“For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift – not from works, so that no one can boast.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Okay, I know I’ve talked about it several times – more than any other series I’ve reviewed since I’ve been doing this – but I just can’t help it. It was so good, and now it’s over. Rarely has a show received the amount of cultural acclaim that Ted Lasso has achieved. People are begging its creator, Jason Sudeikis, to bring it back for another story arc. And they are doing this not simply because it was so very good, but because of the good it introduced to the culture over its three-season run. And yet this past Wednesday, the series officially came to an end. And as much as it pains me to say this, I hope that ending remains. Let’s talk one more time about why the show was so good, and why it could have been even better.

Let me cover two things right out of the gate. Number 1: I’m going to talk about the final episode. If you haven’t watched that and don’t want spoilers, don’t read this. Number 2: Ted Lasso had too much language and too much sexual content. I’ve thought that from day one, and I’m pretty sure I’ve noted as much in all of my reviews of the series. You may or may not disagree, but that’s my take. Let’s set that to the side and talk about the show.

I’ve said it before, but I can’t say it enough: it’s really good. It is absolutely worth signing up for a subscription to AppleTV for a month and binging the whole series. You will laugh. You will cry. And you will be both heartbroken and absolutely delighted that Ted decides to go home in the end to be a dad and, hopefully, a husband again. The whole story begins when in an ugly divorce from her womanizing but super wealthy husband, Rebecca Welton gains ownership of the Richmond Greyhounds Football Club. Planning to destroy the organization in order to get revenge against her ex-husband, she hires an American football coach from Wichita State in the absolute heart of the Midwest, knowing full well that the American football coach knows nothing about what the rest of the world calls football and will fail miserably. He’s nothing more than the patsy who will take the fall as part of her revenge scheme.

What she gets instead is Ted Lasso.

Ted is nothing short of a burst of sunshine in dark world. He is kind and patient and generous and forgiving (so, so, forgiving) and has the uncanny ability of drawing the absolute best out of everyone around him. In spite of knowing nothing about the game itself, Lasso gradually wins over the players, the leadership, the press, and finally the fans by being just so incredibly likeable. The first season takes viewers on a journey of Ted’s redeeming the culture of the Richmond organization, but it ends with the team’s being relegated from the Premier League to the Championship League. The second season sees Ted’s culture change take hold and finishes with the team moving back up to the Premier League. But the real feature of that journey was revealing Ted’s personal struggles from his childhood trauma and showing how he got on a path out of them with the help of friends, family (namely, his son), and a trusted counselor. The final season saw the team struggle early, but eventually find themselves and run the table on the Premier League to advance to the Champions League (a rather confusing series of titles along with some odd rules governing which teams go where that gets gently, but hilariously lampooned in the final minutes of the series finale). As with the second season, though, the real story is how all the stories get wrapped up with their appropriately happy endings.

There are three moments from the final two episodes that are worth my highlighting them here. This trio are collectively a perfect example of why the series was so good, and why it could have been even just a little bit better if it had made one small – but significant – change. The first leads to the happy ending of Nathan Shelley. At the end of the second season, Nate finally bought into the growing chorus of good press arguing he was the real brains behind the team’s success that season. He started the series as the team’s mousy, disrespected kitman (what we call equipment manager), but Ted did his thing, discovered that he was a genius coach, and promoted him accordingly. In a fit of arrogance, he betrayed Ted in a painful, public fashion, and got himself hired to be the coach of West Ham, the team Rebecca’s ex-husband, Rupert Mannion bought in order to compete with and defeat his ex-wife. Nate tries his best to live up to the cool, snarky, arrogant image Rupert and the rest of the press wanted him to inhabit, but he misses the culture Ted had created at Richmond. His attempts to recreate it at West Ham fall hilariously flat.

As the third season winds up, Nate finally enters a relationship with, Jade, the receptionist at his favorite restaurant, and whose attention he had been very clumsily trying to attract since the first season. Jade has a way of calling the best out of him like Ted did, and when Rupert reveals his truly depraved character by inviting Nate to cheat on her, he quits as coach. The Richmond players learn about this and, having been thoroughly discipled by Ted’s gracious and forgiving spirit, invite him back to the team. The holdout, though, is Coach Beard, Ted’s incredibly loyal assistant who came with him from Wichita State in the beginning. Beard has not forgiven Nate and has no intention of it because of the wound he dealt to his friend. But Ted’s graciousness finally prevails on Beard’s heart, and in an incredibly touching moment, he finally reveals his own backstory of how Ted had forgiven him years before after he had also betrayed Ted after having received nothing but kindness and grace from him. Because of Ted’s forgiveness of him, he was finally going to forgive Nate. The whole episode is just soaked in the Gospel’s call for us to forgive because we have been forgiven. As the author of a terrific book on prayer I recently read puts it: “God’s forgiveness is too good to keep to ourselves, and it’s too true not to apply to everyone else.” (Prayer, John Onwuchekwa, 83)

The second moment features the total redemption of Jamie Tartt. Tartt is a soccer phenom, but at the beginning of the series is too stuck on his own celebrity to be any good to anyone else. After having been signed by the elite team, Manchester City, Tartt quit the team in order to be on a dating show…which he loses. At that point, Richmond is the only team that will sign him because they are in such desperate need for talent. Tartt is arrogant to the extreme. He belittles the players around him constantly and is almost as much of a womanizer as Rupert. Through the second season we learn of his own childhood struggles because of his abusive and alcoholic father’s constantly belittling him for not being good enough at football. It is a major victory when he finally decides he’s not going to play out of hatred for his father any longer. Into the third season in which we see Jamie grow in humility of spirit in remarkable ways, we meet his devoted and encouraging mother who assures him of her love on a trip home where the team will play Jamie’s former team. Certain of his dad’s presence at the game and knowing he is going to be the loudest voice in the crowd cheering against him, Jamie is a wreck.

During the game, Jamie gets badly injured just as Richmond was beginning to make a comeback after going down early. As Jamie is trying to recover from it, Ted comes over and, putting the entirety of the moment they are in to the side, asks with all his natural genuineness how he is doing. Jamie acknowledges that since he’s not playing well out of a desire to prove his dad wrong anymore, he doesn’t know what he’s playing for. In yet another Gospel-soaked moment, Ted tells him to forgive his dad, be released from that burden, and to play because he loves the game. The call to forgiveness here certainly stands out, but what caught my attention even more is the fact that Ted could not have had that conversation with Jamie had he not spent the previous three years pouring into him with patience and kindness. It was Ted’s commitment to bringing the best out of the people around him that was the catalyst to Jamie’s total character turnaround.

Jesus called us to make disciples who make disciples. We can’t do this by force or pressure. Pushing or guilting someone into the Christian faith will never yield long-term positive results by itself. It is when we woo with kindness and graciousness and humility and generosity, refusing to condemn people for their faults (even the obvious ones) but instead highlighting and encouraging their virtues that we will see the biggest changes come. There still must be accountability with failure, and Ted practices that, but his commitment to grace and graciousness is what is truly transformative. This is a pattern that followers of Jesus looking to meaningfully make disciples who make disciples will do well to follow.

One last moment. In the waning moments of the series finale, Roy Kent asks to join Diamond Dogs, the little boys-only club Ted forms with his inner circle where the guys can share what’s on their hearts and minds without judgment, and where they can receive encouragement, accountability, and wise counsel on how to best navigate the waters they are in at the moment. In other words, it’s a small group without the Gospel. It is the kind of relationship circle all of us needs. Roy shares his struggles with having spent a full year trying to be a better person and feeling like he hasn’t managed to make any improvement.

The group, in true modern fashion, responds by telling him that the real goal is to learn to accept yourself for who you are. They assure him that no one is perfect. This leads them to spontaneously start listing off things that are perfect (Back to the Future, Jaws, Trent’s hair, Grace Kelly’s eyes, the other side of the pillow, and so on). Beard clarifies that people aren’t perfect. This leads Leslie Higgins, the bumbling but sincere and lovable Director of Football Operations, to offer Roy this encouragement: “Human beings are never going to be perfect, Roy. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can. And if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards better.”

For a series that has nailed Gospel concepts over and over and over throughout its spectacular three-season run, this was finally the one place where it didn’t quite get as good as it could have been. The series consistently came close to the Gospel, offering a powerful reminder that the Gospel really lies at the heart of all of our stories, and in fact offers a better story than any that we tell on our own. But here it falls just short. Of course, the trouble is that “just short” when it comes to the Gospel still leaves us with an uncrossable gap between us and God.

While Leslie’s speech is meant to be inspiring and encouraging, he’s wrong. Human beings will one day be perfect. We are indeed promised as much. For those who have accepted the Gospel and given their lives to Jesus, we will one day be perfected in His image and made utterly fit for eternity in God’s kingdom. The best we can do will never be good enough. Ever. Our good deeds are likely filthy rags alongside God’s holiness. We can move toward (they use “towards” in England) better all we want, but we’ll never get there on our own. All the “better” we can muster still leaves us a broken, mangled mess. All of the meaningful moral improvement (our moving toward better) we have achieved as a species over the centuries has only and ever come from a single source: God’s people pursuing the ethics of God’s kingdom in the world around them. That’s it. Nothing else has gotten us close.

Our efforts simply aren’t enough. All the rules in the world can’t get us there. As Paul wrote, we are saved by grace through faith and not our own efforts. Even more than that, “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, attested by the Law and the Prophets. The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, since there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

All the goodness of Ted Lasso comes from one place and that place isn’t us. Ted Lasso is what it looks like when a follower of Jesus is salt and light in a tasteless, dark world. The world is longing for this. The immensely popularity of the show that has interviewers literally begging Sudeikis for more is a testament to this. When the Gospel – or even a close facsimile of it – is set before a world awash in the brokenness of sin it laps it up like a dog lost in the desert when it finds an oasis. We have what the world needs. We only need to give it. Ted Lasso was one of the best reminders of that I’ve seen in a very long time. You should watch it. And then you should embrace the Gospel to which it imperfectly points to make the same kind of thing happen in the world around you.