Being Made Right

You know what’s great? Realising that not only do you have the thing you’ve always hoped for, but that actually, what you have received is so much more amazing than anything you thought of in the first place.

One of the things I had to do as part of the first few weeks of FORM, the discipleship and leadership course I've just started, was to tell the others in the group about the story of my life. This has got me thinking a lot about the journey I’ve been on over the last few years, and some of the changes I’ve seen in myself, especially in the ways I think about God.

This is one of the biggest changes I could think of: I used to think that if I was sorry enough for every single thing I ever did wrong, then God would see my sorry-ness and decide that he would forgive me for them. Obviously, having my sins forgiven was great, but there was still lots to worry about: what if I forgot about some particular sin and forgot to apologise for it? Or even worse, what if I sinned without realising? Then I’d have no chance of being forgiven! Or even if I did remember, I might not be quite sorry enough to please God… As you can imagine, this wasn’t a particularly nice way to be feeling, with a general sense of worry and uneasiness about what I may or may not have done wrong, and a slightly panicked and frantic check of my conscience every time we got to confession in church services.

But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law, as was promised in the writings of Moses and the prophets long ago

Romans 3.21

I think this verse gets at what was wrong with my old ideas, and the overwhelming better-ness of God’s plan than I had imagined. God didn’t just want to blot out my sins one by one, as they came along, and he definitely didn’t want me to have to grovel to his to do even that! Jesus paid for all all the darkness in the world to be taken away through his one act of sacrifice, and that includes every time I’m ever going to mess up. Completely covered over, and not to be worried about again.

But much more than that, God wants me to be right with him. It’s like the difference in court between being found guilty but then let off with a pardon, and being declared to be not guilty - in the right – in the first place. But this is not just a verdict that means I don’t have to be punished. It means I can be counted as an adopted son of God himself, and the recipient of everything in his Kingdom that he has to give me. Which is just about the most exciting thing ever…