KEY POINTS:
When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride
If I wake up tomorrow morning, and have come to enough to recall what day it is - Good Friday - those words will begin to run through my head, with the tune to which they were sung in the Methodist hymn book.
They have been with me for most of my life, and even today I cannot sing them, or hear them sung, without shedding tears.
I remember them most of all as being sung when, in a classroom of a school in my birth town of Gore, in Southland, which had been taken over for a Bible class Easter camp, I first gave my life to Jesus Christ.
It was 1953 and I was a 13-year-old schoolboy, a regular church, Sunday school and Bible class-goer from the age of 5. So I suppose it was inevitable that I should accept the invitation to publicly receive Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord.
It was no doubt the words of Isaac Watts' magnificent hymn that triggered it ...
Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood ...
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
... and while I readily admit I had little idea of what I was getting myself into, as things transpired as I grew into teenage years and manhood it was the most important decision I ever made in my life.
It wasn't too many years after that, that I discovered that booze could do for me in a few minutes what the Church hadn't been able to do in years - make me feel good about myself and the world.
So I swapped the Spirit of God for the spirit in the bottle and stumbled down the treacherous path into alcoholism and all that goes with it.
Until, at the age of 35 - a dead man walking, staring into a grave I had dug for myself - I was given a flash of sanity and cried out from the depths of despair, terror and humiliation to the God I learned about in Sunday school. He answered.
Easter is always a special time for me. It reminds me afresh of the incomprehensible sacrifice made by Jesus on the Cross, of his descent into hell, and of his resurrection on the third day.
It reminds me that the Son of Man died a brutal and agonising death in propitiation for the sins of all mankind so God could enter into a new and intimate relationship with his beloved creation.
It reminds me that having given Satan his marching orders, Christ rose again from the dead, delivered the Holy Spirit to us, and lives among us today as Saviour, Lord and King.
But most of all it reminds me of my own near-death, my own descent into hell on Earth, and my own resurrection - for that is what happened.
In spite of 20 years of wilful, shameful, immoral living, God heard my inarticulate prayer on that September Saturday in 1975 and began in me a miraculous transformation that has given me a second chance at life.
It was only years later that I began to understand just what he had done as I lay shivering in a Salvation Army drunk tank - taken away my obsession with alcohol, and left me free to accept (or not) recovery from the deep-seated disease of alcoholism with which I was sorely afflicted.
He must have, because here is a man who never drew a sober breath for 20 years and who hasn't tasted alcohol for more than 31 years.
God has given me the will and the strength to persevere with rebuilding a life shattered by sin, and today I understand that he took me at my 13-year-old word and never reneged on the deal.
"I am the resurrection, and the life," said Jesus. "He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die."
I believe that with all my heart, and this Easter weekend my heart will joyfully sing the refrain of another old favourite hymn ...
So I'll cherish the old rugged cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down;
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it some day for a crown.
