A few little thoughts from a bank card
My grandson, C, who is 11, has just opened his own banking account for which he will be fully responsible. He is very excited about this, very proud of his new bank card.
He had to wait to get the letter with his card and then a letter with his PIN code and then a letter with another code, but now he’s got everything and he’s really, really excited about it, but he needed help to get it set up. He needed help from his mum and dad, who’d already learned what to do. And so they were passing on to him the knowledge that they had already learned.
And that made me think about those spiritual things which we have learned, which we can then pass on to others, helping them to grow in their faith. Do we pass on to others the things that we’ve learned, so that they can be ‘fully fledged’ followers of Jesus?
C is an observant child, noticing things that I just don’t notice! We were looking at his bank card and he noticed a little hologram on it, and asked, “What’s this for? “
As we use the same bank, I said “I wonder if mine’s got a little hologram; I don’t know whether it has or not.” So I got my bank card out to compare and, sure enough, mine has the same hologram on it.
Again C asked what it is for, so his daddy said, “It’s for authenticity, to show which bank you belong to.”
As believers and followers of Jesus, we have his ‘hologram’, if you like, showing that we belong to him, we’re sealed with the Holy Spirit, but I wondered whether, like me with the actual hologram on the card, we sometimes forget that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit.
Are we aware of it?
Are others aware of it?
Does the way we live mark us out as authentic followers of Jesus?
To people looking at us, we might not look any different from everybody else around us but, when they look at us more closely, can they see that we’ve got that Holy Spirit hologram stamped on us?
To a casual observer, C’s bank card and my bank card look exactly the same. But each one has a different name written on it, our personal names.
His name on his, and mine on mine.
And that is what matters to the bank. I can’t make transactions for C, and he can’t make transactions for me.
We have to have that one-on-one with the bank.
In the same way, we need one-to-one time with the Lord, those times when he says to us, “I’ve called you by name; you are Mine.”
C’s card has Master C ** stamped on it, whilst mine has ‘Mrs’, so we talked about what the difference is, and how the title ‘Master’ indicates that, far from being the boss, which is what C laughingly suggested it might mean, it actually means that he’s not yet reached maturity. My title, on the other hand, ‘Mrs’, shows that I have reached the age of maturity to be married. They are quite different; I have reached maturity (and well beyond!)
So next time you get out your bank card to pay for something, take a moment to do a spiritual maturity check.
Do you act as a Jesus follower?
Does your life have the authenticity mark of the Holy Spirit?
Have you had your one-on-one time with the Lord?
And are you passing on what you’ve learned?
