Am I right?

It has been a fair while since I needed to be right.  Naturally I grew up needing to be right.  Most bright young things do.  Now I just cringe at the thought.  I don’t mean glorying in ignorance; I mean being defined by never being wrong. There are two problems with never being wrong. Firstly, you’re only kidding yourself and secondly, people who are always right may feel self-vindicated but actually appear pretty fragile and silly to most of the rest of us. Someone at church said to me the other day, “I just don’t know any more?!”  They were not talking about doubting God or their faith. They were talking about encountering a God who seemed to be reordering their priorities by revealing what really matters to Him.  It is a rude discovery to realise that you have been working away for a long time very diligently on the wrong thing! When people are radically converted to Jesus it is a salutary awakening to the fact that so much of life has been directed to wrong things.  The main wrong thing I directed my life towards was that it was all about me. What a joke!  While this has been dying for a long time now, vestiges remain.  Jesus says to his followers, “Without me you can do nothing” [John 15:5].  Does that really mean you can’t do much without him?  Or that you’d be well advised to get Jesus on your team?  Or that you need to be converted to live a productive life?  Don’t think so.  I think it means that things done independently of Jesus will prove ultimately absolutely fruitless – fruitless to the inner life and fruitless to the world we live in.  Being right is as irrelevant as thinking you can save yourself. As India and Samuel are baptised today, does God include them because they are right or deserving?  No, he includes them because he is gracious and has given himself in death for them – it is all about Jesus not us.  Apart from Him, like us, their real selves, real purpose, real identity will wither.  May that never be so.BlessingsMalcolm