No one likes
to lose. No one likes to feel they have disappointed someone else, especially
someone who is special to them. When you lose and you know you did not give
your best, that makes matters even worse.
I am a
University of Kentucky Wildcat basketball fan. I won’t deny it and I won’t
apologize for it. I have been a fan of the team for over fifty years. I have
cheered for them when they won and I have cheered for them when they lost. I
celebrated when they won and I was disappointed when they lost, but I never
stopped being a fan.
That college
team is special to me. Among people living in rural Kentucky, they are a very
special team. We will stand by them in the good times and in the rough times.
We love our Wildcats all the time even when they lose.
We call that
grace. We learned it from God. Even when those Wildcats play worse than we know
they can, even when they get beat by a weaker team, we still care for our
Wildcats. That is how God looks at us. He looks at us with his heart filled
with grace. He knows we have messed things up. He knows we could have done
better. He knows we could have beaten the temptation, but now we are stuck with
the loss.
Rom
3:23 everyone has sinned and is far away
from God's saving presence.
That’s
right. We all have lost. We all were given a choice that would have made us
winners, but we made the wrong choice and we lost. We missed out on the best
win of all. We failed God and missed his saving presence. Now we must suffer
the consequences.
Except that
God intervened and gave us grace. That means he loves us even when we lose.
Even when we fail and disappoint him, he still loves us and gives us grace.
That grace takes away the loss and gives us a win instead. It isn’t because we
earned it. No, we lost it on our own. He gives us the win because he loves us
that much. He put the loss on his Son Jesus Christ.
Rom 6:23 For sin pays its
wage---death; but God's free gift is eternal life in union with Christ Jesus
our Lord.
Grace is being loved when you lose. We all have lost. None of us will
ever have a perfect season or a perfect record or a scorecard without a big L
for loser on it. We all have disappointed our Creator and committed the sins
that deserve death. Grace intervened and said no. Jesus died instead.
We can get our winning season back in the eyes of God in very simple
fashion. All we have to do is accept God’s plan for giving us a winning season.
A winning season in God’s plan is to have a personal relationship with him
through faith in his Son Jesus Christ.
The Apostle Paul wrote the Book of Romans to explain to his readers
how they can have a winning life. It all revolves around Jesus Christ, the Son
of God. Jesus won the game for us when he died for us taking our failures, our
losses upon himself. God looks at the scorecard now and he doesn’t see the
losses in our column. Jesus took those all away. God sees our lives through the
perfect score of his Son.
Faith in Jesus is our part of the game.
Rom 10:9 If you confess that
Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from death, you will be saved.
Even when my Kentucky Wildcats lose a basketball game, I will still be
on their side cheering them on. Even when I lose, when I fail in life, God is
still on my side cheering me on. His grace is love in action in my life.
