What it told me is that although Baylor is a very very good football program, one of the most exciting in the nation to watch, we're not quite top-tier...yet.
Bowl games (in that sense) are a good, objective measure of the entirety of the football program. It puts appropriate stress on coaches, players, logistics, fan base, and so on. When you're not quite ready for the big-time, it shows. It's an objective measure.
There are a couple of objective measures in our spiritual life, though admittedly they're not as exciting as a bowl game and there's no national television coverage.
Jesus said it this way: "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." If you want to know the status of your heart, look and see where your treasure is. Treasure, in this sense, is most easily and significantly monetary resources. But it can be expanded to anything you count as a resource: time, relational capital, unique abilities, and so forth. The heart is the inmost part of our selves, the part Jesus lovingly lays siege to, captures, and ultimately conquers so that He can renovate it to His liking.
In an important way, that's a real gift. It allows us to really see what the status of our spiritual life is, not what we think it is or hope it might be. Where our treasure is, there our heart will be too.
But that also works the other way: if we learn to redirect our treasure, our heart can come into line. Our priorities determine our passions, not vice versa.
So here at the outset of 2015 with all our resolutions and diets and regimes anew, I hope we all take a moment and take stock, objectively, of the state of our hearts. I hope we clear some path for our priorities to be realigned as necessary so that when 2016 rolls around the state of our heart is better off than it was today.
Priorities determine passions. That's objectively true.
But that's just me thinking thoughts...
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