I feel the need to follow up from yesterday’s bloggage. Having survived the suggestion that God is not in control without being denounced, defriended or debagged (couldn’t think of a third ‘de-‘ word) I feel a little courageous. So I want to suggest something even more radical and controversial. I am warming up to it gradually to give you a chance to prepare yourself for the shock, and to psyche myself up to putting fingers to keyboard.

I suspect that it will be difficult for some of you to cope with and won’t mind if you click away now – I will even suggest a nice safe place for you to go on t’internet with kittens on it.

I will put off procrastinating and get down to it. Although… isn’t it interesting how ‘procrastination’ is a long word and ‘go’ is a short word – almost as if we delay things by saying ‘procrastination’ and get things moving rapidly by saying ‘go’! Imagine if ‘procrastination’ meant ‘go’ – how difficult would races be: “On your marks, get set, procrastination!” Do you go on the ‘p’ or the ‘n’?

Right, I can hear you squealing so here goes.

This is the radical thought.

The moment is upon us.

I am ready to tell you.

I think.

Yes, I am ready.

Here goes.

On your marks

Get Set

Procrastination!

Sorry.

The big news is…

God is mad

about you.

Please read those last two lines together. The split is there to get you worried and perhaps to provide something for people to misquote at the hearing when I am finally excommunicated as a heretic.

[Fanfare!]

But seriously. Here goes:

God thinks you are amazing. He doesn’t make mistakes and he made you. Before you were a twinkle in anyone’s eye he had you in mind. No matter how rubbish you feel about yourself or your life, God thinks you are amazing. He thinks you are so special that he threw away the blueprint when he had created you so that there will never be another ‘you’. Yes, identical twins may be genetically the same but they are individuals in many other ways. He thinks you are so incredible that he wants you to be with him for ever and he’s done all that’s necessary to make that possible.

Why is that so difficult for us to receive sometimes? Our self-esteem can take a bit of a battering and our feelings of self-worth can be lowered by illness, loss of employment, gossip, fatigue, and much more. But whatever you think about yourself, God thinks the best of you. He loves you unconditionally. He knows everything about you and he doesn’t think any the less of you for it.

Are you struggling to believe me? Is this too incredible for you? Read this from The Message version of the Bible (Ephesians 2;1-10):

It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.

Whose opinion of you matters most? God thinks you are amazing and worth saving at the greatest cost possible.

Be blessed, be a blessing