the intercepting player took off running for the wrong end zone. That was when Fairfield player Kha-Ron Thrower had to take matters into his own hands to stop his teammate from running into an embarrassing safety. Thrower ran 50 yards to bring down his teammate at the 10-yard line with a clutch tackle” (you can read about it here).

The local TV news also reported the story and provided the following video, so you can see the action yourself:

Fortunately for the guy who ran the wrong way, he had a teammate who intervened before he could score some points for their rivals.

If a high school football game can be disorienting, how much more can life throw us for a directional loop?

Fortunately, God has provided us with three key “teammates” in our lives as His children to be there for us if we suddenly find ourselves running off in the wrong direction:

First is the Holy Spirit. One of His primary roles in our lives is to lead us to the truth, and that may include actively stopping us from running off in the wrong direction.

For example, that’s exactly what the Holy Spirit did with the Apostle Paul, who on a couple of occasions thought he should head off in one direction, only to be stopped in his tracks by the Holy Spirit:

“Next Paul and Silas traveled through the area of Phrygia and Galatia, because the Holy Spirit had prevented them from preaching the word in the province of Asia at that time. Then coming to the borders of Mysia, they headed north for the province of Bithynia, but again the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them to go there. So instead, they went on through Mysia to the seaport of Troas,” Acts 16:6-8.

You can probably identify more than one occasion when you likely experienced a prompting of the Holy Spirit to go a certain way, change directions, or in some way correct your course. Such leading is a holy version of a teammate tackling you before you run off and score some points for the wrong side.

Along with the Holy Spirit, the Word of God is a trusty “teammate” who can tackle us when we’re thinking we should head off in the wrong direction:

“Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path,” Psalm 119:105.

The quickest way for a disciple of Jesus to lose his or her way in life is to not read and study the Word of God on a daily basis. “Being in the Word” is having that teammate who helps make sure we’re running in the right direction.

And the third “teammate” is the church. When we are born again, we’re born into God’s family, which is the body of Christ. We’re just one part of a single body that is connected together, and it’s that family relationship, or “connectedness” as one body — the fellowship we have with brothers and sisters in Christ — that helps us maintain the right direction for living.

For example, the Apostle Peter strayed off from the right direction in a specific instance, and it was his “family” member, the Apostle Paul, who was a trustworthy teammate who “tackled” Peter so he could turn around and head back in the right direction:

“But when Peter came to Antioch, I had to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong. When he first arrived, he ate with the Gentile believers, who were not circumcised. But afterward, when some friends of James came, Peter wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles anymore. He was afraid of criticism from these people who insisted on the necessity of circumcision. As a result, other Jewish believers followed Peter’s hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. When I saw that they were not following the truth of the gospel message, I said to Peter in front of all the others, “Since you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like a Gentile, why are you now trying to make these Gentiles follow the Jewish traditions? You and I are Jews by birth, not ‘sinners’ like the Gentiles. Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law,” Galatians 2:11-16.

We need relationships in our lives with godly, faithful followers of Jesus who have our best interests in mind and will, if necessary, “tackle” us to keep us from making a serious error of running off in the wrong direction.

If you want to make sure you don’t do something as foolish as run in the wrong direction or score some points for the other side, then make sure you’re sensitive and responsive to these three teammates — that you’re nurturing your relationship with the Holy Spirit, that you’re in the Word of God every day, and that you maintain a strong bond of love with fellow Christians who encourage and support you (as you do the same for them).

Scotty