By Mallory Mattingly
Arizona Wildcats forward Tobe Awaka recently talked about what sin in our lives says about our faith.
“When you first start out as a Christian, I think a lot of people harp on, ‘What are you doing? Like, is your lifestyle aligning?’ You know, do you go out? Do you drink, smoke, sex, all those things — like those are the really, really big things,” the basketball player said on “The Walk” podcast. “And I think that, of course, holiness is important. All that is deeply important. But I think there’s a deeper transformation that happens when you come towards Christ. Like in my mind, the sins and those actions are symptoms of a deeper root issue within you.”
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Unlike his athletic career, though, Awaka’s faith isn’t determined by how well he performs.
“The mindset of being an athlete is based on performance stats and all that,” he said. “And I think you bring that into your walk with Christ as well. If you don’t read your Bible, if you don’t pray, if you don’t do this, it’s like, oh, man, I lost the game today, or it’s over.”
Early in his faith, he had to learn how to drop that mindset, saying that faith is “not performance-based. You know, you’re already accepted, and because you’re accepted, your actions are matching…your gratitude for that.”
His faith in Christ is hard-fought after he looked for truth in every other religion.
“I researched every religion. So Buddhism, Confucianism, Mormonism, Islam and Hinduism. Like I went down a crazy rabbit hole,” Awaka revealed on the podcast. “It was insane. But, yeah, eventually I landed on Jesus Christ. I don’t think I, at that time, had sort of the, you know, intellectual, theological capacity, you know, to, like, explain it. But I knew kind of in my heart, like, yeah, this is the right direction.”
“From then on, I kind of looked to read the Bible front to back,” he continued. “Because honestly, growing up, it was sort of like, you know, Sunday school, the rudimentary Bible school stories and stuff like that. But like, honestly, when I read through the whole Bible, I was shocked. You know, you get into Paul’s letters, and that stuff is super intense. You read James, and it’s like a jab at the heart, you know what I mean. So, yeah, it was really cool to see, kind of how my mindset and my mind revolutionized over that timespan.”
Awaka’s journey highlights that his faith is about far more than outward behavior — it’s about a complete inward transformation, which only happens through a conviction from the Holy Spirit.
Read Next: Basketball Player Searched Every Religion Until He Found Jesus. Here’s What He Learned.
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