On the last Saturday in September this year, the Brisbane Lions football club won their third Australian Football League (AFL) premiership in a row. Achieving the three-peat hasn’t been easy for the club. Ten years ago, they were sitting at the bottom of the AFL ladder with poor membership numbers and low attendances at their games. Since then, they have reshaped the club’s culture, overcome various adversities, and have made incredible comebacks to win games they should not have won. In the last decade, the Lions have become a very successful club.
Over the last three years, after a 4-point loss to Collingwood in the 2023 grand final and a pretty disastrous start to the 2024 season in which they lost five of their first seven games, the Lions adopted the slogans of “Believe” and “Built on Belief.” As a supporter of the Brisbane Lions, I’ve found the turn-around of the team amazing to watch. Their belief in their own abilities as football players and those around them in their team has resulted in their ability to overcome adversity and achieve incredible victories. This belief was clearly evident in the last four and a half minutes of the 2026 Grand Final in which they kicked four goals to go from seventeen points behind to win the game by seven points.
It is a very long way from the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the last Saturday in September to Germany in the early 1500s but there is a clear connection between the Brisbane Lions’ three-peat premierships and the Lutheran Reformation (at least in my mind). Both were shaped by and built on belief. For the Brisbane Lions is has been a belief in themselves and their teammates. For the Lutheran Reformers of the early 1500s it was a belief in God and the good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection for all people. To use a slogan from the Brisbane Lions, we can say that the Protestant Reformation was “Built on Belief.”
We can see this in the New Testament reading for the Commemoration of the Reformation, Romans 3:19-28. Paul writes, “We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ” (v22 NLT), “People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life” (v25 NLT) and “So we are made right with God through faith and not by obeying the law” (v28 NLT). The good news that is clearly evident through all of Paul’s letters and throughout the New Testament is that sinful people are made right with God, not by the good we do or the wrong we don’t do, but purely and solely through faith in Jesus, and his sinless life, his sacrificial death and his life-giving resurrection for us. This is the good news of the Gospel through which the Holy Spirit creates saving faith in us and gives us the ability to believe in everything God has done, is doing and will do for us for Jesus’ sake, and to trust in his life-giving promises to us in his Word.
This belief can be seen in Martin Luther’s struggles with Romans 1:17 which reads, “The righteous will live by faith” (NIV). For a long time in the earlier part of his life, Luther thought this text was demanding something of him. His belief was that he had to somehow become righteous in God’s sight by fulfilling a long list of religious works. The Holy Spirit opened his eyes to see that righteousness wasn’t a demand from God but God’s gift to him in Jesus and opened his heart to receive God’s gift through faith. Reflecting on his experience later in his life Luther wrote, “All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light.” In a way that can be compared to the belief the Brisbane Lions have which opened the way for them to win three AFL Premierships in a row, the belief Luther found in the Gospel of Jesus opened the door of heaven to him and a new life of freedom, peace, joy and hope.
While we might be able to draw a comparison between the belief of the Brisbane Lions football club and the belief of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformers, there is one significant and essential difference. The belief of the Lions footballers is in themselves and their own abilities. The belief of the Reformers was not in themselves and their abilities, but in the God who became human in Jesus, who is with us in all things, who sacrificed his life for us on the cross, and who defeated sin, death and everything that is wrong with the world in his resurrection. The Brisbane Lions secured their victories by believing in themselves. God gives us the victory of Jesus as a gift which we receive by believing in him and all he has done for us. Jesus’ victory is worth so much more than one, two or even three AFL Premiership cups. The victory Jesus gives to us and which we receive through belief in him gives us a life which is full of the goodness and grace of God, which overflows from us into the lives of the people around us, and which will last beyond death into eternity. The Brisbane Lions will need to compete again next season to try to regain their premiership. The victory we have through Christ lasts forever and will outlast every challenge, disappointment, struggle, hardship and pain we will experience in this life. Just like the Lions were able to make some amazing comebacks because of their belief, our belief in Jesus will give us everything we need for our bodies, minds and spirits to get us through everything we face in this world.
I’m not writing this message because I want to bask a little longer in the victories the Lions achieved this year and in previous years. Instead, as a person of faith who follows Jesus and who is also a supporter of the Brisbane Lions, I have witnessed the difference that belief can make in a football club and in the lives of its fans. This change is nothing compared to the difference that belief in Jesus and the Gospel can make in our lives and in the lives of the people we know. The hope and joy experienced by Lions fans over the last few years is insignificant compared to the deep and lasting hope and joy we can find and share with others when our lives are built on belief in Jesus and his life, death and resurrection for us.
We live in uncertain times in our world. We face an uncertain future in our church. In all these things, Paul tells us, “overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us” (Romans 8:37 NLT). The purpose of the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago was to return to a church that was built on belief in Jesus and the Gospel. As we, a church of the continuing Reformation, build our lives and our church community on this same belief in Jesus and the good news of his life, death and resurrection for us, who knows what God might be able to do through us for the sake of the Gospel and for the growth of Christ’s Kingdom?
All God asks us to do is to believe and build our lives on belief in Jesus.
More to think about or discuss:
- What does the word “Believe” mean to you? How does what you believe show in how you live your life?
- Christian belief centres on Jesus and his life, death and resurrection for us. How does that belief shape the way you see yourself & how you relate to the people around you?
- How can we show what we believe about God’s goodness and grace to us in Jesus to the people around us? What are some practical and tangible ways we can do that?
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