Lately I have been thinking about how very naturally a self-centred person I am.
I wake up, I can even do my quiet time with God. But that does not thereby automatically make me a God-and-other-centred. I am rather defensive, judgemental, and all too readily to think that others should revolve around my plans, even God. The current petrol crisis has only served to confirm that. I am quite prepared for others (all the way around the world) to suffer that my convenient life continue. I see this in others and recoil at such sin, but when it is in me I all too readily excuse myself, because “it’s me”!
Surely, I am worthy of wrath and curse.
This makes God’s gracious inclusion of me all the more astounding. In my mind it also confirms his gracious election.
If he had never chosen to be gracious to me, I know I would never have chosen him.
He saw my extreme self-centredness, but instead of passing me by, he chose to pour out his life for me.
In return for my self-consumed and eventually self-destructive attitude, he didn’t leave me to lie in the bed I made, but chose to (gradually) open my eyes to it.
In return for my self-inflicted misery, he chose to lead me to repentance in order to know his sweet salvation.
In return for my poor and miserly regard for him he chose to crowns me with the knowledge of his love and glory.
Year by year, he brings me to become ever more aware that his grace to me is grace, completely undeserved; further, merely because he sovereignly chose to.
This makes me sad over myself that I still fall so far short of his glory. I should be a much more grateful recipient of grace than I am!
But it also helps me see the importance of prayer that I might become the more grateful recipient I ought to be. The truth is that there is still much deadness that continues to reside in me (that is, indwelling sin), that I need the same power that raised Jesus from the dead to powerfully work in me, to transform me day by day to walk worthily of the Lord. And praise God for sending his son, who died for our sin, rose to new life and ascended into heaven, that he might be able to send the Holy Spirit to be able to make this a reality!
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