The basics of basketball, which I just briefly touched on, are they key to becoming a better player and team. The basics are a key to development. Without the basics, there are so many things that you miss out on. You don't learn how to shoot properly, you from bad habits, and you don't have yourself a chance to grow.
Another issue you face with the basics of basketball is becoming bored with them. This past season capped off a lifetime of competitive basketball for me. Imagine having to have excitement about the basics every day for 17 years. It was tempting to become bored about the simple basic of basketball but I never let myself become that way because I would have never been any good if I did that. I loved the game and the excitement I had for it fueled me to love the basics. If I didn't know the basics of basketball, I would have never learned to play the proper way.
For me, working on the basics was always something that was refreshing. During the midst of a lengthy basketball season, it is easy to get caught up in game plans and strategies you need to beat other teams. It becomes so easy to focus on everything we need to know and learn versus what we already know...the basics. When we would take a break from our defensive strategies and work on the basics of closing out and defensive sides, I was reminded of basic things that I was forgetting to do. I was refreshed because I was reminded of the basic things you need to know and do in order to help your team win.
The same things happens in our spiritual lives. We need to remember the basics and be refreshed by simple things like reading our bibles. We can't focus only on learning new things or we forget the old things, like perhaps the very reason we became believers in the first place.
Another problem that we face with our spiritual lives is becoming bored or impatient. Sometimes we can get caught up in just waiting on God to answer a prayer. Or we get caught up in routine where we are just continually doing something just to do it. It is way too easy to read your bible just not read it rather than reading it to grow and to learn things from it. It is easy to pray before every meal just to pray before every meal. Do you get what I am saying? We become too habitual without a purpose to grow.
I am sure you can relate. It's fun to learn and when you get in a habit of only focusing on all the new, it becomes easy to forget the basics. To me, that is life, in a way. We get on a path that we keep following and don't remember how we got on that path in the first place.
One of the things Paul writes about in 2 Peter is refreshing our memory as believers. A simple way to do that is reading your bible. I was that person who got on their own path of growth and could not figure how how to genuinely grow in my relationship with Christ. I was also on that path where I was a little bored. I would pray before bed, just to pray before bed. I would try reading devotionals just to say that I was doing something about my walk with the Lord. I was just doing things in a certain way because I was a little bored and partially impatient. What I was doing didn't have a genuine purpose. A couple of summers ago, I figured out the best was to grow was through reading my bible. That simple, spiritual refreshment changed my life. I quickly learned so many things that I had forgotten about because I had ended up on a rabbit trail where I wasn't really experiencing growth.
"I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body." (2 Peter 1:13)
As believers we can't neglect the basics of our faith. We need constant reminders of the fundamentals of our faith and how we became believers in the first place. Don't allow yourself to get on the rabbit trail, to get bored, or to become impatient with messages on the basics of Christian life. Get excited and do something with a purpose to grow. Have a growth mindset in everything that you do.
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