The Chance He Never Earned

Just a few years before the 1999 NFL season, Kurt Warner was stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa, earning $5.50 an hour. He'd been cut by the Green Bay Packers, passed over by every NFL team, and was playing weekend football in the Arena Football League. By any reasonable measure, his dream was dead.

Then came an opportunity he never could have engineered. Trent Green, the starting quarterback for the St. Louis Rams, tore his ACL in a preseason game. Head coach Dick Vermeil stood before the press and said, "We will rally around Kurt Warner, and we will play good football." Warner didn't earn that moment. He didn't climb the ladder. The door simply opened, and grace walked him through it.

That season, Warner threw 41 touchdown passes, won the league MVP, and led the Rams to victory in Super Bowl XXXIV. When reporters asked how a stock boy became a Super Bowl champion, Warner pointed upward.

This is how the grace of the Almighty works. We don't earn it. We can't climb our way to it. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8-9, "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast."

Grace doesn't check your résumé. It finds a stock boy stacking cans and says, "I have plans for you that you cannot imagine." You don't have to earn your way to God. The door is already open.