Home » Programs » A World of Difference » Your Rights

Your Rights

Civil rights, human rights, and personal rights are frequent topics of discussion in all kinds of contexts. Moments ago, I typed the word “rights” into my favourite search engine and it offered to connect me with almost two billion web pages. I didn’t take time to check them all.

Codes, manifestos, regulations, policies and laws all attempt to clarify rights in one way or another, at one level or another. Sometimes, rights are claimed by people for themselves. It is only the force of their own personality or the social weight of their support group which provides hope of their getting what they want. Sometimes, rights are granted by government with the full weight of that jurisdiction’s legal machinery protecting them.

In society, rights change. In my part of the world, new laws encroaching on personal rights crop up with some regularity. Tobacco users are no longer allowed to smoke even within a specified distance from the doors of a public building, let alone inside. Drivers have to pack up their electronic tools and toys while they are behind the wheel. Parents and guardians had better be aware of the often changing legal rights of their children.

Rights are sometimes just assumed, but they can be taken away if we don’t stand up for them. However, some rights are irrevokable. When God gives you a right, no one can take it from you. John talks about a right that God offers us in the first chapter of his gospel. He wrote about how Jesus “came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. (John 1:11-12 ESV)

Some things God offers us are conferred indiscriminately upon everyone. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus mentioned that the sun rises on the evil as well as on the good and that the rain falls in equal measure on the just and the unjust. We all share the same physical environment, enjoying its blessings and suffering the consequences of our misuse and abuse of it. However, the right we just read about - the right to become children of God - is not like this.

It is conditional. Not everyone received Jesus when He was here during the time of His incarnation. Not everyone receives Him now. But to those who do receive Him - trusting God through Him - He gives this astonishing right of being children of God.

When you respond to the invitation of Jesus to believe in Him, He gives you the right to become a child of God. That is something that doesn’t need human laws to protect it. Indeed, human laws may well attempt to restrict your right to talk about it or otherwise express it, but they can’t take it away.

When it comes to your rights, there’s a world of difference between those that you might claim for yourself based on your cultural context and those given to you by God by virtue of your relationship with Him through the Lord Jesus Christ.

Ron Hughes
© October 2008