Why Pro Baseball Player Riley Unroe Honors Jesus ‘With My Life’
By Movieguide® Contributor
While professional baseball player Riley Unroe grew up going to church and faith was part of his life, it wasn’t something he leaned on.
“When I was drafted, I decided to take advantage of what the world had to offer and held on to the label of Christian, but I did not hold its values, and I did not live according to Christ’s calling for me,” he said in Sports Spectrum‘s “I Once Was” series.
Unroe began to chase after all the wrong things, and “when I didn’t have my identity in Christ, faking it became the only way I knew how to process in the world and function, and so I got really good at faking it.”
Eventually, he became tired of keeping up the pretense of Christianity, so he asked his mentor for help.
His mentor guided the athlete back to his faith and told Unroe to seek the Lord through prayer.
“I was expecting to be judged and feel his wrath come upon me, and I was terrified to enter that pitch-black closet, but within the first five minutes, all he reminded me of is why he loves me,” Unroe explained. “Those were the only thoughts that I had on my mind and for the next 40 minutes or so.”
After his intimate time with the Lord, he went back to his life of baseball and suddenly “felt the strongest urge to return back to what I once was.”
“That was the defining moment for me, so I got on my knees, and I kept praying to him, and I prayed, ‘Please help me and save me and deliver me from this evil that I’ve welcomed into my life. Restore me from this.’ And after about three minutes, I felt the most liberating, unshackling freedom that I’ve ever felt in my entire life,” he recalled.
From that moment on, Unroe began to live for the Lord and not for himself.
“There’s a peace within me that I know that God’s got me, and my security and my identity for the rest of my life is no longer in what I do but in who I am as a child of God,” Unroe declared. “You can never go wrong giving your life to Jesus, and that is who I will glorify, and that is who I will honor with my life.”
For more inspiring sports stories, check out Sports Spectrum.
A few years ago, Unroe shared a prayer asking God to work through him.
“God, thank You for always being at work in me. Please continue to transform my desires and actions so that they honor You. Use me to fulfill Your purpose in the world. I want my life to bring You glory. Amen,” he prayed in an X post.
He also uses his platform to support the work of Water Mission, an organization that builds “safe water, sanitation, and hygienee solutions in developing nations and disaster areas.”
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