Have you ever stopped to consider how many documents chronicle our lives? Starting with a birth certificate that details our entry into this world, all the way through a certificate of death that marks our passing, each milestone is recorded. A baptismal or christening certificate, report cards from elementary, junior high, and high school — perhaps naturalization documents, college or graduate school diplomas and degrees, awards, and certificates that applaud our performance, criminal records when we go astray; the folder gets larger as we age.
Enlistment and discharge papers, job offers, performance reviews, pink slips or promotion announcements and tax returns, mortgages, and automobile titles may detail our work years. Marriage certificates, birth announcements, wills, and trusts, and sometimes, regrettably, divorce papers catalog family relationships.
Service to our church is recorded in letters of membership, donation receipts, ordination certificates, and occasional entries in church bulletins. In some families, significant life events are recorded in the family Bible. Thanks to services such as Ancestry.com and 23andme.com, records of our forebearers may even be available for perusal. If anyone wants to know about you, there is plenty of information they can find in public records.
But do all those records reveal who you are? Taken as a whole, what type of resume would they offer if you had to apply for entrance into heaven? They may show successes and failures as measured by human standards, but what record will God look at when he prepares your final report card?
Psalm 14:2 tells us, The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. (NIV)
Try as I might, I am unable to identify any single, or any collection of records that would identify someone who is understanding, who is a seeker of God. Even someone with what appears to be a rock-solid resume as a Christian might have a few things in the record they would prefer to omit. I know of more than a few failures I’d like to omit.
Fortunately, the Lord doesn’t ask us to come to him with a perfect resume. If you have accepted Christ into your heart, what you were is irrelevant; what you are is what matters.
You Are Saved. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. Ephesians 2:8-9
You are a new Creation. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! So much for the resume. 2 Corinthians 5:17
You are a child of God. See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 1 John 3:1
You are God’s special possession. But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 1 Peter 2:9
You are more than a conqueror. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. Romans 8:37
You are Jesus’s Friend. “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” John 15:15
You are a miracle worker. “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”
John 14:12
You are a citizen of heaven. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, Philippians 3:20
You need not worry about your resume as a Christian. Your name is already indelibly etched in the only record that matters: the Lamb’s book of life.
The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels. Revelation 3:5
Blessings,
Don & Bonnie Sennott
Authors of the book: Your Heart is an Open book: Finding Answers in God’s Word
Your Heart is An Open Book Paperback Hardcover Kindle on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2E489kR
Your Heart is An Open Book Hardcover Paperback Nook on Barnes & Nobel:https://bit.ly/30Zktff
Image from Flickr: Old document with nice stamp.
Because He Loves Us Press 