Let’s talk about LeBron James. Currently his career FG% (Field Goal Percentage) is 0.4964. For those of you who don’t track basketball stats, FG% reveals how often a player makes a shot. To get a player’s FG% one divides the player’s scoring shots (or buckets!) by the number of attempts. Which looks like this:
Scoring Shots (field goals) / Attempts (3pt attempts + 2pt attempts)
So LeBron, on average across his career, misses a little bit more than half the time he attempts to score. To give you an idea, the best career FG% of all time belongs to Artis Gilmore, who commanded a solid 0.5990, roughly 60% of the time he shot during his career, he was making buckets. You can’t even say it would be a longshot for someone to have a career FG% of 1.0000 – it’s a human impossibility. The lowest career FG% in the NBA is around 0.3000, lower than that and I don’t think you would make it into the NBA.
My career FG% is probably like this year; 0.2016. My friend shoots a 1.0000. He swapped his statistics with me. So when you look at my stats it says 1.0000. And He now has a 0.2016 and got kicked out of the NBA.
This friend is Jesus. Ever hear “Jesus died for your sins” – whatever that means. Well this is what it means. You see the truth is my FG% sucks. Jesus tells me the truth – “Bertholt, your FG% is terrible.” But he also loves me and doesn’t want me kicked out of the NBA. So he does the only possible thing here to remain truthful and loving. He swaps our stats and he himself takes all the punishment. This metaphor describes what Jesus does with our sin.
The word we translate as “sin” in the bible actually means “missing the mark.” It was a term used in archery. When an archer fires and his shot putters into the ground yards short of target; he literally misses the mark. So in the bible when it talks about sin imagine this concept – very similar to FG%. God is saying the target or goal – is self-sacrificial love. That’s scoring. A love that doesn’t even think about itself at all – neither, first or last – it is totally focused on those around it. A love that doesn’t care about how it affects themselves but simply does what is serving and loving for another. That’s God’s standard for being considered perfect, like him, and earning your way into heaven. Being realistic about my life, my FG% is probably more like 0.0005.
It’s difficult to imagine a love like God’s. Yet, when you read the New Testament, you start to see it in Jesus’ life. He would heal a cripple because it was the loving thing to do, and then a mob would try to stone him to death because by healing that person he broke a law. I can imagine a person doing stuff like this sometimes, but Jesus does this day-in-day out. Whether he is exhausted or hungry he continues to serve people and love them – there isn’t any selfishness in his actions anywhere. Just read the accounts in Luke or Matthew – you get this picture of the man. Some respond to his love, others are threatened by how it condemns themselves. They earned their way into the NBA and don’t want to hear that their FG% is terrible. So ultimately they did kill him.
Jesus shoots a 1.0000 precisely because he is God. John wrote “God is love” (1 John 4:8). The rub is that the opposite of love: apathy, hate, self-centeredness. Those things God rejects and judges – because they destroy and damage us and others, physically, emotionally and spiritually. That’s why Jesus tells us our FG% sucks – we don’t come near to God’s perfect love. Even if you were to shoot a perfect 1.0000 from today forward; your career FG% will never be a 1.0000 because you’ve already messed up sometime in the past. There is no fixing your wrap sheet – stats are stone, unchanging and unforgiving.
But Jesus says:
“I will give you my wrap sheet. When God looks at you, he will see my stats, and that gets you into heaven. Not hard work, not practicing buckets every day, not improving your stats.”
Simply accepting Jesus’ wrap sheet gets us the qualifications to have eternal life. No one deserves it, that’s why it is called grace – which simply means “gift.” So do you want Jesus’ stats, or do you think you can shoot that 1.0000?
