The year 1915 was a good one for George. He was twenty-one years old, recently married and a starting pitcher for the Boston Red Socks. On May 15 of that year his team was playing the Yankees at the Polo Grounds, with Jack Warhop on the mound for New York. In the third inning, George took his turn at the plate and promptly crushed one of Warhop’s pitches, launching it over the right field wall. It was the fifth hit of George’s young career and his first homerun. It was not to be his last.

During the next twenty years, George Herman Ruth hit 713 more homeruns. In the 1927 season alone, he smacked sixty of them. His prowess with a bat made other homerun hitters of his day look anemic—sometimes even whole teams. He earned the title “The Sultan of Swat” but is better known today simply as “The Babe.” For years his records stood as firm as the Rock of Gibraltar, but all records, including the Babe’s, beg to be broken. In 1961 Roger Maris set a new single-season mark with sixty-one, and Hank Aaron retired in 1976 with a career total of 755. Later, Barry Bonds eclipsed everyone.

Still, Babe Ruth remains the standard by which all sluggers are judged.

Maybe Bonds and Aaron put more over the fence, maybe sluggers such as Mickey Mantle and Luke Easter could hit them farther, but there has always been something that has set the Babe apart from the rest of the field. Ruth played with panache, charisma. For example, during the 1932 World Series with the Cubs and Wrigley Field, Ruth supposedly called a homerun shot to centerfield just before he began his at-bat. On the first pitch, he sent the ball to the very place where he had pointed. Whatever you want to call Ruth’s flair, he knew how to play to the grandstands, how to please a crowd.

Not every baseball player can do what Babe Ruth could do. Not every one of us can be a crowd pleaser on the diamond, or anywhere else for that matter. We can please God, though. “Without faith it is impossible to please God,” stated one writer in the New Testament (Hebrews 11:6), implying that with faith we can please God. Faith serves as the key element in our relationship with God. Our religious rituals and charitable deeds are good as far as they go, but they do not make us right with God and bridge the gap between us and the Almighty. Only by faith can we do these things.

By faith we understand that all we see in nature is the result of His creative wisdom and power. When we exercise faith, we believe that God is there, even when He seems absent. By faith we accept that Jesus is His unique Son who died for us and was raised from the dead to give us a hope that transcends this life.

Faith involves more than believing the right things about God, though. It means that we trust Him. We rely on His forgiveness. We commit ourselves to following His Son and obeying His guidelines for living, simply because we trust that His way is the right one.

Faith is the only way we can establish and maintain a relationship with God. All that He offers us—eternal life, peace, forgiveness—is a gracious gift. A gift, by definition, cannot be earned. We cannot do enough good things to deserve God’s grace, nor can we commit enough sins to disqualify us from it. All we can do is accept His grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8). When we do this, even if we cannot please a crowd, we can please God. And, that is far more important.