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Christians have a special status because of what is given to us. We are children of God and have received “the kindness and love of God our Saviour” (Tit. 3:4). God plucked us up from the disgusting dung heap of sin and put us in a spiritual clean room, as it were, where His holiness can tolerate us. He imputes or assigns to us (justifies) the label that says we are clean or righteous because of the blood of Christ (salvation). He makes us, who are less than nothing, to become more than something — co-heirs with his Son, Jesus Christ (sanctification).
It is hard to wrap our head around just how much of an inheritance God has given us through our Lord Jesus. A simple, though vastly inadequate parallel, would be self-made billionaire Warren Buffet. He is worth at least US$60 billion, has given billions to charity, and reportedly said that he would give more billions to charity. These charities did not work for his money but they will benefit from it. Similarly, it is not the “righteous things” which we have done, but God’s mercy that saved us (vs. 5). We have “been justified by His grace” (vs. 7), justified by His mercy (vs. 5) and most of all justified by His love (vs. 4).
Pause. Think. Wonder. This God is the God who measures out the heavens as a curtain. He sits on the circle of the earth and picks up islands as if they were nothing (Isa. 40:22). In July 1969, it took the American space shuttle Apollo 11 four days to land on the moon. It takes us easily a day to fly half the way around the world. And we scurry around our daily lives like grasshoppers.
Yet God has chosen to save us and has given us the richest stock there is – eternal life (vs. 7). How do we treasure it? Human nature is such that when we know a rich benefactor, we are polite towards him. Yet we are often rude to God. We ignore Him unless we want something from Him; then we run to Him like a spiritual ATM. Like the Cretans, we need to go from rags to riches in our salvation-sanctification story. Go from foolishness, malice and hate (vs. 3) to being peaceable, gentle and ready to do whatever is good (vs. 1-2 and 8). At the very least, remember God in Bible reading and prayers in our daily living.
