Life may be the strangest game ever invented. You enter without reading the instructions, nobody tells you how many years you get to play, the difficulty level changes without warning, and eventually the clock hits zero.
And here’s the truly ridiculous part.
God gave us the answer key.
We still insist on figuring it out ourselves.
Jesus is the cheat code for the game of life. Not because following Him makes life easy. It doesn’t. Not because Christians magically avoid cancer, divorce, bankruptcy, betrayal, war, stupidity, bad decisions, or transmission failures 400 miles from home.
We don’t.
Jesus is the cheat code because He tells you what the game actually is.
Most of us spend half our lives playing the wrong game.
We chase money. Titles. Promotions. Houses. Toys. Followers. Recognition. Power. Maybe another zero in the retirement account. We collect possessions like we’re going to unlock some secret bonus level where the winner gets to keep his bass boat after he dies.
Spoiler alert: you don’t.
The Egyptians tried sending stuff along. Archaeologists eventually dug it up.
The game started much simpler.
Adam was placed in a garden and told to work it and keep it. Humanity was given something good and told, essentially, take care of this. Cultivate it. Make something worthwhile with what I’ve given you.
Then humanity did what humanity has been doing ever since.
We screwed it up.
And we’ve been blaming somebody else ever since.
Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. Today we’d probably blame childhood trauma, systemic inequities, our supervisor, Facebook, climate change, capitalism, the government, or Mercury being in retrograde.
Different century. Same humans.
Yet the Bible keeps returning to this wonderful agricultural metaphor: fruit.
Jesus said you recognize a tree by its fruit. Paul wrote about the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus described Himself as the vine and us as the branches and said plainly that apart from Him we can do nothing.
In other words, God isn’t terribly impressed with the label on the tree.
He wants to see the fruit.
Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control.
That’s the scoreboard.
And we get a lifetime to work on it.
That’s where Christianity gets wonderfully unfair.
You get redos.
Lots of them.
Screw up?
Repent. Learn something. Get back up.
Screw up again?
Repent. Learn something else. Get back up again.
Peter denied Jesus three times while Jesus was being hauled toward His death. That’s not exactly résumé material for becoming one of the most important leaders in Christianity.
Jesus used him anyway.
Paul participated in the persecution of Christians. If Christianity had a human-resources department, Paul’s application probably wouldn’t have made it through the first background check.
God used him anyway.
Then there’s the thief hanging beside Jesus.
The man apparently figured out the game with seconds left on the clock.
No seminary.
No baptismal certificate tucked neatly into a filing cabinet.
No decades of church attendance.
No impressive list of charitable contributions.
Just recognition, repentance, and faith.
And Jesus told him, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
That’s grace.
The greatest comeback mechanic ever built into any game.
But there’s one detail modern Christianity sometimes gets uncomfortable mentioning.
The clock eventually runs out.
You don’t know when.
Neither do I.
That’s what makes this whole thing matter.
Jesus didn’t say, “I am one potentially useful lifestyle strategy among several equally effective alternatives.”
He said:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
The Way.
That’s what early Christians actually called Christianity: the Way.
Which makes the metaphor almost embarrassingly obvious.
Life is the course.
Jesus is the Way through it.
And God apparently gives us an extraordinary amount of patience while we wander around trying every other route first.
We take the money route.
Dead end.
The ego route.
Dead end.
The pleasure route.
Dead end.
The power route.
Dead end.
The “I’ll finally be happy when I get ______” route.
Another dead end.
Then somewhere along the journey, usually after we’ve collected enough bruises, some of us finally look at the instructions we’ve been carrying around the entire time.
Oh.
That’s what this was about.
Maybe life isn’t primarily about how much we accumulate.
Maybe it’s about what we cultivate.
Maybe the question at the end isn’t going to be how impressive our résumé looked, how many people knew our name, how much money was in the account, or whether we won every argument on Facebook.
Maybe the question is much simpler.
What fruit did your life produce?
Did people encounter more love because you existed?
Did you forgive?
Did you protect the weak?
Did you feed somebody?
Teach somebody?
Raise children who knew they were loved?
Help your neighbor?
Stand for truth when doing so cost something?
Did you leave your little patch of God’s garden better than you found it?
You’re going to screw some of it up.
Guaranteed.
Welcome to humanity.
The remarkable message of Christianity isn’t that good people never fall down.
It’s that fallen people can get back up.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Grace doesn’t mean the test doesn’t matter.
Grace means God keeps handing you the pencil back.
Until one day He doesn’t.
Eventually somebody calls time.
So while you’re still breathing, you’re still playing.
There’s still time to repent.
Still time to forgive somebody.
Still time to apologize.
Still time to repair something you’ve broken.
Still time to plant something worth harvesting.
Still time to produce good fruit.
Still time to follow the Way.
We spend fortunes trying to discover the secret to a meaningful life. We buy books, attend seminars, chase gurus, listen to podcasts, optimize our sleep, measure our steps, track our calories, manage our portfolios, and download another app promising to finally make us happy.
Meanwhile, a carpenter from Nazareth gave us the answer roughly two thousand years ago.
Follow Me.
That’s the cheat code.
The instructions have been sitting there the whole time.
The only question is whether we’ll use them before the clock runs out.
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