We are more than our results

“Your grades don’t define your ability; and what people say about you doesn’t define who you are.” So concludes Nicky Gumbel, of Alpha fame.

This is especially apt for my family. Wonderfully, after two months of anxious waiting, all four of our granddaughters sitting A-levels this year made the university of their choice. So congratulations to (in chronological order) Rose, Kate, Ana and Joy!

I well recall my own anxious wait, some 59 years ago. At the time it seemed as though my whole life was in the balance — and looking back, it was! I have no doubt that had I dropped just one grade my life would have been very different. Very different, undoubtedly — but any better? Who knows?

Some five years later I found myself in another university interview. Jacqui and I were engaged, and I was pursuing a career in social work. So I applied for a postgraduate degree at Bangor University.

It was a brilliant interview. The aim was simple: is this course right for me? There was certainly no financial pressure on the university to fill the course. And as the interview progressed, it became increasingly clear that social work as a profession was not for me.

So I failed in my application — for which I thank God, even more so from the perspective of 54 years.

Hilariously (and this is an entire blog in itself), the following year I found myself in yet another interview for a university place, at Durham this time. Except — and you won’t believe this — I didn’t realise I was being interviewed at the time. I was offered a place and, to my surprise, after some persuasion I took it.

In other words, when you submit your life to the Good Shepherd, you never quite know where he will lead you. But what you do know is that, even when you walk through the valley of deepest darkness, the LORD is with you. For, as Andrew Murray affirmed: “God takes full responsibility for the life yielded to him.”

So all this gives some context to those students who received their A-level results this week, especially those who are now going through clearing. Above all, it reinforces the conviction that we are more than our results.

We live in a world which constantly measures us — grades, qualifications, salary, achievements, even fitness statistics — but the Christian gospel begins with grace rather than achievement. A result may determine where someone studies in September; it does not determine their worth.

Our worth is revealed, above all, at the cross of Jesus — which has to go down as the Greatest Failure in History.

There is a seemingly throwaway line in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans. He is urging members of the church there to make allowances for their fellow Christians.

“If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love,” he writes. “Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died.” (Romans 14:15)

There it is. That is our value. Each one of us is someone for whom Christ died. Our worth is measured by the lifeblood of the Son of God — a value beyond measure, and certainly beyond the reach of a set of examination grades.

And so, for Christians, what does it mean to succeed?

The apostle Paul was in no doubt. In a remarkable passage in his letter to the Philippians, he reflects on his former life — the life he lived before being grabbed by the love of Christ just outside Damascus. By any reckoning he had made it, even becoming a student of one of the leading teachers of his era. He had tasted Success with a capital S.

“The very credentials these people are waving around as something special,” he writes in The Message translation: “I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash — along with everything else I used to take credit for.”

And why?

“Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life.”

Then, using vivid language which some translations rather shy away from, he concludes:

“Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant — dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him.” (Philippians 3:7–9)

As disciples of Christ, therefore, we refuse to allow the world to set our goals or define who we are. We treat success and failure, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, as the two impostors. We walk to a different drum.

So congratulations to those celebrating this week. And to those disappointed, uncertain, or wondering what happens next: a closed door is not necessarily a wrong turning, and an unexpected opening may lead somewhere you could never have planned. I know that from experience.

Our results matter, of course, but they are never the final verdict on our lives. Success is something to receive thankfully, not something on which to build our identity; failure may hurt deeply, but it need never define us.

For the Christian, the great question is not simply, “How well did I do?” but “Whose am I?”

And Christ’s answer is wonderfully clear: you are mine.