Losers Welcome: The Gospel In The Age Of Winning
In a culture driven by…
Expectations and determination, it’s no surprise that so many resonate with the raw honesty of Post Malone and Jelly Roll’s new song, "Losers." The track is an anthem for those who’ve felt the weight of their failures, been labeled as outcasts, and struggled under the relentless pressure to be more. Its appeal is vast because it offers an unfiltered embrace of what society often shuns—the flawed, the foolish, and the frail.
Listening to the song, I couldn’t help but see the place where its message collides with the heart of the Gospel.
While the song gives voice to the outcast and the broken, the Gospel takes it a step further, offering not just solidarity but redemption. In Jesus, we find the story of a God who crashed into our broken world with outlandish love, offering life to those checkmated by the here and now—a God who meets us in our mess, not with more demands.
The truth is, we are all flawed, foolish, and frail in one way or another. Despite how we spin the narrative, the failures in our lives are something we’re keenly aware of in the still moments of the night. But it's in those moments that, unlike religion, the Gospel story strips us down to know ourselves anew.
It’s in those moments where we find losers are not despised or rejected. In fact, losers can discover something about themselves that self-proclaimed winners cannot: they are fully loved despite what they achieve.
“For God so loved the world”—the broken world, the unbelieving world, the messy world, the confused world, the fake world, the self-righteous world, the lying world, the selfish world, the hurtful world, the hurting world, the struggling world, the addicted world—”that He gave His one and only Son” (John 3:16).
God’s grand redemptive act wasn’t an elaborate dinner party for winners striving to overcome their humanity. Instead, it was Jesus hung on a cross between two losers who couldn’t.
In a society that often presents Christianity as something reserved for the godly, the spiritually fit, and the morally competent, it’s easy to miss the essence of the Gospel. But that’s precisely why we must remember, and keep on remembering, that God loves us as we are, not as we should be. Grace always operates in failure, not success. And all that’s left for us to do is accept our acceptance.
Sure, that kind of grace is messy, and the practice of faith isn’t tidy. But it’s the life we’ve been given by the God who has already united Himself with who we truly are. As the song "Losers" puts it, "you might be lonely [in this endeavor], but you’re never alone. You’re right where you’re supposed to be. Right here with all the losers. The ones like you, and the ones like me.”