By Ron Price
You may have heard the story of the young eagle who was wounded and brought back to health by a local farmer. The farmer cared for the eagle and fed him chicken feed every day—right along with the rest of his chickens. Even after the eagle regained his strength, he never attempted to fly. He would sometimes look wistfully up towards an eagle soaring across the sky and think to himself how wonderful it must be to be able to fly like that.
Was he an eagle or was he a chicken? My answer is that by position he was an eagle, but by condition he was a chicken. So now let me ask you—are you a sinner or a saint?
When I ask this question in various churches I find people most reluctant to state they are saints. I think we have somehow come to believe that a saint is a person who is so old that he or she couldn’t sin even if they wanted to. We seem uncomfortable taking that moniker for ourselves, for reasons that far exceed the word limitations of this article.
My concern is that while our position in Christ is that of a saint (note how many New Testament letters are addressed to saints)—our condition is that we are sinners. And I dare say that is a far greater problem than semantics.
When we first hear the Good News of all that Christ did for us and we repent of our sins and ask Him to come into our hearts, we typically go on a journey to try to live for Him. Sounds good on the surface, but whose efforts are we relying on? If our own, we might as well stay in bed. If it’s His life-transforming efforts at work within us, then why do we deny what He is doing and still call ourselves sinners? Now I realize that this side of Heaven we will all fall short, but I prefer to focus on God’s viewpoint of who I am rather than my own or anyone else’s. He says that I am a saint. He says that the Robe of Righteousness covers me. He looks at me and sees the perfect Image of His Son Jesus Christ. How do you spell WOW?!
I don’t pretend to be a theologian or claim that I fully comprehend the import of that last paragraph. I don’t need to understand it all. I understand enough to say, “Count me in.”
Let me leave you with a statement by Ellen G. White: “The forgiveness of sins is not the sole result of the death of Jesus. He made the infinite sacrifice, not only that sin might be removed, but that human nature might be restored, rebeautified, reconstituted from its ruins, and made fit for the presence of God” [Testimonies for the Church, vol. 5, p. 537].
So the next time I, or anyone else asks you if you are a sinner or a saint, I hope you’ll be prompted to declare, “By the grace of God I am a saint!”
Ron Price is a member of the RMC executive committee from Farmington, NM.