There’s hope

March 1, 2009

Discovering Facebook has been both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it has provided me the opportunity to reconnect with lots of long-lost friends and a curse because it has provided me the opportunity to see the foolishness and brokenness of my youth through older & a little wiser eyes (not that I have “arrived” by any means!).

As a general rule, I am good at replaying my mistakes & sins over and over again in my brain, beating myself up a little more with each replay, but Facebook has caused me to hone the skill.  It seems every time I turn around, I find another person from my past and I’m realizing that the regrets of things I did and said (and there are many) get resurrected right along with the friendship. Quite honestly, it’s been painful.  Oh how I wish I could go back and do things differently.

There are two main problems with my replaying of things.  First, it takes my eyes off God and puts them on myself; it’s a form of idolatry, plain and simple.  Second, it makes me get stuck in a futile cycle of wishing I could go back and change things, knowing that I can’t, wondering if and how I can make amends and all the while never moving passed the past & choosing to make a difference starting now.

But listening this morning to the first sermon in John Piper’s series on Romans, God provided a glimpse of His grace. Speaking about Romans 1:1 when Paul says he was “set apart for the gospel of God,” Piper expounds:

When did that happen – being set apart for the gospel of God? Galatians 1:15 says, “God . . . set me apart even from my mother’s womb.” This means that before Paul was bought as a slave, and before he was called on the Damascus road, and before he was born, God set him apart for the gospel of God. Which means that God did not look around for a person to fill the apostolic role; he prepared Paul from his mother’s womb to serve the gospel – which is an astonishing thing when you realize the pathway that led from the womb to the Damascus road, namely, Paul’s unbelief and persecution of the church.

Which means that in the very first verse of this great book we taste some of the magnitude of God’s inscrutable wisdom which Paul worships in 11:33-36 (“Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!”). God did not leave anything to chance in the founding of his church through the writing of his apostles: He set him apart before birth; he purchased him by the death of his Son; he called him effectively on the Damascus road.

Paul’s (approximate) “30-year detour” (as Piper describes) from the time he was born to the time he was converted was horrible in every sense of the word, filled even with calculated, brutal murder.  Still, God reigned and reigns and has ultimately been glorified.

So there is much hope for me.  I’ll say it again that I am so grateful God wastes. nothing.

Related posts:

1. We Hope It Helped
2. The Bedtime Prayer of a 2 1/2 Year Old
3. marriage

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