Let’s assume you’ve challenged the all-time, undefeated World Chess Champion to a game.

You were confident in your chess skills, and figured that you had a fair chance of winning. The challenge seemed like a good idea at the time.

As the game progresses, however, you realize you’re vastly outmatched. You severely overestimated your abilities. The champion is on course to trounce you easily.

Worse still, you’d made a rash and cocky wager. You bet everything you had that you’d win: your house, your car, all your possessions.

Now you have a horrible sinking feeling, certain that you’re about to lose everything you own.

But then the chess champion does something unexpected.

He comes over to your side of the table, picks up one of your pieces, and makes a move for you.

Then he goes back to his side of the table and makes his own move.

This pattern repeats several times. Eventually you realize what he’s doing: he’s making very shrewd moves on your behalf, employing a strategy you’d never have thought of.

It slowly dawns on you that he’s opening up a path to victory for you.

The chess champion is actually helping you win! He’s doing for you what you had no possibility of doing for yourself.

After he’s won the game for you, the champion gives you a hearty handshake and a wink. All you can do is humbly thank him with profound gratitude. If it weren’t for his gracious actions, you’d have lost everything.

What’s the spiritual lesson for us here?

To ultimately “win” at life, you need God to be on both sides of the equation.

While the story above isn’t a perfect analogy, it does illustrate a few things.

We tend to believe that we can achieve eternal life on our own merits. We fool ourselves by overestimating our goodness and downplaying our sinfulness.

But the standards are much higher than we realize, and so are the stakes. If we’re wrong about how to meet God’s standards, we stand to lose our very souls.

The Scriptures tell us that no one is righteous (Romans 3:10), and that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). This sounds like a hopeless situation.

But God did something unexpected. He came over to our side of the table, as it were, by being born on earth as a human being.

As Jesus Christ, God did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. Jesus lived a perfect life and fulfilled all the demands of the law. Through His obedience, Jesus fully met God’s standards.

Through Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross, He makes His perfect record available to us. He paid the price for our sins so that if we put our trust in Him, we can be made right before God.

Our connection with God can now be made secure, because through Christ, God is on both sides of the relationship. He set the standards and then came to the other side to perfectly fulfill them.

Jesus played a perfect game for you.

To “win” eternal life, all you need to do is repent of your sins and believe in His atoning work on the Cross. His righteousness will then be credited to your account, and your scorecard is marked with His perfection.

You can’t lose with a deal like this.

In fact, you can bet your life on it!

© 2024 Lori J. Cartmell. All rights reserved.