Hansie Cronje
I think the most controversial figure in South African cricket was Hansie Cronje.
He was the country’s golden boy—a great leader, a Christian man. Everybody loved him, until it came out that he had been involved with fraud and match-fixing, and the whole country kind of fell apart.
And it still chokes me up thinking of that scene where he was in court and he admitted what he’d done and he broke down in tears. I get all choked up just thinking about it.
Forgiveness And Grace
An interesting thing about Hansie is that many South Africans chose to forgive him, and they still loved him even after he’d done what he’d done. And that was, in a sense, a witness to our Christian faith as a nation.
Hansie died in a plane crash in 2002, and there are all sorts of theories about whether he was killed because of his knowledge of all the underground activity that was happening in the cricket world.
A Prodigal Returns
But before he died, he had come back to faith. Yesterday we spoke about Peter Pollock, and interestingly, he was enormously influential in helping Hansie come back to faith.
It’s really a prodigal son story. Remember the prodigal son Jesus speaks about in Luke 15? He really messed up. He really messed up in a bad way. But when he returned to God, there was grace, there was forgiveness, there was mercy available to him.
Thank God Hansie found that. And even somebody who messed up as badly as Hansie did found redemption when he came back to God in faith.
God's Endless Mercy
I want to say to you, friends, however far you’ve gone from the faith, whatever evil you’ve gotten yourself wrapped up in, there is enough grace in the heart of God for you to find redemption if you come back to Him.
If you throw yourself at His feet, He will love you and give you mercy and forgiveness. Here’s the truth, friends: All of us, to some extent, are prodigals. It’s easy to point fingers at somebody who we think has sinned in a worse way than us.
But friends, all of us—all of us—need the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ to wash away our stains and free us from our sins. Come to Him today, would you, like Hansie, and I promise you, you will find grace and redemption which can only come from Him.
