More and more people of fame are being honest about their faith. This trend is true in Hollywood, politics and even sports.
Around a month ago, Baker Mayfield, the quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was interviewed on a platform called Sports Spectrum personifying the power of doing so. In his interview he is asked about his Christian faith and he responds in a remarkably authentic, intentional and detailed way. His journey is the path for so many who experience a deeper conversion to Christ. Taking a closer look into his story can aid us in growing more deeply in our faith as well as guide us to how we can bring others to conversion as well.
Other quarterbacks like Jayden Daniels of the Washington Commanders, Bo Nix of the Denver Broncos, C.J. Stroud of the Houston Texans and Brock Purdy of the San Francisco 49ers all proclaim their faith regularly and unreservedly. Like Mayfield, their witness ought to challenge us to do so as well because having God as our foundation makes us immovable—no matter what the world thinks.
Baker admits that he grew up in a family that was not particularly religious. For them, Sunday Mass took place on Easter Sunday and Christmas—that was it. He didn’t feel the need for faith in his early life. He recalls that his identity was found in being a football player. Being a quarterback was everything to him.
As an adult, Mayfield said that he thought being Christian was just about “doing good deeds and being a good person.” There was no depth to his faith life at this point. It was not until he met a pastor who told him about the reality of sin and the need for a savior that things began to change.
“He told me I didn’t have to be perfect. I didn’t have to have it all figured out … He helped me realize that I don’t have to be a perfect football player or a perfect leader to be a good Christian. That was huge for me.”
Up until this point in his life, Baker thought that his accomplishments were what defined him. While he thought about Christianity differently after this conversion with a pastor, it took a while for it to truly sink in. Ultimately, it was the main trials of his life that brought him to encounter Jesus and be transformed.
“A couple years into my NFL career,” Baker continued, “God taught me a lesson. He had to take my career down to the studs and make me realize that I’m more than a football player—that there’s much more going on than just the game of football. To see that, I had to hit rock bottom. And it wasn’t just football—it was our marriage. We weren’t doing well at all. We were trying to have kids, and it wasn’t going well.”
It was from this stance of failure and dependency on God that he began to realize that the only One who has our true identity is Christ. These concrete realities in his life forced him to become more honest and vulnerable with who he was as a man and as a person. Baker noted that the concept and reality that so many of us put on “a mask and facade” of who we really are in life but hold back that 1% is where his life changed.
It was not until he was truly honest with who he was and what he was feeling about life that God came crashing in. It was his acceptance of a need for God and the commitment to knowing Him through Scripture that placed him on a path of faith. From there, he never looked back. While he currently starts for the Bucs and has, in many ways, resurrected his career Baker knows that his true identity is found in God and not his accomplishments.
“Tampa feels like home for me now,” he concluded. “But that’s because of what I built my foundation on—what my wife Emily and I built our foundation on—and that’s our faith. It’s been such a special ride to let God take us through it.”
Baker’s story is a photocopy of so many others. It is unique to him but the story goes the same. When we place anything else but God as our number one priority in life—we will be left disappointed and unfulfilled. God, like a good Father, will not impose His love on us but waits for us to see that a relationship with Him is what we need above everything else. Without that foundation, we will be tackled by our circumstances rather than rooted in the firm grounding of knowing that we are worth dying for.
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