Read a Rebels Excerpt

Read John 3:1-16.

“[Nicodemus] came to Jesus at night and said, ‘Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God’” (v. 2).

Two-time NCAA national champion Brittney Reese was such a natural talent that she was the state high school track and field athlete of the year pretty much without any coaching.

Reese was a really good basketball player in high school when one hot spring day of her junior year, a coach promised her a cold drink if she would take a shot at the long jump. “Having no clue about proper form or where to land or even what to do,” she gave it a try. When she landed, the coach’s eyes lit up. Containing his excitement, he calmly asked, “Why don’t you go try that again?” She did and landed in pretty much the same spot. Reese’s life was forever changed.

Basketball was her first love, and so she didn’t have any time to devote to track. She simply showed up for meets and jumped. She had such natural jumping abilities that she was the state’s 2004 Gatorade track and field athlete of the year, excelling despite not having any personal training.

She played basketball for two seasons at Gulf Coast Community College, which didn’t have a track program. Ole Miss track coach Joe Walker then offered her a track scholarship, even though she had never been coached and hadn’t jumped in two years.

With a little coaching and teaching and a lot of running, Reese blossomed into a world-class athlete, her jumps getting longer and longer. “She looked like she might be good,” said fellow Ole Miss jumper Jasmine Dacus. “But then the girl just blew up.”

Reese was the NCAA Outdoor Champion in the long jump in both 2007 and 2008 and competed in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In 2009 in Berlin, she won the world championship.

Brittney Reese was a natural, but a little teaching and coaching made her a champion.

You can read this book, break 90 on the golf course, and do your job well because somebody taught you. And as you learn, you become the teacher yourself. You teach your children how to play Monopoly and how to drive a car. You show rookies the ropes at the office and teach baseball’s basics to a Little League team.

This pattern of learning and then teaching includes your spiritual life also. Somebody taught you about Jesus, and this, too, you must pass on. Jesus came to teach a truth that the religious teachers and the powerful of his day did not want to hear. Little has changed in that regard, as the world today often reacts with scorn and disdain to Jesus’ message.

Nothing, not even death itself, could stop Jesus from teaching his lesson of life and salvation. So should nothing stop you from teaching life’s most important lesson: Jesus saves.

I can dunk. -- Brittney Reese on her natural jumping abilities

In life, you learn and then you teach, which includes learning and teaching about Jesus, the most important lesson of all.