THOUGHTS ON THE LORD’S DAY
“Where there are no oxen, the stall is clean, but from the strength of an ox comes an abundant harvest.”
Proverbs 14:4
Years ago, a very close friend and I built homes to support our young families while going through Bible College. The job site was always littered with lumber, all sorts of trash, and generally a mess.
The house looked ugly, all its insides exposed as it was being nailed together. Yet, this process was necessary to get it finished and ready for its new owner. When completed, the home was beautiful. Everything was clean and perfect in order for the new homeowner to move in.
Our walk with God through this life is much the same process. We often must go through messy periods in which it seems that everything is out of place and nothing seems to make sense.
It is during these times that God is building a better home for His own habitation. He might remove some structural timbers in our lives and replace them with new ones. He might even add on another room, or put on a new roof. Unless this process takes place, we will never be the home in which He feels comfortable living.
His goal is to make us more like Him. Achieving this requires a period of removing all that does reflect Him and adding things that will make us more effective as Kingdom ambassadors. Most of the time it’s a very painful process, one for which we are ill prepared and do everything we can to avoid.
It would be impossible to keep oxen in a barn without having to clean up the mess from time to time. It just comes with the territory, but the result of the oxen is an abundant harvest. Same with producing a harvest with our lives.
God may be allowing a mess in your life today in order to ensure a fruitful harvest in His dwelling place, your life, is completed. The building site may look cluttered and out-of-order today, but God is building something beautiful.
“Something beautiful, something good. All my confusion He understood. All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife. But he made something beautiful of my life.”
May these words from a song written by Gloria Gaither remind us all that God’s remodeling process is critical to a beautiful life well lived!