The basement in my home is a dungeon. Construction workers poured the concrete walls over a hundred years ago, and when it rains, the walls leak like an old pirate ship. I store my road bike in the basement, a corner of the dungeon tucked inside a small alcove. During the winter or when it’s really raining, I come inside the leaky dungeon, put my bike on a trainer, and ride for an hour while I stare at the posters on the walls.

I collected most of the posters in college, and one poster catches my attention each time I ride, especially times like right now, for the three weeks in July when a hundred professional riders compete in the two-thousand-mile race called the Tour de France.

The poster is of Lance Armstrong, his famous “What Am I On?” poster. A blurred Armstrong rides along a country road in his iconic Postal uniform on his Trek bicycle frame. The red, white, and blue colors evoke the best of American, even Texan, pride, the ideas that happiness can be pursued and success is democratized to everyone willing to work hard. In the background behind Lance is a white building resembling a country church. Perhaps the church signifies devotion and zeal, even worship. In the upper right-hand corner the poster reads:

This is my body and I can do whatever I want to it, I can push it, study it, tweak it, listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?

The poster was actually part of a broader marketing campaign by Nike. A television commercial employed the same brash and polemical wording on the poster to rebuke the early rumors of Lance’s steroid use and blood doping.

As I said, I’ve had this poster since college, and many times as a college athlete, I would look up and think, If I work hard, if I do the work with excellence and effort, passion and devotion, if I put in the six-hour days and I’m smart about it, then I will get ahead. It. Will. Happen.

I did this because, more than just celebrating Armstrong’s work ethic, the poster promised—indeed the “Legend of Lance” promised—similar results to all who had ears to hear. The way the poster shows Lance riding slightly uphill underscores this promise. His skills and determination shined brightest on French mountains, so the climbing posture fits. But the posture also extends the promise of progress to any devoted viewer, any true believer in hard work. You can do this too, it whispers. Armstrong climbed back from cancer by riding his bike uphill six hours a day. What are you on?

Needless to say, that poster looks different to me today than it did in college.

Not only was Lance Armstrong stripped of all seven of the titles he won in the Tour de France, but during that era the governing body of the race has chosen not to award other winners because of such pervasive use of performance-enhancing drugs. Most top riders have confessed to cheating or been credibly accused.

I ponder these realities and see the potential to make what some call a “Jesus juke,” that is, to quickly move from one story—whether a sad or sappy story—to a fairly obvious connection to Jesus, often some sentimental truth. But in all seriousness, the story of Lance and this particular “What Am I On?” poster has often led me to reflect upon Jesus’s words about treasure. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” Jesus said. “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matt. 6:19–20).

The promise, however, offers more than we likely realize at first. God offers forgiveness for cheaters. Instead of standing trial for our failings, God offers to let the death of Christ stand as the public reckoning for wrongs. And here is the real treasure, forgiveness from God and friendship with him that never fades.

I know he’s controversial, but I like Armstrong—not only back in the day when he raced but now. I appreciated the early autobiography It’s Not About the Bike written with Sally Jenkins, and I appreciate now his predictably arrogant hot takes on his podcast The Move. And I can appreciate his recent attempts to engage the conversation of transgenderism in sports, chiefly biological men playing against biological women.

Yet of course I understand the polarization, like on Twitter for instance. The comments under his posts fall almost exclusively in the categories of either “I love you, Lance” or “I hate you.” This is because he’s also hurt people, not only back in the day when he squashed his accusers, but the way his hot takes still cut down others. For all the other falsehoods about Armstrong’s integrity in his that early autobiography, it really was true that it’s not about the bike. Lance is about Lance, then and now.

And I feel this same temptation tug at me, even as I preach and lead a church and love my wife and kids and point others to Jesus. Too often it’s about Benjamin.

So I guess I long for Armstrong to know—as I long for myself and others to know—the treasure of God’s forgiveness and what it means to be caught up in something bigger, indeed Somone bigger, than myself. Because while the promise of the poster has rusted, the promise from Jesus has not and will not.