Potholes and Scars

Saturday afternoon I was working in the garage on a woodworking project and my son, Cooper, came through to get a scooter. He grabbed a helmet and started to ride his scooter in the driveway while I worked. After all of about 2 minutes of riding, if that long, I heard him hit the ground with a loud thud. Now Cooper falling is not unusual. We joke with him that he falls down on flat ground with nothing around to trip him up. So him lying on the ground didn't alarm me too much. When he asked for some help I realized he was probably hurting. He had a large scrape on his knee that required a large amount of peroxide and a good sized bandage. While washing the wound I couldn't help but notice all the scars on his knee. Had he felt better I would have joked with him about his knee looking like a road full of potholes. He had gashes from jumping off a scooter at a friend's house. He had a scar where he fell on our back deck and required stitches. There were an assortment of other scars on his knee as well.

As I cleaned the wound and waited for back up to arrive, namely my wife, I thought about how his knee and the thought of a pothole damaged road looked so similar. Then I started thinking about how our spiritual life can look like a scarred knee or a road full of potholes. The mistakes we make in life, let's call them sins, they leave wounds on us spiritually. Like a fresh scrape on your knee, these sins hurt, causing pain and even at times tears. The healing process is hard. You have to clean the wound and that can sometimes be more painful than the actually injury. To clean the sin out of your life you have to come to the realization of what your sin is doing to you spiritually. Sin is damaging your relationship with God, if you have a relationship with Him, and it is also damaging your relationship with others. You must allow God to step in and pour the peroxide of grace on the wounds that sin is causing in your life. When you do He will forgive you and bring about spiritual healing in your life. But what about the scars those sins have left behind. Not that you haven't been forgiven, but the fact you can't forget about them? What good are those spiritual scars? Those scars, like any scars, are reminders. In this case, they remind you of the damage done by sin. They serve as a warning to us of what happens when we fall spiritually and sin injures us. They work to bring wisdom into our lives to keep us from making the same mistakes again. Sometimes we learn and we have no more scars like the one we received before. Sometimes we don't learn and that same sin, or maybe a different sin, trips us up and we fall once again.

But maybe you are like the road near our church that is severally in need of repair because it is full of potholes. Maybe you liken your spiritual life to a road that has never been repaired and is full of teeth-rattling potholes. Maybe you don't have a relationship with God, so repairing the damage to your spiritual life has never happened. Your sin separates you from God and He wants to forgive you of your sins, repair your pothole filled life and start a personal relationship with you. What it takes to get rid of the potholes is not to fill them in and pack the holes full. No, He wants to give you a completely new spiritual life. What that means is He wants to completely do away with the old road and lay down a new road that is pothole free and smooth as can be. He can do it. He wants to do it. All you have to do is ask for it. All you have to do is believe that His Son Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins, was raised from the dead 3 days later, ask God to forgive you because of Jesus' sacrificial death, and ask Jesus to be the one in charge of your life. It is that simple. Why wouldn't you want a new life in Christ that gets rid of all the spiritual potholes?

If you need God's grace to be poured on the wounds of your sins today, then take time right now to confess your sin and ask Him for forgiveness. He is faithful to forgive us when we do (1 John 1:9). If you are serious about having God pave you a new spiritual road, then check out this link or this link, or email me at pastornick@northcatawbabaptist.com. 

Whichever decision you make today, you won't be disappointed!


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