We insist on referring to ourselves as 'sinners' when the New Testament never once uses that term to describe someone who is now a Christian. It doesn't deny our propensity to still sin - that would be foolish and naïve - but it constantly stresses our new status and our deliverance from the stranglehold of the power of sin. We need to take our lead from God's Word on this. Sin may still defile us but it no longer defines us.
The example of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 is extremely helpful. He is intent on honouring the veracity of the Lord's work in him and, indeed, through him. Without any affectation he says, "By the grace of God I am what I am...I worked harder than all of them - yet not I but the grace of God that was with me".
From such a long way back, from being one who did his very best to raze to the ground the fledgling church, Paul has been saved and put into God's service, entrusted in the power of the Spirit with breaking new gospel ground, taking the message of salvation to places as yet unreached. And all because the grace of God was powerfully at work in him.
What seems so counter-intuitive to us actually honours the Lord - and in turn helps us. He has worked in our lives and is still at work in us. We need to recognise that and receive the encouragement it gives us. And give to him the honour he so richly and rightly deserves.
We receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need not because we have special qualifications or have a certain potential that can be unleashed under the right circumstances. No, grace is the free favour of God, unconditioned by anything to do with our own efforts.
It isn't genuine humility to deny the strength and significance of saving grace in our lives. However much against the cultural grain of our church context it goes, we are to delight in and magnify the Lord for his work in us. Once we were blind, now we can see. Once we were dead in trespasses and sins in which we used to walk - now we are raised with Christ and seated in heavenly places.
Affirming this is not self-serving; it places the honour firmly where it belongs: with the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us, in whom we are new creatures. The old has surely gone and the new is truly here.
Because his grace to us was not without effect.
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O how the grace of God
Amazes me!
It loosed me from my bonds
And set me free!
What made it happen so?
His own will, this much I know,
Set me, as now I show,
At liberty.
My God has chosen me,
Though one of nought,
To sit beside my King
In heaven’s court.
Hear what my Lord has done
O, the love that made him run
To meet his erring son!
This has God wrought.
Not for my righteousness,
For I have none,
But for his mercy’s sake,
Jesus, God’s Son,
Suffered on Calvary’s tree—
Crucified with thieves was he—
Great was his grace to me,
His wayward one.
And when I think of how,
At Calvary,
He bore sin’s penalty
Instead of me,
Amazed, I wonder why
He, the sinless One, should die
For one so vile as I;
My Saviour he!
Now all my heart’s desire
Is to abide
In him, my Saviour dear,
In him to hide.
My shield and buckler he,
Covering and protecting me;
From Satan’s darts I’ll be
Safe at his side.
Lord Jesus, hear my prayer,
Thy grace impart;
When evil thoughts arise
Through Satan’s art,
O, drive them all away
And do Thou, from day to day,
Keep me beneath Thy sway,
King of my heart.
Come now, the whole of me,
Eyes, ears, and voice.
Join me, creation all,
With joyful noise:
Praise him who broke the chain
Holding me in sin’s domain
And set me free again!
Sing and rejoice!
(Emmanuel T Sibomana)
