Tag: forgiveness

  • Sea Glass

    Beauty from Brokenness

    During a recent trip to Vancouver Island, I collected a few pieces of sea glass (also called beach glass).  Most of the pieces I collected were small clear or brown bits, but I did pick up a few blue and green fragments.

    Sea glass starts its life as broken bits of bottles and other discarded glass. It’s glass that, for whatever reason, is no longer useful and thrown away. Over time, water and erosion polish it into something refined and beautiful.

    People collect sea glass to make crafts and jewelry, or simply because of its color. It can come in any color of the rainbow, depending on what color glass it started as.

    It fascinated me because something broken and discarded can end up so beautiful. It reminds me of Christians.

    Before we become believers, we are anything but beautiful. We were created in God’s image but have been marred by sin and the knocks of life. We often feel discarded and purposeless.

    God takes the broken bits of our lives and, out of love, gives us the gift of faith to become believers. We are born again and adopted into God’s family. We still have polishing and repair work to do in this life, but He works on us, conforming us to the image of Christ.

    He doesn’t do that because we deserve it. We could never get our acts together to warrant salvation. He does it out of love, purchasing us with His own shed blood. When a sinner is saved, it truly is a miracle.

    Throughout the Scriptures we see declarations that God saves the discarded and broken

    The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; Isaiah 61:1-2 ESV

    The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:13 ESV

    Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11:28 ESV

    The circumstances of your life may have left you feeling broken and discarded. Others might have rejected you, but God loves you beyond measure. He will make something beautiful from you and the mess of life.

    Trust in Him and rejoice.

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

    SUMMARY

    I found beauty in broken sea glass on a beach on Vancouver Island. It reminded me that God takes the broken and discarded and makes them new through faith.

    TAKEAWAY

    Sea glass starts out as broken, discarded trash before years of water and erosion make it beautiful.

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  • The Gospel – the best news you will ever hear

    You know the silence that falls right before you open an envelope, or pick up the phone, when you have already braced for the worst. Most of the time the news matches the dread. But every now and then it does not. Every now and then you brace yourself and find out the test was clear, or the debt was settled, or the answer was yes, and for a second you just stand there rereading it, because good news that size is hard to trust on the first pass.

    That mix of disbelief and relief is about the closest thing I know, in ordinary life, to what the Bible calls the gospel.

    The word itself simply means good news. But you cannot understand why it is good until you understand the news that came before it, and that part is not pleasant. Scripture does not soften it. All of us, every last one, have fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Not just the people we point to on the news. Us. Our sin is not a smudge to wipe off. It is a debt we cannot pay, and the wages of that debt are death (Romans 6:23).

    If the story stopped there, it would just be bad news, true and unbearable. But it does not stop there.

    Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. He was buried, and He was raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). That is the gospel in its smallest form, four facts that changed everything. And Paul will not let us read past the cost of it without feeling it. God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). Not after we cleaned ourselves up. While we were still enemies. He paid a debt He did not owe, for people who could never repay Him.

    Here is where the gospel parts ways with every other religion and every self-improvement plan you have ever tried. It is by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). You do not earn your way into this. You do not balance the scales with enough good deeds to outweigh the bad. The debt was already paid. The only question left is whether you will receive the gift.

    As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name (John 1:12). That word receive is doing a lot of work. It is not a transaction you negotiate. It is a gift you open. Faith is simply reaching out your hand and taking what Christ already purchased at the cross.

    And what happens next is not a slight improvement. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things passed away, behold, new things have come (2 Corinthians 5:17). You are not patched up. You are remade. Rescued from the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom you have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Colossians 1:13-14). That is not a metaphor for self-help. That is a change of citizenship, paid for in blood, sealed by an empty tomb.

    Some people can tell you the exact day they stopped bracing for bad news and finally believed the good news was real. I hope you have a day like that to point back to as well, the day you stopped trying to pay a debt you could never settle and simply received what Christ already finished.

    If you have never reached out your hand for that gift, today is a good day to start. Tell Him you know the bad news is true of you, and ask Him to make the good news true of you too. He has already done the hard part.

    If you have already received it, do not let the wonder of it go stale. Read those four facts from 1 Corinthians 15 again slowly. Let them surprise you the way they did the first day.

    Hallelu Yah (Praise God)

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

    More about the good news of the gospel.