Your body feels tense, and your palms start to sweat. Your craving for ice cream reaches a new peak. Your hands start to shake from too many Red Bulls and a lack of sleep. Lecture notes from last term suddenly seem incomprehensible, and you develop an unhealthy fascination for daytime TV. There’s not a seat to be found at the library. The exam season has definitely arrived.
Some people seem to take exams in their stride. For the rest of us, they can be a nerve-wracking and horrible experience. A whole year’s worth of work condensed into three hours of frantic scribbling. How do we cope?
Perhaps you’ve always been a high achiever, and you’re suddenly faced with the prospect of failure. Your identity, your self-image, seems ready to crumble. Or perhaps you’ve barely scraped through, feeling out of place with all these clever people around you. You feel like a fraud about to be exposed.
Exams are about proving you have certain skills or know certain things, but we take things much further. We try to prove ourselves to our parents, to ourselves, to others – and to God. What if we can’t prove ourselves? What if the “expected” 2:1 isn’t going to happen? What if we have to retake an exam, or repeat the year?
With all these pressures and worries swimming around our heads, it can feel impossible to know where to begin. We procrastinate when we should be working, and feel guilty about not working when we should be resting. Things seem out of control, and we struggle just to keep our head above water. Everything else takes a back seat – exercise, healthy eating, spending time with God and his people.
What is the Christian response to all this? Here’s three truths to to encourage ourselves with:
You are a child of God. Christians are much loved children of a heavenly Father. The Father loves you even as he loves Jesus (John 17:23). You don’t have to be a high achiever. Your identity is not in your degree. Your place in the family is secure. You are a child of God.
Your Father is in control. Not only is God loving, but he is also powerful. Not only does he care for you in the midst of exams, but he is using them for your good. Things may seem chaotic, even hopeless – but God is using all of it to shape you to be more like Jesus (Romans 8:28-29). You don’t need to worry – your Father is in control.
You don’t have to earn his love. You don’t have to prove yourself. Pass or fail in these exams, the one verdict on you that ultimately matters has already been given (Romans 8:1). Your achievements never made God love you, and your failures won’t stop him either. His love for you is all of grace. You don’t have to earn his love.
Next time we’ll look at how we can apply these truths in the midst of the stress, as well as some practical tips for the exam period.
The new year comes with renewed attempts to get our act together, to pull our socks up, to do better. Our resolutions can be vague (“eat less chocolate”) or specific (“get up at 6.30am to pray”), expensive (“join a gym”) or money-saving (“spend less on clothes”). They can be realistic (“eat an apple each day”) or seemingly unachievable (“stop looking at porn”). They can all be good desires to grow in godliness, but they can also be dangerous attempts at self-justification – trying to save ourselves through our efforts.
By nature we try to gain acceptance from God, others and ourselves through performance. We ask ourselves whether we’ve achieved enough, worked hard enough, or improved enough. If we manage to keep our resolutions, we feel better about ourselves; if we fail, we feel guilty and despondent. Success makes us think that God loves us and is close to us; failure, that he’s angry and aloof.
New year’s resolutions can reinforce the idea that we can save ourselves. For those of us who are generally self-disciplined, we can become confident in our own ability to change, to become acceptable to God. For those of us who are weak-willed, our inevitable failure leads to hopelessness. Either way, we end up focused on ourselves.
Our problems lie deeper than mere behaviour. The eyes of our hearts constantly turn inwards, looking to ourselves for salvation and satisfaction rather than to Jesus. We may try to gain acceptance from God through performance, but we never will. Spiritually, we are dead and in need of resurrection. Resolving to do better by ourselves is like a corpse resolving to learn to tap-dance.
This is why God’s resolutions are such good news. He promises us that “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). He has raised us with Christ, giving us new, resurrection life in him (Eph 2:4-5), and has promised us an eternal inheritance, giving us his Spirit as a guarantee (Eph 1:13-14). He has resolved to bring us home, and he does not break his word.
How does this change how we think about new year’s resolutions?
First, we must accept that we cannot save ourselves from the death we deserve, but God has graciously done it all. Nothing we can do will change this certainty.
With this foundation, Paul says to “offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness” (Romans 6:13). We don’t do this to earn a relationship with God; we do this because we have a relationship with God that is unshakeable, and our new hearts long to serve their new master.
So this year, let us resolve to constantly look to Jesus, knowing all our salvation and joy comes from him; and consequently resolve to do our utmost to follow him daily, knowing that he has resolved never to leave or forsake us (Hebrews 13:5). His resolutions are never broken.
Who can comprehend the riches of the glory of this grace? Christ, that rich and pious Husband, takes as a wife a needy and impious harlot, redeeming her from all her evils and supplying her with all His good things. It is impossible now that her sins should destroy her, since they have been laid upon Christ and swallowed up in Him, and since she has in her Husband Christ a righteousness which she may claim as her own, and which she can set up with confidence against all her sins, against death and hell, saying, “If I have sinned, my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned; all mine is His, and all His is mine,” as it is written, “My beloved is mine, and I am His”.
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On this day in 1555, two men were executed in the centre of Oxford. Their crime: believing that our salvation rests on the finished work of Christ, not on anything we do ourselves. Their punishment: to be burnt at the stake.
Amongst their dying words, these ones of Latimer’s are the most famous:
Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as (I trust) shall never be put out.
Latimer was vindicated: to this day, their Protestant faith has survived in the UK, lasting through persecution, civil war, opposition from outside, and false teaching from within. The faith that gave them courage to face an excruciating death is still alive today.
And yet…
How often do we fall into believing those old, old lies: that our good works are what save us, not Christ?
When we sin, do we run to Jesus for forgiveness, or do we feel the need to earn it first? It’s so easy to think that we need to do something good to outweigh the bad before he’ll listen to us again. Easy, but deadly.
When we see someone else mess up, do we respond with grace, or do we feel good about ourselves because we didn’t fail? You know the kind of thoughts: “God must be more pleased with me; after all, I’m not as bad as that.”
No! The Protestant martyrs died defending the truth that nothing we do can make us acceptable to God. Whether we’ve had a fantastic day of walking in Christian freedom, or a shocking day feeling enslaved to sin, we would still be as far away from God as ever, if he had not come close to us. Jesus, King of the universe, stepped down, down even to death, in order to bring us up with him to his Father. He takes our sin, and gives us his perfect obedience. In him, we are as loved by the Father as he has been since eternity past.
How can we still think a quiet time is going to earn us extra credit? That it’ll make up for our daily rejection of Jesus? That we can somehow add to the perfect obedience of Christ?
The old, old lies are still around, too. But be of good comfort; God’s grace is the same as it ever was. Are you burdened with guilt? Run to Jesus, and he will forgive you. Are you proud of your holiness? Look to Jesus, and let him humble you. Do you feel distant from God? Come to Jesus, and let him bring you near.
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)
Keep the candle burning.