Seeing it through
In the end, I suppose, when it comes to ethics, believers must summarize true and full life not as a life that is upright and pursues righteous principles but one that is lived out in the image of God (see Ephesians 5:1-3, for example). I’m speaking of course of those who have been confronted with Jesus Christ who is God’s full self-disclosure as a human. I know there are those who have not been given the gospel but by God’s grace live exemplary lives. Still, we can’t settle for less than the highest we know and the highest, a Christian would rightly say, is Jesus Christ.
And while a Christian can’t profess to be morally superior to the rest of his fellows he can do nothing less than insist that Jesus Christ is and was. The Christian’s faith in Christ is a glad confession that Jesus is Lord of all and it doesn’t matter ultimately that he, the Christian, is impressive in virtue just so long as he genuinely insists that Jesus is and that he seeks Christ's likeness. So that the Christian’s ethical life is the imitation of Christ and so it is “gospeling” as well as ethics.
In a world filled with sin, injustice, oppression, cruelty, immorality and greed it isn't hard to feel weary; to be the underdog and to see your loving purposes stymied. The recognition that for all our own personal growth in the moral realm we seem barely better than when we first began the struggle can be a burden hard to bear. To act in righteousness now and then is one thing but to remain always righteous is beyond us; because we are what we are. God doesn't expect sinlessness of us but he does call us to keep our commitment to and faith in Jesus Christ and see it through for that is what God is like. G. S Kennedy, WWI chaplain, reminded us of that when he had a rough-spoken soldier say of Christ in prayer at Gethsemane :
And the answer [that] came to
the prayers he prayed
Was his power to see it through;
To see it through to the bitter end,
And to die like a God at the last,
In a glory of light that were dawning bright
With the sorrow of death all past.
And the Christ who was hung on the cross is
God,
True God for me and you,
For the only God that a true man trusts
Is the God that sees it through.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.