Let me tell you about the greatest basketball game ever played.
June 19, 2016. Game 7. Cleveland Cavaliers versus the Golden State Warriors, who had just won 73 games in the regular season — the most in NBA history — and were playing in their second consecutive Finals. The Warriors had built a 3-1 series lead. No team in NBA history had ever come back from 3-1 in the Finals. Ever. And yet here we were.
I am a Cavaliers fan. Which means I have a complicated relationship with hope. I’ve watched this franchise break your heart in ways that feel almost creative. So sitting on my couch that night, I was not calm. Nobody who loves this team is ever calm. We have been trained, over decades of heartbreak, not to trust the good thing when it’s happening.
The fourth quarter comes. LeBron James — our guy, the kid from Akron who left and came back — makes a chase-down block that still doesn’t seem physically possible. Then Kyrie Irving pulls up over Steph Curry with 53 seconds left and drains a three that silences Oracle Arena. The Cavaliers hold on. 93-89. For the first time in 52 years, Cleveland is a champion.
I don’t have words for what that felt like. I’m not sure I need them. If you’ve ever loved a team and finally watched them win, you already know.
Here’s the thing though. I watched that game again recently, for the ten-year anniversary. And something was different.The fear was gone. Completely. I wasn’t gripping anything. I wasn’t holding my breath when Golden State cut the lead. I wasn’t sick to my stomach in the fourth quarter. I watched the whole thing leaning back, smiling, almost giddy — not because the game was less dramatic, but because I already knew the outcome. I already knew the victor.
Knowing the victor changes everything about how you watch the game.
This concept runs through the entire Bible. But perhaps nowhere does it hit harder, nowhere is it more visible in real human flesh, than the Book of Acts. Specifically, Acts 2. Peter’s sermon.
Read it slowly and let the context land. Mere weeks before this moment, Peter was feeling everything. The fear, the uncertainty, the sick dread of a man watching something he loves fall apart in real time. He had denied Jesus three times in a courtyard and wept bitterly. He had watched the crucifixion from a distance. He had been in that upper room behind locked doors, waiting, not sure what came next.
Then he saw it. The risen Christ. Bodily. Undeniably. The Victor, standing in front of him.
And everything changed. Acts 2:14 — Peter stood up. Two words. The man who was hiding is now on his feet in public. The man who couldn’t hold his nerve in front of a servant girl now opens his mouth in front of thousands. And he doesn’t hedge. He doesn’t soften the message to make it more palatable. He looks at the crowd — the very city that called for the crucifixion — and says it plainly: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.
Why could he do that? Verse 24. Because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. The game was already over. Peter had seen the rerun. There was no fear left. Only proclamation. Only victory.
Victory. It’s worth sitting with that word for a moment.
The victory Peter is standing in isn’t abstract. It isn’t wishful thinking or religious optimism. It is the physical, historical, documented reality that a man who was dead walked out of a tomb. That the grave could not hold him. That every power that stood against him — Rome, the religious establishment, sin, death itself — had swung its hardest and come up empty. The resurrection is not a metaphor for hope. It is the announcement that the war is over, the score is final, and we already know who won.
This is what fuels everything in Acts. It’s why Peter and John stand before the Sanhedrin — the same council that arranged the crucifixion — and speak without flinching (Acts 4:13). It’s why the apostles walk out of a flogging rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for the name (Acts 5:41). These are not unusually brave people. They are ordinary people who have seen the Victor. People who already know how the story ends don’t grip the couch.
So here’s the question that lands closer to home. And I want to ask it gently, because I suspect most of us already feel it.
Pastors. Ministry leaders. Those of us who have given our lives to this — how are we living?
I don’t ask that as an accusation. I ask it as someone who knows what the weight of ministry can do to a person over time. The sermon calendar never stops. The needs in your congregation are real and they don’t wait for you to catch your breath. The programs need volunteers, the budget needs attention, the family at home needs a version of you that isn’t depleted. Ministry is beautiful and it is hard, and sometimes those two things are true on the same day.
But here is what I wonder, and I wonder it about myself as much as anyone: in the midst of all we have built and all we are trying to sustain, have we quietly lost sight of the victory? Not out of unbelief. Not because we stopped loving Jesus. But because somewhere in the volume of it all, we shifted from men and women who know the outcome to men and women who are just trying to keep up?
How are we preaching? Do our sermons carry the weight and the joy of people who have seen the risen Christ — or have we drifted toward careful, managed communication that is more anxious than it is assured? How are we discipling our families, our churches? Are the people watching our lives learning what it looks like to live from the victory or are they watching us grip the couch?
How are we evangelizing? Are we sharing the resurrection like Peter in Acts 2, or have we grown tentative — hoping the conversation doesn’t ask too much of us?
The tomb doesn’t care about our calendar. The resurrection is not waiting on our next sermon series to become true. And yet we carry ourselves, sometimes — if we’re honest — like people watching it live. Tense. Uncertain. Exhausted. Wondering if it’s all going to hold.
Friend, it’s going to hold. Because Jesus is still risen. The same Jesus who met a broken, demoralized fisherman on a beach and turned him into the preacher of Pentecost — He is still in the business of restoring and sending His people. He is not watching your ministry with nervous hands, wondering if you’ll pull it off. He already knows the outcome. He is the outcome. And He is inviting you — in your weariness, in your doubt, in the middle of everything you are carrying — to stop watching the game like you don’t know how it ends.
The tomb is empty. The Victor is alive. Peter stood up. Go and do likewise.