When I was a little boy there was a children’s record request programme on B.B.C. Radio. One of the songs, regularly played towards the end of the programme because of its popularity, was called ‘The Ugly Duckling’ sung by Danny Kaye. It told the story of a rather self-conscious little ‘duckling’, mixing with the other birds and feeling very sorry for himself because of his ‘feathers all stubby and brown’. He was rather despised by his fellow birds, and felt something of a failure, especially when he cast a side-long glance at their comparative beauty. Then one day the ‘ugly duckling’ looked down, and saw something marvellous. He no longer had brown, ugly feathers, but was arrayed in the splendid white feathers of a swan! And off he went shouting, ‘I’m a swan, I’m a swan’. Although he had thought he was a duckling, he had never been a duckling. He had been a swan all the time. But the real difference came when he saw what he really was. The recognition of his true identity was the beginning of new joy!
Precisely the same is true of the teaching of this chapter [Romans 6]. The great mistake many of us make is to look only at our sin and failure, and then ask, a little despairingly, What can I do? But our need is not to do, it is first of all to understand what God has done; to see that what he has made us through his Son is a man or a woman who has died with Christ to sin’s dominion and has been raised with Christ to newness of life. We are those over whom sin no longer has any dominion. Like the ‘ugly duckling’ then, I may say: ‘I’m not under sin’s dominion! I am a new creature! I am not what I thought I was, nor what I once was! I’m not an “ugly duckling” Christian, I’m a child of God!’
Sinclair Ferguson
