The answer Mike Leake provides might not be the one we want to hear, but it is the truth.
DID GOD LOVE ME BECAUSE HE SAW WHAT OTHERS COULDN’T?
I hate to admit that I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the guy who took down Don Zimmer, but it’s true. I always loved watching Pedro Martinez pitch. In an age when most pitchers seemed afraid to use the whole plate, Pedro refused to surrender the inside half. He pitched aggressive, and he pitched inside.
Given my penchant for biographies it was a given that I’d buy Pedro’s autobiography when Amazon put it on sale for $1.99. I was surprised to learn that many of the coaches in the Dodgers farm system didn’t like Pedro’s stuff. At the moment of decision, when the Dodgers were to decide if Pedro would ever make it to the big leagues, Martinez was standing outside a window listening in. This is what he heard:
Each time I heard one of the coaches find a new phrase to describe how I was a scraggly, no-good, never-amount-to-anything piece of nothing, it felt like a machete took another hack at the branch I was standing on….Then I heard a voice, a high-pitched voice, cut through the others and halt my fall.“He’s got the heart of a lion.”Eleodoro Arias was speaking. Unmistakably Eleodoro. (From Pedro, 15)
As I read through this I thought about how believers of all people should be like Eleodoro—seeing things in people that nobody else sees. I think of folks like the woman at the well. Everybody else had given up on her. She was a lost cause. But Jesus saw something other people didn’t see.
Or did he?
Is that really the story of the gospel? Is it really that Jesus sees things in believers that we cannot see? Or that he doesn’t give up on us because he can see that somewhere inside of us we’ve got the heart of a lion?
I just finished preaching through Ephesians 2 and one of the major points was that our redemption isn’t dependent upon our character—it’s founded upon who God is. That is really great news. Consider what Sam Storms says on this point:
When we say to Jesus: ‘Who were we that led you to do this for us? Jesus does not then says: ‘You were a treasure hidden to yourself but seen by Me. When we ask, “Who were we that led you to do this for us?” the only answer is: “You were hell-deserving rebels who had no claim on anything in Me other than to be the recipients and objects of eternal wrath. I did this for you not because you were a treasure or because of anything in you; indeed it was in spite of what was in you. I did this for you solely because of what was in Me, namely, sovereign and free and gracious love for those who deserved only to be hated.”
This is hard truth for us to swallow at first. I want to believe that God’s love for me is based upon things within me—things like my “heart of a lion”. But once I start to choke down this truth it become absolutely beautiful and liberating. My performance and my character is prone to change. My heart at times is prone to wander. But God’s character is unchanging. That my redemption is grounded in His character means that my redemption is firmly fixed. His affections for me aren’t going to wax and wane based upon my performance—instead it is based on who He is.
There is something to be said for being like Eleodoro and seeing character in folks when nobody else can see them. But that’s not grounded in some silly idea of the innate greatness of humanity. Such a thing is grounded in the unfathomable power of a God who awakens the dead—a God who takes hell-bent rebellious sinners and makes them joyously free worshippers.
God’s love is based in God—and this is phenomenal news.
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