All this pain, I wonder if I'll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all.
All this earth, could all that is lost ever be found?
Could a garden come up from this ground at all?
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust.
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us.
All around, hope is spring up from this old ground
Out of chaos, life is being found in You.
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us.
You make me new, You are making me new.
I will admit, without shame, that I have probably listened to this song no less than 50 times, and about 15 within the last half hour, if that is possible. I really let the chorus get into me...I let the music move my emotions, and the lyrics to coincide with it.
Beautiful. It is a word that most females really love to hear, especially in regards to ones' self. And in anything, we cherish beautiful things. There is another song with that word in it. It is by the band NeedToBreathe and the lyrics say,
Hey now this is my desire
consume me like a fire
cause I just want something beautiful to touch me
I know that i'm in reach
cause I am down on my knees
waiting for something beautiful...
I just love... both of these songs and the imagery within both of their lyrics. ANYWAY/deviation.
I let the words and music move me. Today has been filled with mostly one thought: God's love. I don't know how many times recently I have heard something along the lines of "The love of God changes you. You know you've encountered the love of God because you wouldn't be the same." or more poignantly for me, "Radical devotion, the ROOT of devotion to God STARTS in the heart. The problem is not that we do not LOVE God enough, but that we do not UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH GOD LOVES US."
How much... God loves us. It is not something you can just ALWAYS point to in your "feelings bank". You know, "this is how I feel when I know that God loves me"... KNOWING that God loves us, and FEELING that God loves us are two different things. We know that we do not always FEEL things, spiritually speaking (we won't go into how wanting to 'feel' everything is often what deceives us and leads us into lies and sin). So we don't feel things all the time, but we can, objectively, KNOW something, all the time. You can objectively look at the scriptures and point of a love that is sacrificial, a love that disciplines us, a love that we really, can only know and experience in part, because it REALLY is a mystery.
Read this quote from C.J. Mahaney's Living the Cross Centered Life:
"When you tell non-Christians, "God loves you," they aren't surprised, they aren't perplexed, they aren't stunned. Regrettably, the same is true among evangelicals, who simply assume the gracious disposition of God-- and therefore presume upon it. And we'll continue to do this until we learn to see our condition more fully from God's perspective."
What is "our condition"? Well, to put it shortly, we sin. I don't really want to go into that topic right now. Our condition is imperfection. OUR CONDITION is that we make mistakes, people who make mistakes often do so at our expense. Our condition is that we suffer, that we hurt, that we are happy doing things that do not please God. Very often, we "do the very things [we] do not want to do." Our condition is that we think that God is a gracious God, so he can just say "you messed up, but since I love you, I'm gonna look over it."
Well, God's graciousness doesn't work like OURS often does. God is gracious, God is loving, God is also JUST. Were it not for his LOVE, his JUSTICE is terrifying. We do not see God's justice in our lives in the way that it was carried out in many of the OT scriptures. NO, God did NOT send an earthquake to Haiti to punish them for some sin that is greater than the ones we commit in our every day lives anyway. NO God did not send a hurricane to Louisiana to punish them for whatever sins someone said they committed that are worse than the lies we tell daily about our neighbors and twisted pornographic messages that abide in our hearts. You know, we're not even good enough to be a sacrifice and outlet of God's perfect justice? In order to carry out perfect justice, you need a PERFECT sacrifice. A sacrifice of something clean for something dirty. You know what God did? He begot himself. Jesus. John 3:16 says he sent his only "begotten" son. Now, you know that begotten doesn't mean CREATED. Read up on it here.
Jesus was a perfect sacrifice. He lived a life that was... perfect, therefore he was that perfect sacrifice. You know how I said God did not send his wrath through earthquakes, hurricanes, tidal waves ect? You know why I KNOW He did not? Because somewhere between 29 and 33A.D. Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God, received ALL of God's justice on the most cruel and popular forms of punishment by the Roman government, the cross. He was whipped, he was beaten, he was nailed to the wood, he was hoisted up, left to suffer, and if it wasn't enough, he was mocked and taunted the whole time. That is what God's wrath looks like. That is what it looks like for each one of us individually. God's requirement of justice was satisfied through Jesus on the cross.
That... does not look so beautiful. But that is what love looks like. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but to save it through him.
Now, if you don't want to believe that, or you don't want to accept that as what is true, that really is your choice. But for those of you who do, or want to... even, think of how you know of God's love, or maybe how you want to know, or feel God's love.
I feel God's love when I think of what I described earlier, and when I hear the words of a song like "Beautiful Things". As those lyrics are being sung, my heart, my mind wanders to the cross. If you listen to the song, you'll notice that the music REALLY does not lend itself to a violent, gruesome scene of death. It's ironic to the theme in that sense. BUT through Jesus' sacrifice, we are being made 'beautiful' in the sight of God.
I remember all of the times when I've felt low, insignificant, sinful, unbeautiful, broken in my body and my heart, irresponsible, overwhelmed, hopeless, chaotic... I remember when I have disobeyed the God who revealed his love to me one day and brought me from the valleys to the mountains of life. I'll humbly take the opportunity to humbly tell you that I have no problem acknowledging my 'valley' times (which are more than just 'periods in my life' but sometimes daily shortfalls and little sins!). I think of the wholeness and newness of life that makes beautiful things out of the dust.
If you go to my entry on grace, you'll realize that the aforementioned feelings of inadequacy are all relieved by grace, which after an HONEST ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTANCE that as hard as we try, we won't do everything 'perfectly' and 'have fallen short of the glory of God', offering us another 'way' of living life, a new, "beautiful things" kind of life, DIVINELY INFLUENCED by LOVE, which we know is synonymous with GOD, because God IS love (1 John 4:16).
The issue is not that we do not love God enough. It is that we do not understand how very much God loves us. Take time today, or whenever, but do not delay... to think about love. What does the word LOVE mean to you? What does it look like to you? To God? Find a book that details the crucifixion of Jesus, read the accounts in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (flip to the back of each book in the Bible and scan until you see the headings!). KNOW that God loves you, even if you do not always FEEL it. I could give you a million reasons and scriptural support that you shouldn't ever give up this seeking God and drawing near to God... If you want me to, I will, but in the words of Nike, just do it.
Lindsay.
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