Month: August 2013

As White As Snow?

Isaiah 1:18 (NLT)

“Come now, let’s settle this,”
says the Lord.

Image

Powdered Sugar

“Though your sins are like scarlet,

 I will make them as white as snow.

Though they are red like crimson,
I will make them as white as wool.

Have you ever pondered “as white as snow”? When I think of this concept, I think of pure, fresh fallen snow…until it melts into dirty slush. Yeah, I know, not so beautiful anymore. I think about when daily poor choices turns my snow into slush, does God get irritated at me for messing up His pure, fresh snow with my crimson sin?

The other day I was making butter cookies and the last step before baking them is to roll the dough into powdered sugar. I took out a container and poured a lot out because once I start rolling that dough around in that pure white sugar then the dough is going to leave little chunkies in there that I’ll have to sift out. As I scooped several 1 tbsp size dough balls into the sugar and began to shake my container to evenly coat them, God spoke to me and said “see, as white as snow.” What I had never noticed before (I’ve made these cookies countless times) was that nothing stuck to the powdered sugar. The more I rolled cookie after cookie, the powdered sugar stayed white – fresh, clean, pure. And then I thought, “hmmm, you know, when I eat anything with powdered sugar it covers my fingers, mouth, clothes, everything in a fine dust of sugar.”

And God spoke to me – “Christy, you may be dropping sin into your life, and it needs to be sifted out, but when I said ‘white as snow’, I wanted you to know it meant always forgiven, always covered by MY love. On that day that you gave your life to Jesus and reconciled yourself to Me, nothing can change the color of MY GRACE or reduce it to slush.”

As far as the east is from the west, He has removed my sin. I don’t use this analogy as permission to do whatever I want without regard to consequences. It is a reminder of God’s love. Of the blood shed on the cross by Jesus to bring me salvation. That He has a plan for me and it is good, and delicious!

Marital Strife

2 Cor. 5:7 We live by faith, not by sight.

“Faith has its anchor in the unseen realm. It lives FROM the invisible TOWARD the visible. Faith actualizes what is realizes. The Scriptures contrast the life of faith with the limitations of natural sight. Faith provides eyes for the heart”

~When Heaven Invades Earth, Day 6 devotional.

The has been perplexing me for a couple of days. I’ve wondered to myself “how do I know if I am living by the seen or the unseen? When has my faith led me to a reality that my eyes did not see but my heart did?” Then last night Chris and I were told that some friends of ours are struggling in their marriage and that is how God revealed these answers to me. 17 years ago after an affair in my marriage, I wanted to walk away. It looked less heartbreaking and easier to dissolve the marriage and hope to one day start afresh with someone new. My thought being I would have more maturity and wisdom in the next relationship. I hadn’t seen any marriage that didn’t dissolve after an affair so the possibility of restoration in my eyes was less than slim to none. But then there was something inside, FAITH, that told me to hold on. If I was willing to plow through the seen and hold onto what I had never seen but had hoped for then my husband and I just might survive this train wreck. So we held tight, no, not to each other, but to the thought that one day we would hold each other again. This year God celebrates His work in our 20th Anniversary. For those struggling in marriage, from whatever hurt has been caused by one of you or both, settle in your hearts – individually and as partners – to keep looking for what cannot be seen with human eyes but only seen with the heart.