Football is back, and with it the whole machinery of attention that follows it — the highlight reels, the hot takes, the cameras that find a young man's face before he has even caught his breath. So it was worth stopping on a line from Denver's quarterback, Bo Nix, talking about the visibility that has come with his job: "I want it to be about sharing the gospel."
Not a sermon. Not a slogan. Just a young man with a microphone in his face deciding out loud where he wants the light to land.
You don't have to care about the Broncos to find that arresting. Here is a person whose entire profession is to be looked at, saying he'd rather you looked past him.
Paul said it first, and he said it in a hard season
There is an old line for this. Writing to a church that had grown fond of comparing preachers the way we compare quarterbacks, Paul put it plainly:
"For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake... But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us" (2 Corinthians 4:5, 7).
Jars of clay. Not trophies. Not display cases. Ordinary crockery, the cheap stuff you keep on the bottom shelf. Paul's point is not that you're worthless; it's that nobody has ever walked away from a lit room admiring the lamp. The whole design of the thing is that the container is unremarkable so the treasure inside is unmistakable.
That is a freeing word if you've ever felt the pressure to be impressive before you're allowed to be useful. God has never required you to be impressive. He has asked you to be carrying something.
You already have a platform; it just doesn't have a camera on it
Here is where this gets practical, and close to home. It is easy to read a story about an athlete and conclude that gospel influence belongs to people with contracts and followers. That is not what Scripture describes. Every one of us stands in a place where certain people can hear us and almost nobody else can.
The second-shift crew who hears you before anyone else does. The group chat. The neighbor whose driveway meets yours. The bleachers on a Friday night in Ravenna, where half the town ends up anyway. The hallway outside a hospital room. The kid who has decided, for reasons you'll never fully understand, that you are the adult worth listening to.
That is a platform. It is smaller than a stadium and, in the accounting of heaven, not one bit less serious. What Bo Nix said about his job is exactly what the Lord is asking of yours: let it be about Him. Not louder. Not preachier. Just pointed somewhere other than yourself.
The Spirit is the one doing the pointing
And here's the relief in it — you are not the engine of this. Jesus said of the Holy Spirit, "He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you" (John 16:14). Glorifying Christ is the Spirit's own job description. When you open your mouth about what God has done, you are not launching something; you are joining something already underway.
I watch this happen in our own church. Someone gets a nudge to call a person they haven't thought about in months, and it turns out to be the exact day that call was needed. Someone prays for a coworker in the break room, awkwardly, and the coworker starts asking questions. Nothing dramatic enough to make a headline. Everything the Spirit wanted. If you want to practice it, Tuesday morning prayer at 11 is one of the simplest places I know to start — you learn quickly there that God does the moving and we mostly get to watch.
Next Sunday, the whole church preaches without saying a word
We come to the Lord's Table next Sunday, September 20, and Communion is the church's own version of we preach not ourselves. Paul says that when we eat the bread and drink the cup, "you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Corinthians 11:26). No one at that table is displaying their record. We are all holding something we did not earn and could not manufacture, and the attention goes where it belongs.
If you feel unseen this week — no platform, no audience, no highlight reel, maybe a prayer you've prayed a long time with no answer yet — hear this: the treasure in you is not diminished by the plainness of the jar. Christ is what you carry. He is worth every bit of the attention you send His way, and He has never once overlooked the person who quietly pointed to Him.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.