"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving."
Colossians 3:23-24
At I.C.C.E. athletic preparation, participation and physical education and development are not considered of secondary importance to academic development but must go hand-in-hand with the total spiritual development of the student. While advertisements stress how terrible it is to waste the human mind, it needs to be stressed that it is no less terrible to waste the potential of the body. The Apostle Paul makes an issue of how important the body is in serving the Lord. Romans 12:1 exhorts us, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” It would be impossible to serve Christ without utilizing some portion of the body in addition to the mind. I Corinthians 6:19-20 calls every Christian to discipline his body thereby harnessing its energies under the direction of the Holy Spirit in serving Christ. It says, “What, know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: Therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” While most of us would never think of destroying a building dedicated to the worship of God, we do worse by the neglect of the body which is indeed God’s temple. The Bible again stresses the importance of bodily discipline when employing an athletic term meaning “disqualified from further participation of service” when it says, “But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway (disqualified from running in the race).” God here tells us that serving Him effectively requires good discipline of the body.
Teamwork is another vital ingredient of service to Christ. Jesus exercised teamwork when he chose and trained His twelve Apostles to spread the Gospel. He later sent seventy disciples out to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom in teams of two. Learning to overcome the weakness of others by contributing one’s strengths while appreciating the strengths of others in overcoming our own weakness is basic to Christian discipleship. Galations 6:2 says, “Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
Immanuel, therefore, utilizes team sports, and an Intramural Program to develop athletic skills and principles of teamwork to train the students to use their bodies as disciplined tools of service to Christ.