DAILY DEVOTIONAL – June 17, 2020
“Managing Our Mess“
Prayer: Lord Jesus, You have made us a new creation in Your blood shed for our sins. Help us to live life each day in thankfulness and gratitude for Your love by loving others. Amen.
Scripture: Isaiah 1:18
Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool.
Devotional – “Managing Our Mess”
It doesn’t happen as often as I would like, but I always love it when any of you listening sends me stories to use in these devotionals or asks for a particular topic to be addressed. So, if you would like to share a story with me that you think would make a good devotional, or if you would like to ask for a devotional on a particular topic or Scripture passage, please email me! ejay@stmarkomaha.org.
Yesterday a listener sent me a link to a story. It is a story that a real person shared online about a month ago or so. For the purposes of this story, we’ll call this person “Jane”.
Here is what Jane wrote online about a recent experience she had in the grocery store:
“I was at the grocery store this morning and heard a loud crash and something shattering. Being nosy, I walked towards the sound and saw some people whispering and looking back to the end of the next aisle. When I walked down that aisle, I saw an older lady had hit a shelf and many things had fallen to the ground and broke. She was kneeling on the floor embarrassed, and frantically trying to clean up the mess she made.
I felt so bad for her as everyone was just standing there staring at her. So I went and knelt beside her and told her not to worry and started helping her pick up the broken pieces. After about a minute, the store manager came and knelt beside us and said, “Leave it, we will clean this up.”
The lady, totally embarrassed said, “I need to pay for all this first.” The manager smiled, helped her to her feet and said, “No ma’am, we have insurance for this, you do not have to pay anything!”
For all of the horrible things that humanity does in its sinfulness, this is a wonderfully refreshing story, and in this story, you can’t help but see a picture of God’s love for us in Jesus.
Through our sin, we have created a monumental mess of the life and creation that God so graciously created us to enjoy with Him. Our sin separated us from God, and truthfully, God could have very well just decided to leave us to our own mess. He could have required that we pay for our own sins and clean up our own mess before He would ever come near to us again or forgive us for what we have done. Yes, God in His perfect holiness could have done that…but He didn’t.
Even while we were lost in the mess of our own sin, God came to us (like the manager came to that elderly lady) and He cleaned up our mess for us. We could never clean up the mess we have made. No laws passed, no military might, no scientific discovery and no humanitarian effort can erase sin or the death that has come to us all because of sin. None of us could ever afford to repay God for the offense our sin has brought against Him. God knows this, and God also loves us with an eternal and forgiving love, so He sent his Son Jesus to manage our mess, to be covered in our sins and punished on the cross in our place in order to satisfy the debt we owe to God. Through His resurrection from the dead Christ has paid for sin and died our death, and by grace through faith He then comes to us in baptism and washes us clean, restoring us to God.
Jane ended her story online by saying:
Collecting the pieces of your broken heart from all the blows life has thrown at you, remember, God will heal all your wounds. He wants to heal you! He wants to take care of your soul!
Indeed God has taken care of our soul by cleansing us in the blood of Christ. As the famous hymn goes:
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.
(Jesus Paid it All)
Thanks for joining me for another devotional today, and remember, God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
