Grace and peace are yours through Jesus Christ who is on our side. Amen.

Romans 8:35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ³⁶ As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." ³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Heavenly Father, in Your great kindness You created us and all the world in perfect harmony. When we had shaken the foundations of creation by our rebellion, You showed abundant mercy by restoring through Your Son what we could never repair. You have promised and demonstrated to us your amazing and gracious love. Nothing can take us away from that love and salvation. For this we give You thanks and praise, now and forever. Amen.

This past winter some of the Teens asked me if I was going to go with them on their weekend tobogganing and skiing trip with the Youth group from Trinity, Union Grove. I told them I couldn’t go because I had to work on Sunday, and I’m also not very good at skiing. Then one of Teens replied, "Pastor doesn’t do things he’s not good at. He wants to win." (Kyle was right. That’s why I keep playing Kyle in ping-pong.)

People say I’m a competitive person. It’s not that I’m competitive – I just like to win, when I play ping-pong, darts, golf, board games, pretty much anything. But I don’t think I’m that much more competitive than other people. No one enjoys coming in second place. No one likes being a loser. We all like to win.

It may be that your form of competition comes in different forms. You want to be the first out of the parking lot at a sold-out concert because you don’t want to be stuck in traffic. You want to add just the right spices and sauce to grill the best T-bone steaks. You want that blue ribbon at the county fair. You want your home to be clean so your mom doesn’t say anything about it. You want to be able to repair your own vehicle to make your dad proud. You want that higher position at work, the best Christmas decorations in your neighborhood, and the smartest and most athletic children in the school.

We all like to be winners. That’s fine. God has made us to be winners. He formed you in your mother’s womb with his own hands and breathed life into you. God doesn’t make junk. He creates masterpieces. He put his best effort into you. And when you went bad, he sent his Son to shed his blood to redeem you. He sent his Holy Spirit to work on you and perfect you.

God has made you a winner. You will learn today that you are a winner because God has placed you on his winning team. Since you are a winner, you need to live like a winner.

When kids play a pickup game of basketball, football or kickball, what do the captains do? They take turns picking the best player available. They want to have the strongest and best teams. They each want to have the team that will win. Well, guess what. I don’t think we really ever outgrow that desire.

What has happened to us now? We are not one of the captains. We are one of the players. And we have been picked to be on a team – God’s Team. There are only two teams – God’s Team and Satan’s Team. Obviously God’s Team is the stronger and better of the two teams. We all want to play for God.

However, because of sin, we switched teams. We didn’t like God’s rulebook, so we went to the opposing team. Satan has no rules. We didn’t like to have to practice our faith or work out in God’s gymnasium of his Church or wear our team colors out in public. Satan doesn’t expect so much from us. He lets us do our own thing. Satan allows cursing, and drunkenness, and gossiping, and sexual fraternizing among his team. God doesn’t want any of that from his team.

So we switched teams. We went from the winning team to the sinning team.

You know how difficult it is to root for the Milwaukee Brewers. They really haven’t had a good team in over 20 years. You know it is bad when you are excited that they are only a few games under .500. It is hard to root for a losing team. It is even harder to play for a losing team. Our sin places us on a losing team. Satan’s team is destined for eternal loss.

Thankfully God didn’t want that to happen. He hadn’t created us to be losers. He wanted you and me on his team. But there was a great cost involved. A "trade" needed to take place.

To bring us onto his team, God provided a substitute for us, someone who did not sin, who could not sin. That substitute was God’s Son, Jesus. God exchanged the "perfect athlete" for billions of losers. Not really understanding what was happening, Satan approved the trade on Mount Calvary. There on that mount of glory, Jesus became the greatest sinner of all time. He took all of mankind’s sins upon himself. He suffered the punishment that was ours. He died for the sins we had committed. He completed the "trade" by rising from the dead to overwhelm the opposition.

Now we are on God's team. He has bought us back. We are on the right team – eternally! If God is for us, who can be against us? No one can oppose us.

Being on God’s Team means we have to play the game – the game of life. Every day we have to compete against Satan’s Team. Some of the best players on Satan’s Team are the World with all its glitz and fame and power; the Demons with all their sneaky little tricks and evil intentions; and our Sinful Flesh which knows all our weaknesses and faults. We are up against a formidable team.

Sometimes it may seem like we are losing, like we are way behind, and we are getting beaten up in the process. That is when one of God’s Team leaders speaks up in the locker room and fires us up by saying, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us."

That Team leader is the apostle Paul and he is encouraging us: "You have God on your team. Nothing can change that. Nothing can take you away from the love of Christ. Let me ask you, do you think God saved you from hell and damnation, just so you could worry about the little things here on earth? Did he teach you to live the Christian life, just so he could watch you fall? Was his Son nailed to the cross for your sins, just to ignore your prayers? Come on!"

Yes, the game of life is difficult. One of your teammates said long ago: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." We will face extreme suffering for God’s sake. We will face troubles, those aches, irritations and stress of life. We will face hardships of serious illnesses, family problems, and financial burdens. We will face physical and psychological persecutions. These persecutions will often result in a lack of food, lack of clothing, and physical dangers – in other words, famine, nakedness, danger, and sword.

When we Christians suffer physical harm it seems as though Christ has separated himself from his team and abandoned them. However, God doesn’t remove all trials from our path. Instead we are able to overcome them because we find our strength in Jesus and his power and love. We are more than conquerors through him who loved us. We are champions not because we loved Jesus, but because he loves us. He loved us all enough to create this earth for us, make us and shape us in his image, come to earth as one of us, die for us, rise for us, ascend into heaven and intercede for us. If Jesus did all that, he is not going to abandon us.

As great as it was for John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins to win seven NCAA championships in a row or the Pittsburgh Steelers win four Super Bowls in a row or Lance Armstrong to win seven Tours de France, those are nothing compared to our victory over Satan’s team. Paul says that we are "more than conquerors." We are super champions. We are supremely victorious. Far from being overcome, we are the ones who will overcome.

Temptations drive us closer to God. Troubles and tragedy push us onto our knees in prayer to God. Lack of possessions and money remind us of our treasures stored in heaven. And death, the greatest of Satan’s Team members, actually means eternal life for us. In the end … we always win. All because we are on God’s Team. He has made us winners. As winners we need to live like winners.

We have a problem that the tooth fairy at the Zarling home is notoriously slow. You see, the women in my family have decided that our tooth fairy is a guy because he is always late. This last time Abbey put her tooth under her pillow. She waited about three days without any action taken on her tooth. So she wrote a letter: "Dear Tooth Fairy, where have you been? I’m getting really mad. So get my tooth. Please. Thank you."

We may have minor irritations like a slow tooth fairy or big problems like cancer or dementia. We can allow these misfortunes to affect our mood, our marriage, and our faith. There are countless people who fall away from God, stop coming to church, stop praying because they are going through difficult times. When difficulties and problems and suffering arrive in our lives, it is so easy for us to get depressed, crabby or worried. Maybe we are losing sleep or impatient or always negative.

When we act like this in any way we are living like losers. We are acting like we have nothing to live for, like God doesn’t love us, like Jesus didn’t win heaven for us, like we aren’t part of God’s winning team. We are living like there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

It is said that people can endure almost anything if there's some goal to shoot for, some "light at the end of the tunnel." Prisoners of war have talked about undergoing horrible treatment of all sorts, but making it because they thought about the day they'd be released, or when the war would end, or re-uniting with a loved one.

This world can be tough, with all its stresses and challenges. We struggle to focus on eternal things. We get caught up in the rat race of life. We fail to love God, fail to love our fellow humans, and we feel guilt because of it.

But there's light at the end of the tunnel! Someday you're leaving this world, and you're going to a world which is so far better that it can't even compare. Because Jesus paid for your sins on the cross, because he rose from the dead, the doors of heaven are wide open for you! And, it's going to be awesome!

While you are living in this world, God promises that nothing will be able to remove you from his winning team, no evil forces can detract from God’s love, nothing will be able to keep you apart from your God – a God who created you, sustains you, redeemed you, sanctified you, and is going to make sure that you finally get to see the source of the light at the end of the tunnel. Looking at that light at the end of the tunnel, you and I can endure anything now! "Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

This is the love that God has lavished on us. He chose us from eternity to be on his team. Winning athletic teams receive trophies, medals, and rings. As part of God’s winning team you have received a crown of glory, white robe of perfection, the trophy of the empty cross and open tomb, and the palm branch of praise. The Holy Spirit marked us as God’s team members in our baptism. He continues to strengthen us through his Word and the Lord’s Supper. And God is going to keep us in the faith until we reach eternal glory. Nothing is greater than our God. He has made you a winner and he wants you to live like a winner. Amen.

This is one of the greatest promises in the Bible: "Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Amen.