Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - UPDATED Kobe Bryant: 5 Lessons After the Tragedy | Keith and Patrick

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to drive across town. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. On this episode, we are going to discuss the very tragic death of Kobe Bryant, his daughter, Gianna, and seven other people who were aboard a helicopter that crashed several days ago. And we thought about talking about this on the podcast last week, the week that it happened. But we decided that maybe wasn't the best idea. People were grieving appropriately so, and it seemed like it was too quick to turn it into kind of cultural analysis. But now this week, we think it's worth coming back and revisiting this topic and just asking the question, what can we learn from it?

Starting point is 00:00:50 Now, we're trying to thread the needle, and so we ask for a little bit of grace here from you. What I mean by that is this is definitely a tragic situation. A family is torn apart, more than one, several. And we should heed God's command to weep with those who weep. And so the right response of everybody, but for sure Christians, is to pray, to have compassion on this family, to pray for their friends and family members and everyone involved with it. On the other hand, we think that there's something here for us to learn from. And so we're going to kind of think about this, not as people who knew Kobe Bryant, because of course we didn't. but as people who are pastors and who want to think biblically about this situation and see what we can learn from it.

Starting point is 00:01:39 Yeah, so today we're not going to do a retrospective on Kobe's life. We're not even going to talk about how to process grief and how to work through grief in our own lives. Those would be interesting, great podcasts on their own. Instead, we want to take the advice of Ecclesiastes 7-2. This is what it says. It's better to go to the house of mourning than go to the house of feasting. for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. And then in verse four, the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools

Starting point is 00:02:12 is in the house of mirth. And I think what this passage is inviting us to do is to reflect on death, is to think about what death can teach us how to live our lives, how to live our lives before God. And so as a lot of people are reflecting on death in the wake of Kobe Bryant's death, we thought this is a good time for us to do it on the podcast. And to kind of make it simple, we've come up with five big takeaways that we think anybody who's thinking about death, thinking about what happened to Kobe, can take away and can learn. The first thing that we can learn from this tragedy is that we all need to live our life backwards. And all we mean by that is that we need to live our life backwards. And all we mean by that is that we need. need to think about how our life is going to end and then walk back to where we are now in life and say, I want to live in a way that I will be happy with my life when I die. One thing we all know for sure is that we are all going to die. And it seems like a long time in the future to most of us. But it's probably not.

Starting point is 00:03:17 It probably sneaks up on you quicker than you think. And of course it comes unexpectedly. There's not like a countdown clock. No one knows exactly when they'll die. You and I might have many years ahead of us, but then again, we might not. And so since we know that we're all going to die, we can work backward from that and say, how do I want to live in light of my death? It's actually interesting. In the wake of 9-11, Kobe went on the news and he said some things that he was learning from that tragedy. And what he said, I think, is really wise. And I have to imagine that it's precisely the takeaway that Kobe would want anybody who was grieving over his death to walk away

Starting point is 00:03:58 with. This is what he said. I've learned that you can't take things for granted. You know how we always say you later? One thing I've realized from September 11th is that you can't ever say that for sure. Things change in the blink of an eye. People go to work and they don't come back. One minute they're living and the next they're not. And it doesn't matter who you are. There's nothing you can do about it. it. I think he's right. It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter if you're me or if you're Kobe Bryant or if you're you. You don't know how long your life's going to be. You don't know how long the lives of the people around you are going to be. And when we remember that not everybody lives to a ripe old age, it changes how we live our lives. We want to live our lives backwards.

Starting point is 00:04:45 Psalm 1912 says, it's a prayer. It's a prayer to God that simply says, teach me to number my days so that I may gain a heart of wisdom. It's saying the key to wisdom, the key to living a excellent, godly life is remembering that your days are numbered. It sounds kind of morbid, and I'm guessing Keith does the same thing too, but I think about my funeral somewhat regularly, not in the sense of what are people going to say? I think about what do I want them to say? Who are the people that are going to be there? Will I have done anything in my life that has made their lives richer and better. Well, I've done anything in my life that they'll be able to say made the world a better place. When I think about my life, I want to start there right at the very end

Starting point is 00:05:29 and work my way backwards. Another way of saying that is what do you want to do with the dash of your life? Let me put that in context. Patrick says that we maybe think about death more than the average person, and that might be because we're pastors. And so we are surrounded by stories of people, and people dying, maybe more than most. And I have done many funerals in which I'm walking around in cemeteries as part of the service. And one thing that you'll see on every gravestone is a date the person was born and a date the person died. And those two dates are usually separated by a dash. And that dash, it hides a lot because that dash is a stand in for a person's life.

Starting point is 00:06:18 I say it hides a lot because not everybody lives their life, their dash, in the same way. So the question we have to ask is, how do we want to invest our years, however long we have here, how do we want to live out our dash? And the more we think about that, the more intentional we can be. And therefore, I think the more we will be prepared for death whenever it comes in our life. Our second takeaway kind of connects to that, and it's that we don't have to airbrush people's lives and death. What I mean when I say that is, you know, when someone passes away, they tend, especially if they're a celebrity, to get the all good treatment or the all bad treatment. So the New York Times, they did a long story and exosé on Kobe's life. And in that exosé, Kobe got the good treatment.

Starting point is 00:07:11 He came out looking like a great guy. The only problem with that is that Kobe was a mixed bag. You know, by all accounts, it seems like he was a good dad and he cared about his kids. But then if you read a story, you know that back in 2003, he was pretty credibly accused of raping a woman. And while I don't know what really happened and no one listening to this knows, we can rest assured that Kobe wasn't a perfect guy. And that's always a temptation when someone dies is to take that little dash that was their life and airbrush out all the bad stuff and try to treat it like it's only good. My kids are older and they were at the house the other night and we were having dinner. And when I threw out this fact that Patrick mentioned that the Big Times article didn't have anything about this alleged rape that Kobe committed, a few of my kids had never even heard that before.

Starting point is 00:08:03 They had no idea that was even a part of Kobe's story. And so the point isn't to beat him up because it seems like he really grew a lot since that time. The point is to wrestle with where does this desire to airbrush people's lives come from? Because what we end up doing is we end up making heroes or, you know, people into demons. And I think it's an unwillingness to wrestle with that we are mixed back. Kobe is no different than any of us. We are all human beings who have a lot of things that are, we've done that are good in life, but also a lot of flaws, brokenness, and sin.

Starting point is 00:08:41 And it seems much more healthy to deal with reality of who we really are and who people really are as opposed to creating heroic stories about people who didn't even really exist. I think that temptation relates to another thing we're learning. Number three, that we need to beware of overinvesting in celebrity culture. One of the reasons why I think we, again, have the temptation to either turn celebrities into heroes or turn them into. to villains is precisely because they're celebrities. And celebrities have become people that we as a culture have become tempted to expend a lot of emotional energy following, caring about. I can speak for myself here. I've got a limited emotional tank, right? I've only got so much that I can give away to people. And so one of the questions I have to ask myself continually is, do I have enough

Starting point is 00:09:35 to give to this person or to that person? And if I am spending my emotional energy grieving, over celebrities, grieving over people I've never met, spending time investing in their lives and knowing who they are, I simply have to ask myself the question, am I taking that emotional energy from someone that really needs it who's close at hand? My daughter, my son, my wife, my friends. There are so many ways we invest in celebrity culture. We follow them. We try to be like them. We pay attention to what they are doing. We get emotionally invested so that we feel like we know these people. And I think Patrick makes a really good point that we have a limited emotional tank, you might call it. And therefore, when we spend it on celebrities, we maybe neglect or don't

Starting point is 00:10:21 invest as much as we can in the real life people around us. And why do we do that? Well, my guess, there are a lot of reasons more than we can cover here. But I think one reason is because it is relatively cheap and easy. What I mean by that is that when you invest in celebrities, you aren't expected to actually follow through and help or come to their aid. If Kobe Bryant dies, I'm not expected to show up at the funeral. I'm not expected to befriend his kids and take on some role. I'm not expected to take a meal over. But when the people around me, when they go through crises, maybe not just death, but any kind of crises, then I'm kind of expected. It's incumbent upon me to play some sort of role in helping them through it, process it, sitting and listening to them or leaving

Starting point is 00:11:17 some of the burdens they're going through. And I don't like that. I want my life to be free to do what I want to do. I don't want to have to serve other people. So I can connect with celebrities. I can connect with movie stars or singers or sports athletes or whatever. I can connect with them, mourn them, feel like I'm a part of their life because they don't put any real demands on me. And so it kind of trains us. It provides this ground for us to develop unhealthy habits or unhealthy expectations of what real relationships are like.

Starting point is 00:11:55 Real relationships, real community is always costly. Now it's worth it. Wow, is it ever worth it? But because relationships I say is worth it because that's where we find so much joy and companionship and it's how God designed us to live, all that. But it costs me to die to myself and to put another person's needs and interests above my own. Just remember this. When someone like Kobe dies, when you watch the media, it's almost as though death has never happened before. It's almost as though people are grappling with the reality of death for the first time. And I'm not talking about his friends and his family, the people who genuinely knew him. I'm not trying to make any critique there. I'm talking about the people who didn't know him, who are

Starting point is 00:12:37 shocked and confused. And that's, again, what a lot of us experienced. But it's not the first time that death happened. I got really curious. I got online and I searched how many people die in the U.S. every day. 7,500 people, 150,000 people worldwide. And none of those are on the front page. none of those are making the headlines. So the day before Kobe died, 150,000 people died. And the day after Kobe died, 150,000 people died. We are surrounded by death. It's not as though this is the first time that this has happened. And I think the challenge I want to give myself is, remember that those deaths, the pain, the suffering, it's not just happening over on the West Coast where Kobe Bryant lives. It's happening right here in my own community. And I think that my emotional energy is far better spent

Starting point is 00:13:28 focusing on what's happening here on the lives that are actually around me that I can actually have an impact on than it is spent on grieving on someone who I never met, and not to be too callous, but who if I died would have never grieved me. That's kind of the point with the celebrity relationships is that we're investing in people who don't even know we exist. Not in a bad way, just a superstar, Kobe or Madonna or whoever you want it to be. It doesn't matter. They don't know all their fans. So we're investing so much energy in someone who has no idea that we exist.

Starting point is 00:14:04 Or in this specific case, we're mourning someone's death who would mourn us if we died. So it seems like we're better off investing in the local community that we live in, wherever that is, where we're encouraging people and being encouraged, or we're sometimes grieving and being grieved. And that takes us to the fourth thing we're learning from this tragedy, and it deals with grieving. It is kind of like don't exchange genuine relationships for digital relationships. So one of the things I tell people who are experiencing grief is that

Starting point is 00:14:46 two people usually don't agree in the same way, and we shouldn't have expectations for them to. So, for example, I have recently talked to a married couple who experienced a miscarriage, and it was a sad situation, and I warned them that they will be tempted to try to make the other person grieve the way they do. They will think, just by nature, the way we're wired, that the way we're grieving is the right way, and the way the other person is grieving maybe isn't quite as authentic or real or genuine. So maybe for you, you grieve by expressing a lot of tears and emotion. And maybe another person grieves by just kind of being alone and processing the events with God. Well, they might look at each other and say, you're not grieving the right way.

Starting point is 00:15:38 One would say, well, you're showing all this emotion, you're making a big drama out of it, calm down. and the person who is more expressive and their emotions might look and say, look, you're just detached. You don't care. You're not having any emotion. None of us grieve the same way. And so even when we approach something like this, a national, a story, we shouldn't have the expectation that everybody's got to do it just quite like we do it. Give people the space to grieve in their own way. Now, while everybody doesn't grieve the same way and we've got to give people that space, it doesn't mean that all ways of grieving are equally healthy.

Starting point is 00:16:18 And so we can reflect on ourselves and just ask, how should we grieve? And there's this temptation to grieve digitally instead of in real physical, tangible relationships. So, for example, there's a tendency to go on social media and to grieve publicly there, but not be willing to process face-to-face with a feeling. friend and cry and maybe give each other a hug and share stories in that tangible way. And again, I'm not trying to say that putting things on Facebook is all bad at all, but I think it's worth asking the question, is it because we don't have real friendships

Starting point is 00:17:00 that we're really connected with people in our life that we don't grieve with them and that we run to Facebook because we feel like people on social media get us more than the people really around us? Is it because we don't want to have to look at another human being and be in their presence, but we can just say all this to the internet? What is it about us? Is that the way God created us to have these kind of digital relationships that replace, not enhance, but replace physical relationships? And I think the same thing can be said if we are the people responding to those who are going through grief. Are we only responding digitally? Do they only see a text? Do they only get a Facebook message saying how sad they are and how much they'll miss this person?

Starting point is 00:17:51 That might be, depending on your relationship, what you need to do. But in some instances, if you're close to someone, it requires a lot more than that. It might require going over to their house, bringing them a meal, doing something in person. We can't let Facebook replace those in-person relationships. I think another temptation, and just a question we need to ask ourselves when we are, faced with grief is why we're posting. This is a story from my own past. I went to high school with a gal who died in her late 20s in a really sad accident. And when she died, everybody got onto Facebook, all these people I graduated with. And they talked about how wonderful she was and how much she added to their life and how sad that they were. And I don't know how sincere each individual person was. But here's what struck me. When I was in high school, no one.

Starting point is 00:18:42 one was nice to this girl. No one said nice things about her. No one said nice things to her. I saw people posting on her Facebook who I remember in high school saying mean things about her. And it kind of struck me. I thought, why are they going on to Facebook and saying all these things that they never would have said to her face when she was living? Why are they saying them now? Maybe it was guilt, or maybe it was just self-aggrandizement. Look at what kind of person I am. I have this empathy. I care for people in loss and tragedy. And again, it was just a moment for me to reflect on myself and ask the question, why am I posting what I'm posting? What's the value of what I'm posting? Am I trying to make this about me? Am I using someone's grief to make myself look better? That's certainly not a good

Starting point is 00:19:27 thing to do. And so that takes us to our fifth and final lesson that we are learning from this tragic event. And that deals with what God sees as a significant life versus how we and and our culture define a significant life. Kobe was a hero because he was a fantastic basketball player. Some say one of the top five or ten basketball players ever to play the game. And that's how he got his status in our culture. Had he not played basketball or been as good, he wouldn't be somebody that was on our radar.

Starting point is 00:20:03 We probably wouldn't know who he is. So there's this idea that a significant person is one who is famous, who has lots of social media followers, who makes lots of money, who finds their name in the headlines. That's what a significant life is. But let's process that a little bit together. Is that how God sees a significant life? Just think about sports. Sports has been incredibly important throughout history in all kinds of different cultures. In ancient Greece, track was a real.

Starting point is 00:20:36 really big deal. And so imagine a decathlet or a marathon runner who was the leader of the nation, the best of the best at that time. And that would a person would have been a really big deal. I mean, everybody would have known about that person just like today. Everybody knows who Kobe Bryant is or LeBron James or Michael Jordan or any day's today's modern athletes. But now let me ask you this. Who was the best decathlete ever in ancient Greece? the best marathon runner? Well, of course, you have no idea. They were a really big deal in their day

Starting point is 00:21:14 because they were a sports god, a sports hero. But we have no idea who they are. So maybe sports isn't the place to put our identity. Maybe sports isn't the place to identify and define a significant life. And not just sports, maybe celebrity, isn't it? Again, in our culture, we've decided. that what a significant life looks like is being famous, is having lots of followers. But is that really what's most significant in God's eyes? Edith Schaefer was an author, and she helped co-found the Libre

Starting point is 00:21:52 Fellowship with her husband, Francis Schaefer. And she was asked by an interviewer, who in the world is closest to God. I don't really know what the interviewer expected her to say, maybe Billy Graham, Mother Teresa. But I love her answer. She said that the person who's closest to God is someone you've never heard of, probably living in a corner of the world that you will never visit, doing things that will never make their way onto the news. But they're faithfully serving Jesus. They're faithfully sacrificing for Jesus.

Starting point is 00:22:24 They're faithfully following Jesus. And their lives matter tremendously in God's eyes. I kind of wonder if she had Psalm 116, verse 15 in mind. This is what it says. precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. And it's simply a way of saying this. A significant life led before God, it's not a life of celebrity. It's not a life of being a sports God.

Starting point is 00:22:49 I'm not saying you can't have those things to please God. I'm saying those are the things that God simply doesn't make much of. What does God make much of? A life that's well-pleasing to him. A life lived serving him. A life lived reflecting him into the world. We mentioned earlier that the New York Times, along with pretty much every major media outlet, has done all kinds of reports, stories on Kobe, his death and the circumstances surrounding it, but also his impact on culture or his significance in the basketball slash sports world. If the New York Times and the L.A. Times and all the major media outlets have been around back in Jesus' day, do you think that any of them would have covered his death?

Starting point is 00:23:32 No. I mean, the answer is for sure 100% no. Jesus was just another Jew crucified outside of Jerusalem, crucified as a common criminal because there were rumors of insurrection against Rome that swirled around him. So Jesus lived this relatively unknown life. He lived a life that didn't make him famous that wouldn't have appeared in media. And so be careful. about how you think your life will be significant. It won't come from being famous, but from being faithful, faithful to God, faithful to love him, love others. I can imagine some 13-year-old out there watching TV, seeing all of the morning happening around Kobe's life and thinking, gosh, I want people to treat me the way that they treated Kobe. I want people to remember me the way that they're remembering Kobe. And that person might end up thinking, the only way I can do that, again, is to live a big, famous life. But I hope one of the encouragements anyone listening to this podcast can take

Starting point is 00:24:41 away is that, again, that's not a meaningful life before God, that we can live in everyday, normal, mundane life that no one is ever going to write about in the newspapers. And God will still look upon us. We'll still live a significant life in his eyes. We started off talking about how everybody's life has a start and a finish and there's a dash in between it. That's the biggest takeaway I think I want to take from all of this tragedy is that my dash is my dash. No one else can live it. No one else can define it. And I want to not live it for myself. I want to live it for Jesus. I don't want to live it for my glory to be famous. I want to live it for the service of my king. And if we do that, I think that we've numbered our days well. We've lived. We've lived.

Starting point is 00:25:29 wisely and we've lived a life that's going to be pleasing before our God. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations. Thank you.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - UPDATED Kobe Bryant: 5 Lessons After the Tragedy | Keith and Patrick

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