I often don’t know how to respond to lovely things people say about what I have written in my blog. Their messages are always humbling and fill me full to the brim with an emotion I can’t quite put words around, except to say I feel the Lord’s love in a deep way. Maybe it’s because I know how far I drifted away from God when I was in my twenties. Or maybe it’s because I know—as one of my pastors used to pray before each sermon—that I’m just one beggar showing another where the bread is. But, more and more, I’m coming to understand that it is because I’m a broken beggar who is loved and forgiven. Far beyond what I can fathom.
For God is love.
At this time of the year when I see the tiny wren preparing for winter or the coat of the deer becoming thick for additional warmth and turning dark brown for extra camouflage, God’s tender care for each of His creatures overflows within my heart. Matthew 10:29-30 (TPT), paints a loving picture of what that looks like.
“You can buy two sparrows for only a copper coin, yet not even one sparrow falls from its nest without the knowledge of your Father.”
His love for us goes even deeper than that.
“Aren’t you worth much more to God than many sparrows? So don’t worry. For your Father cares deeply about even the smallest detail of your life.”
From what we eat and drink to the clothes on our backs, the Lord provides for our every need. Even when we stumble, fall, or drift into a bramble of sin, He is there to untangle and stand us upright again.
Most of us never want to sin. If we’re honest with ourselves though, that’s where all of us can be found in one way or another. Not meaning to judge, we find ourselves in the thick of it when the thought, I would never do that, sticks in our minds. Not wanting to speak ill of someone, we realize we have inadvertently cloaked gossip in a request for prayer when we come face-to-face with our messed up motives. Like a slithering snake, sin within our hearts creeps up on us when we least expect it.
More often than not we try to keep it hidden. Satan would like nothing better. For if we cover up and don’t confess what is brewing within, we cannot be healed or set free from it. When that is the state of our being, the offshoot is that we cannot possibly point the way to Jesus. Our impure hearts won’t permit it.
The Good News is that if we come to Jesus, not only will He set us free from sinful entanglements, but He will also use the miracles He has brought about within our lives—our stories—to point others to Himself. It is the shards of our once broken, but now healed hearts, that best reflect who Jesus is.
Look what the Samaritan woman declared to all who would listen.
“Come and meet a man at the well who told me everything I’ve ever done! He could be the One we’ve been waiting for.” “…Many from the Samaritan village became believers in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony: “He told me everything I ever did!”
John 4:29,39 TPT
Like her, who was knee-deep in sin, we need to share who we once were. Not—as my mom used to say—to hang our dirty laundry for all to see—but as the beggar showing another where the heavenly bread is, to point to Jesus.
Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). I pray each one of us will become transparent, because we are coming to know the breadth, the length, the depth, and the height of God’s love and His forgiveness (Ephesians 3:18).
Kimberly