Grace Is Being Loved When You Lose

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.

Stretch ‘Em Out Wide

Mat 11:28  "Come to me, all of you who are tired from carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest.

Mat 11:29  Take my yoke and put it on you, and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in spirit; and you will find rest.

Mat 11:30  For the yoke I will give you is easy, and the load I will put on you is light."

With these words Jesus opened the gates of heaven to anyone who was willing to admit who they were, confess their inability to do it all on their own, and accept what he was offering. To be only a three-letter word, “all” makes a lot of things possible for us through the love and sacrifice of Christ we would otherwise miss.

This last weekend concluded a two-week golf tournament known as the US Golf Kids World Championships. Nearly fifty foreign countries were represented along with forty-nine states. Only Alaska went without a representative. This was a tournament in which everyone was welcome. Of course you had to make it through all the preliminary rounds played around the world, but if you made the lowest score, you were welcome regardless of nation, color of skin, or family traditions.

Jesus gives an invitation to join him that is open to all. His invitation can be accepted by anyone. He has not set any kind of pre-existing conditions about who is receiving the invitation. He has not limited it to people of a certain race or nationality or physical condition. He offers rest to anyone who will see him as who he is, the One who can give rest and relief.

Unlike the golf tournament, there are no preliminary rounds in which one must succeed to be welcomed into the presence of Christ. We can all come as we are and be accepted. Acceptance by Jesus depends not upon what we can do, but upon the place we are willing to give him in our lives.

What Jesus asks is that we become like him. We are to take his yoke and put it upon our shoulders, allowing it to dictate what our lives will be. We are to learn from him. We become the students while he remains the Master Teacher. We do not make him fit our desires. In being fitted to his yoke, we become transformed into his nature.

The rest we find comes from allowing him to carry the load. We find rest as we conform to his ways instead of fighting him as we seek to be acceptable in the eyes of the world. We find the rest that no conflict in this world can destroy as we allow the Master of the yoke to give guidance, teach the acceptable pattern of life, and carry the heaviest of our burdens.

In the Gospel of John we find a longer word that means the same thing as “all”.

Joh 3:16  For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not die but have eternal life. (my emphasis)

“Everyone who believes” is welcome to come and find the rest Jesus has promised. Is there a qualification to receiving this eternal life? Yes, it is a thing called belief. Is there a qualification to receiving the rest Jesus has offered? Yes, it is called taking his yoke upon our shoulders. To be a part of the “all” and “everyone” to whom the invitation is extended, we must come with honest and humble hearts that can receive the offer.

A short story goes in some fashion as this: I asked Jesus how much he loved me. He said, “This much,” and he stretched out his arms and died. He stretched his arms wide enough to take in the world, all the world and everyone who would believe. He bids us to welcome others in the same way.