We are coming to end of this particular phase of coronavirus – some of us met together for the first time last night for a midweek meeting, and more of us will be able to meet together on Sunday for our first Sunday services since the middle of March.
It is a time when we can “take stock” and consider how lockdown has gone for us spiritually.
If you are like me, you will probably be able to look back and see some areas where you can say, “With God’s grace that went well, God taught me new things, his Spirit enabled me to grow spiritually”, but there will also be areas where you look back and thing, “I didn’t handle that well, what I did or said or thought then wasn’t what God would have wanted of me.”
The question then is how you respond to your failures. Satan would want you to conclude, “I’m not much a Christian am I? I don’t know if God will still accept me”.
Instead I would urge you to turn to Philippians 3v9: “… and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.”
Christ is our righteousness. Or, to put it negatively, our righteousness is not our own achievement – not even the tiniest bit of it. That means that if we have been making a real mess of living as a Christian, we are still righteous – Christ is our righteousness. If, on the other hand, we feel we have been doing rather rather well at living as Christian, we are no more righteous – Christ is our righteousness.
John Bunyan – the famous author of Pilgrim’s Progress – wrote a sort of spiritual autobiography (a very lengthy testimony of his conversion!), “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners”. He struggled greatly with his repeated failures in seeking to follow Christ. He relates how God, very graciously, revealed to him the significance of the precious truth that Christ is our righteousness.
(It was written about 350 years ago, so the language is rather “quaint”, but I think you will get the general idea!)
“But one day, as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought withal, I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, is my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was adoing, God could not say of me, He wants my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, p35-36)
Tim
As a hymn, I have chosen my favourite of the new songs I have come across in lockdown
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