An advertisement on the side of a plumber's van in South Africa read: There is no place too deep, too dark or too dirty for us to handle.
I don’t know about you, but that would be one of the most challenging jobs to have. Most of us don’t want depth, dark or dirt at all, let alone to the extent to which this plumber was willing to go. You talk about Messy!
This past Sunday, we finished the “Messy Grace” sermon series. Again, not that God’s grace is messy; instead, God’s perfect grace intersects with messy lives to leave us forever changed.
The Apostle Paul attested to the work of Grace that powerfully changed his messy life in 1 Corinthians 15:10 (ESV) when he said, “by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.”
God had a vehicle (not a van of course) and by it He entered into our messy life and brought the cleansing power to change us forever. That vehicle, is called grace. The driver, Jesus. On the side of grace, you could imagine it saying, “There is no place too deep, too dark or too dirty for us to handle.”
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God…” (Ephesians 2:8, NASB)
As we have seen throughout this series, we have been saved not just for ourselves but we have also been saved for others. As the Apostle put it in 2 Corinthians 5:17-20 (NIV): “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”
As Paul puts it, we are to be Christ’s representatives for the world to be reconciled to God. In other words, we are to invite anyone and everyone into the grace that changed us. We are to have a sign over our life that says, “There is no life too deep, too dark or too dirty (messy) for Jesus to handle”.
Let’s encourage that in each other. Let’s support each other in that. If you see someone in our church family struggling with “Messy Grace” for someone in their life, pray for them and as the Lord leads, offer your encouragement, love and support. Let’s be a church that is willing to get “Messy”!