the US women’s national soccer team.
“I just fully pushed all the chips into His
hand,” Ertz says, “and it was the best
decision that I ever made.”
even lethal, zeal for Judaism. Paul’s
religion was performance-based, and
void of grace, mercy, and love. But
when the risen Son of God confronted
him on the road to Damascus, Paul was
What Ertz experienced was liberating instantly and forever changed, as he
grace and freedom in Christ. In this, attests in Philippians 3:7–11:
he shared something with the apostle
Paul’s experience in Acts 9. Both men
But whatever gain I had, I counted as
grew up in a works-based religion, then
loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed,
were knocked over by God’s unmerited
I count everything as loss because
kindness.
of the surpassing worth of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I
have suffered the loss of all things
and count them as rubbish, in order
that I may gain Christ and be found
in him, not having a righteousness
of my own that comes from the law,
but that which comes through faith
in Christ, the righteousness from
God that depends on faith— that
I may know him and the power of
his resurrection, and may share his
sufferings, becoming like him in his
With the benefit of hindsight, Ertz now
death, that by any means possible I
describes his road to Philly in similar
may attain the resurrection from the
language: “Just getting drafted by
dead.
Philadelphia, I think, was God calling
me to come to Christ,” Ertz says. “If I Jesus had much to say about the
were to draft at any other place, I can’t concept of “practice makes perfect.” In
say for one hundred-percent certainty Matthew 23 he issued a scathing rebuke
that I would be as far along in my walk of the Jewish religious leaders of his day,
as I am now. I know there was a reason who had built an entire religious system
I was drafted here.”
on legalism, calling them “hypocrites,”
“blind fools,” “whitewashed tombs,”
Paul, a self-described “Hebrew of “serpents,” and a “brood of vipers.” He
Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5), had once condemned their devotion to outward
wrongly placed his trust in his ethnic righteousness, calling it “hypocrisy
heritage; a fastidious observance to the and lawlessness,” and he wondered
Old Testament law; and an unmatched, aloud, “How are you to escape being
54 • Solutions