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When the Game Owns Your Heart: A Christian's Guide to Loving Sports Without Losing Your Joy, Your Witness, or Your Family
Paperback
Series: Hope House Legacy, Book 18
Sports GeneralChristian Living
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 19 2026
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.31 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What happens when the final score starts controlling your heart?
Sports are a wonderful gift-but they make a terrible god.
There is nothing wrong with loving your team, wearing the jersey, yelling at the television, celebrating a championship, or feeling miserable when your team somehow manages to blow a lead they had absolutely no business blowing.
But what happens when the game follows us home?
When a loss steals our peace. When a bad call changes our mood. When our family learns to check the score before deciding whether it is safe to talk to us. When we treat opposing fans, players, coaches, or officials in ways that don't look very much like Jesus.
In When the Game Owns Your Heart, pastor, longtime coach, athlete, and unapologetic sports fan Dr. Rich Johnson takes an honest-and often humorous-look at the strange power sports can have over us.
Drawing from decades of coaching, personal stories, biblical truth, and insights from sports psychology, Dr. Johnson explores why we become so emotionally attached to teams we don't play for and athletes we've never met.
This isn't a book telling Christians to stop loving sports. It's about learning to love sports without being owned by them.
Readers will explore how to:
- Cheer passionately without losing their Christian witness
- Handle losing without making everyone around them miserable
- Celebrate winning without humiliating someone else
- Recognize when fandom is becoming idolatry
- Keep sports from controlling time, money, emotions, and relationships
- Enjoy the game while keeping Jesus on the throne of the heart
Laugh a little. Squirm a little. Recognize yourself a few times.
Then discover a better way to be a fan-one that allows you to cheer loudly, lose graciously, win humbly, love people well, and remember what really matters when the stadium finally goes quiet.
Your team may win or lose.
Jesus is still Lord.
That description stays very close to the manuscript's central purpose: not making Christians less enthusiastic about sports, but helping them enjoy sports without being controlled by them.
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