In July 1961, Vince Lombardi, coach of the Green Bay Packers, stood before thirty-eight professional football players ready to start a new season. Six months previous, they had lost the championship game in the final minutes and had been sitting in that memory ever since. These athletes were ready to adjust what needed adjusting to make sure this year was different and were waiting for their coach to give them direction. Instead, Lombardi looked out over the second-best team in the world, held up a football, and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” And with that statement, the coach expressed his intention to take that team back to the fundamentals of the game.

In a similar way, sometimes the church needs to go back to the fundamentals of her existence, her mission, and her purpose. It’s an important discipline to regularly sit under God’s word and hear it declare authoritatively but simply, “Brothers and sisters, this is a church.”