PICK A FIGHT WEEK 3: WHO WINS?

We have just come through a season in the sports world known as March Madness. It is the time when all of college basketball is competing to become recognized as the national champion. The odds of someone correctly predicting every winner in all sixty-seven games is very small. As a matter of fact, the odds are set at 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Even so, it is estimated that there will be between 60 and 100 million brackets filled out and over $4 billion wagered on those games as people hope to be that one.

Now if you are going to fill out one of those brackets, you are going to evaluate a few things: what team had the best record, what team has a great scoring offense, what team plays great defense, what team has the strongest bench, what teams are coming out of the strongest conferences. But even with all that knowledge, no one has ever been able to predict every winner before the tournament begins.

But what if I told you there is a way to predict who wins—not in college basketball, but in life? Fortunately for us, we have God’s Word, and it clearly explains who wins in the end. But the ending didn’t (and doesn’t) come about in the way that most would expect a win to come about. It didn’t come about through power. It came about through sacrifice. We see winning coming about by force: who’s strongest and who’s smartest. But the ultimate victory came about through a substitutionary sacrifice, not through an overpowering force.

We weren’t worthy of that. We cannot fix ourselves, but God stepped in, sending Jesus to be that sacrifice and to set the tone for ultimate victory once and for all time. Because of that sacrifice, despite of what happens around us, we can have a bold confidence in God’s victory, and we can live our lives accordingly. Not in arrogance or fear, but instead with a deep gratitude and trust that in the end, fully surrendered to God, we win too!