These days, God is even manifesting His power on basketball courts! If you don’t believe it, ask my son, Jim. In addition to being one of the pastors at our church, he coaches the girls’ varsity basketball team at our Christian school. A few years ago, the Lord spoke to him and said He wanted that team to be number one in the state.

Our school only has about 650 kids, and the girls on our team aren’t even tall. So in the natural, there was no way they could win the state championship. But my son coaches with the Word. He teaches those girls who they are in Christ and about their authority as believers and shows them how to apply those principles to playing basketball. So they got on board with him. They decided God could use them to put Him on display in front of the whole sports world.

We all began to pray over it and received several confirming prophecies that if the girls would give God all the glory, He would become their ability, and they would be the state champions.

Year before last it happened. They became the number one basketball team in the state.

This past year, they went after it again. They fought their way to the finals and in the championship game, they faced a team of girls that absolutely towered over them. Winning looked impossible!

The night before the game I was praying for them, did a flop and stop in my Bible and saw a verse in Isaiah where the Lord said, “Fear not. Be not dismayed for I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will harden you to difficulties and I will beat the mountain low.” When I called Jim and give him the scripture to encourage him, he said, “Mom! Do you know the name of the team we’re playing?”

“No,” I answered. “What is it?”

“It’s Mountain Iron- Buhl!”

During the game, Jim gave our girls the green light to use a defensive strategy they’d had been working on in practice for two years. They’d never implemented it before in an actual game. But, hallelujah, it worked! The Iron Mountain girls, even though they were much taller and bigger than our little girls, could not get past our little defenders. So our team won the state championship again!

Suddenly it seemed like everybody, even people in the media, were saying, “Who is this school? We never heard of them!” And, of course, God got all the glory.

About the same time, I began to hear about Tim Tebow making news for God in football. Then came Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens. I’d never heard of him until the day of the Super Bowl when he said during a pre-game interview on television, “No weapon formed against us shall prosper.” I knew in my spirit when he said that, I knew what God was about to do. He was going to put Himself on display.

Sure enough, the Ravens won the Super Bowl. Afterward, Ray Lewis quoted another scripture to the national media: “If God be for us, who can be against us?”