FIFTY NOT OUT!
I've hit a half century and I'm still batting! The great thing about being fifty years old is knowing that I'm half way through my race and I'm beginning to get an idea of what life is about! I believe that a guy should know what he is going to do with his life by the time he is fifty! Besides having a bit of maturity in life's university I'm also (reasonably) still fit and healthy; and that is a double blessing! Of course I've made some dreadful mistakes in life and hurt people in the process - I often wish I could make amends but the passage of time makes that inappropriate if not impossible; afterall who wants a bad penny turning up after a decade or two only to salve their own conscience - for whose benefit is that really?

Others may have hurt me or circumstances thwarted my ambitions - but I wouldn't exchange those reverses. These events are the very things which help shape us and make us who we are. And actually none of them are unique to us. The chief thing is knowing how God has had a hand on my life particularly at those times I felt most bereft. Again there is nothing uncommon in this. I want to emphasise how faithful the "enscripturated Word" has proved over the years. I see my story written there in all its ghastly detail, it holds a mirror up to my face and has faithfully shown me who I am; the face I show no one else! That's how I know it speaks the truth.

The usual format of a Christian "testimony" like this is to spell out what worldly depths I had sunk to - but that isn't the case with me. I was raised in a highly moral family (and that isn't a bad thing) so when I subsequently became a Christian my problem was not the usual suspects of sex, drugs or money but something altogether more insidious; the problem of pharisaiism! (Or moral rule keeping). Yes, the Gospel is not about moralism!. The trouble with this particular sin is that it is one which can pass unnoticed within evangelicalism. And if people thought highly of me in those early years it was because they didn't perceive this trait in me, but then nor did I. They had much too high an opinion of me - as I did! I hasten to add that the Gospel does not therefore give us licence to sin - Jesus said that 'our righteouness must exceed that of the Pharisees' in Matthew 5 v20; what it does mean is that righteouness is not a substitute for Grace. And if I've learnt anything in the last fifty years is that it's all about Grace!