True About You

For how long will we be the holy, perfect, flawless, and beyond-accusation sons of God? For always! The Bible uses all kinds of marvelous words and phrases which describe us as we have already become in Christ, forever establishing how great His gift is to us. It is perhaps the most humbling point of faith to believe what He believes is true about you, and the wonder of it makes you addicted to the One holding the opinion. What a concept.

Yet most days scarcely any of us gets much of a thrill from the fact. Hang out with a few Christian types and drop the biblical truth that they actually are a select bunch of people, a collection of royal, God-birthed ministers, a spotless and holy group belonging to Him (see 1 Peter 2:9-12) and they’ll argue with you! I wonder why that might be. We, the bride of Christ, are certainly not dumb. We’ve been deceived.

Try this: At church next Sunday set up a table and hang out a sign, “Perfect Christian Survey.” Pull up a chair, whip out a notepad, and (if your church is big enough) ask a hundred people if they believe they have become perfect with God who loves them madly. Give me your best estimate of the actual percentage responding, “Why yes, I do!”

During more than twenty years of pastoring, I have posed that question in various ways to perhaps thousands of Christians, many of whom did not know I was a pastor (and thus a member of the get-the-right-answer-or-be-shamed Gestapo). My findings? Fewer than five percent.

Think Satan has been successful? I do too. But the lights are coming on and the curtain is drawing back, because the Spirit is not willing that we should live without the knowledge of how well-off we have become with God. He is happily revealing to us the majesty of God’s grace to us in Christ. Finding out all about it is in no way a trivial pursuit—it’s what He wants for you.

(Excerpted from my book, Better Off Than You Think—God’s Astounding Opinion of You; chapter 2, “The Pursuit of Trivial Nobility.”)