"They loved their Lord so dear, so dear," wrote Lesbia Scott in a popular children's hymn, "and God's love made them strong." This 1929 hymn, titled "I Sing a Song of the Saints of God," makes it clear that saints are those who have a close, personal relationship with our ever-loving Lord. Scott includes doctors and queens and shepherdesses and soldiers and priests in her charming list of the saints of this world - as well as one who "was slain by a fierce wild beast" - and she insists that "there's not any reason, no, not the least, why I shouldn't be one, too."
There's no reason she shouldn't be one. No, not the least. And there's no reason you shouldn't be a saint, either.
One of the elders in Revelation asks John, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" John shrugs his shoulders, and so the elder answers his own question. They are not necessarily the best and the brightest, the most sophisticated or the most successful, but instead they are the ones "who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."
Out of the great ordeal they have come, out of a life of trials and temptations, distractions and interruptions. Although being pushed, pulled and sometimes pulverized by earthly events, they have done their best to remain close to God through prayer, praise, Scripture study and acts of simple service. They have been bloodied by life, but then washed clean by their faith in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God.
They - like you - are the saints of God.
