There is some truth in the saying ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.’ When I first met my wife Penny she was working as the events coordinator at St Pauls Cathedral in London (you might have heard of it – big Wren building with a dome!). This in turn allowed me the privilege of going to some of the events she had organised as well as attending other functions. I will not bore you with a list, but more than a few of them involved royalty and the great and good of this land.
I’ll be honest with you here and tell you that my upbringing was ordinary, the comprehensive school I attended supplied more people to be tried in the justice system than it ever did Oxbridge graduates. Consequently, I grew up with the mindset that I was just not good enough. Despite this, I have to say that up to now the good has outweighed the bad, despite it not feeling like that from time to time. It was this skewed mindset that dogged me whenever I’d be at one of these events and the thought would always occur to me ‘What on earth is a person with my background doing here?’ To put it simply I was there through no merit of my own it was who I was in relationship with.
For me this illustrates beautifully what happens when we accept Jesus as our Saviour. We enter a living, vital relationship with Him which allows us access, not to a diary of events of drinks and canapes (sometimes of varying quantity and quality) with the great and good of this world, but to God Himself through Jesus’ sacrifice on Calvary. All our sin is taken away at the cross and we become children of the living God. We can only look back on the sins of our past life and wonder like I did ‘What am I of all people doing in this blessed position?’. There was nothing of merit in our lives as our best efforts were, as the Bible tells us, nothing more than filthy rags in the presence of a Holy, Sinless and Perfect God. Why would a holy God love me? The only answer is He does because that is His will.
This is the wonder of God’s grace towards us and as some of you might be aware the word GRACE can be made into the acronym God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. Let us as believers never lose this wonder in our lives that Jesus was prepared to endure the suffering and shame of the Cross to gain for us redemption from sin and it is not my upbringing, job or anything else that defines the person I am, it is Jesus who does that. Praise God!
Image credit: Daniel Joshua via Unsplash
