Still Quarrying: Work Done!

When you are in a treatment programme you have to learn what it is to be passive, to be content to have things done to you.  Someone puts in a cannula, connects you to the infusion, you settle in until it empties itself, and then someone disconnects you.  Really, you have done nothing through the whole process except receive.  And it goes against the grain.  You would be far more comfortable making a more obvious contribution.  

Certainly, you follow all the supplementary advise to keep eating sensibly, exercise if you are up to it, and try as far as possible to follow your usual routine of work, rest and recreation.   But in the end that doesn’t seem to amount to very much.  The real work is what is done to you, what you receive.

That is always a major break-through on a spiritual level.  We find it so difficult to believe that, as Paul teaches, ‘God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’  (Romans 5: 8).   We do nothing to deserve God’s love and what he has done for us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  Nothing we can do raises our moral profile in the eye of God.  We can never have sufficient moral heft to barge through the door to the Kingdom.  The Gospel tells us that we are loved despite our brokenness and not because of our ‘achievements’ in our own or the world’s eyes.  

In the end, Good wants us to grasp that each of us is worth the death of His Son and to respond to this by making Him the focus and the aspiration of our lives.  

Sometimes the old ones are the best.  Writing in the eighteenth century Augustus Montague Toplady wrote a hymn that would be sung through the centuries with these words:

‘Nothing in my ands I bring

 Simply to thy cross I cling;

 Naked, come to thee for dress;

 Helpless, look to thee for grace;

 Foul, I too the fountain fly;

 Wash me Saviour or I die.’

It’s the work done that counts!