Puzzles And Art Projects
Thursday December 5, 2013
Have mercy on me, O God, because of your unfailing love. Because of your great compassion, blot out the stain of my sins. Wash me clean from my guilt. Purify me from my sin. Psalm 51:1-2 NLT
Little children love to work puzzles. Adults like to do them too. In hospital waiting rooms, treatment centers, retirement centers, you can often find a table spread out with 500 or 1000 pieces of jig-saw puzzles that when put together form a beautiful picture. Sometimes they are such lovely pictures, which took a long time to put together, that individuals frame the completed puzzle and hang it on their walls to admire for time to come.
Restoring an old painting that has been damaged by time and circumstances is a bit like putting a jig-saw puzzle together. It’s like figuring out the jig-saw picture puzzle one piece at a time and doing what’s needed for the picture to be properly restored. On the old painting there is great build-ups of dirt, soot and wax (since in ancient times they used candles rather than the electric lights we now have.) These layers of sediment darken and distort the original picture the artist painted. God made you and me in His own image. God is lovely and good and so His plan for our lives was that we would reflect that goodness in our lives. As we all know, bad things happen. We don’t speak and act as we should all the time. Others speak badly and do wrong things that have an effect on our living. Just like an old painting, our lives can sometimes become dirty and scratched and need to be cleaned up. At other times our lives may feel more like a jigsaw puzzle, broken in so many pieces. We just find it so hard to put everything back together the way it was meant to be.
Today we have someone who knows us and knows how to restore us when things don’t go well. One of the most famous verses in the Bible tells us about this:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 (NIV)
But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. John 1:12 (NLT)
God can fix each one of us. Jesus died on the cross so we wouldn’t be lost in our brokenness. Jesus wants to give us new life today.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)
God does the restoring – this giving us new life -- by forgiving us, and healing us. What’s our part in the restoration process? 1) Admit that we have a problem, 2)Trust God to be the expert who knows what to do about the problem, and 3) give Him our lives so He can actually do the work that needs doing, in the way He knows it needs doing.
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