Total Destruction

11/12/2006

“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”
Jeremiah 29:11 (NLT)

From the outside, it’s hard to tell what’s going on inside a home under reconstruction. There might be evidence out front, but other than that, unless we enter in, we can’t know the full story. We can’t know which rooms are being worked on, we can’t know why, and we can’t know what the before and after looks like…unless we enter in.

It’s the same with our hearts…it’s hard to see past a smile sometimes, to get past the words being said, and into the heart of a person if we’re not willing to open up the door and invite others in. If we did, what would be found? Would it be peace and joy, order and contentment? Or would it be brokenness and sorrow, confusion and calamity?

The heart of a home can be repaired with a lot of hard work and the help of others…the heart of a human being can be repaired with the help of our Lord if we will allow Him in to do what needs to be done. Will we open up our lives to the power He yields? If we are open to what God can do in and through us, we will be delighted at the results! God has a plan, a perfect plan, and He is working hard at putting our lives back together…not to ever be the same, but to be better, in ways that we might not see clearly for years to come, or maybe even until we see this world from Heaven’s vantage point.

There are times in our lives when we will just live with what is because we don’t really even know where to start to make the needed changes…it seems it’s all too much, too complicated, too hard, too stressful and it’s really not painful enough yet to want to make a change. We’ll just put up with that leak, that crack in the wall, that smelly situation…

But, God doesn’t want us to get stuck in the muck. God sees so far ahead, beyond what we can yet even envision. I’ve heard it said, “God loves us just the way we are, and He loves us too much to leave us that way.” He has great plans for us! He sees what we can become with some reconstruction… He knows that when a heart is broken beyond repair and we are given the choice to either walk away, or tear away the old and let Him replace it with new, we are at a place where He will begin to renovate our lives. That’s when His redemptive work can really start…

And in the midst of all of it, God can give us glimpses of what that process will look like and what the end result can be…it’s described there in His Word. It’s there, in the lives of so many that have gone ahead of us, if we will only open up His book and take a look.

In the reconstruction, we never go back to exactly what was…we’re changed people, from the inside out. God doesn’t bring total destruction into our lives, into our hearts, to leave us the same. He does it so that when His work is finished, we will be a new creation, having a heart that more closely resembles His—a much better version of a human being. We’ll be newly remodeled, so that what comes out of us will be so much sweeter.