“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” (Jeremiah 17:9, NIV)
Have you ever tried to play with a bent golf club? No matter how good your swing is, it just won’t hit a straight shot. If you don’t know it is bent, you may spend hours or days trying to fix your swing because you can’t hit a straight shot.
So you have two choices with a bent club. Either it goes into the trash bin, or the shaft has to be replaced. It was originally a well-designed club, but something tweaked it into an unusable and worthless object. To be made into a useful tool that will be able to hit a straight shot and be of value to its owner, it must be repaired.
Isn’t that our story? We were originally designed and created in the image of God. We were designed to be in relationship with him and to enjoy immortality and happiness in his presence. We were bent by sin. We have a deceitful heart and want our own way. We cannot know or be used by God until he redeems us and gives us a new heart. We will not find peace until we allow him to replace our bent heart with a new redeemed one.
But we are blind to our sin. Without Christ, we can’t recognize the evil that lies in our hearts—not just in the hearts of evil people but in all people. Universally, human beings are bent, sinful creatures who no longer reflect their Creator. We should be thrown in the trash. There are no straight shots in any of us, and no attempts to fix ourselves will be successful.
God, who is our Creator, sees it differently. He sees us as the straight club he originally created, but which is now flawed by sin and deceit. He knows we can’t cure ourselves, no matter how good we try to be. Our only hope is that somehow he can fix us and redeem us back into his original design for us. That is just what he has done. He is the cure for our bent and broken lives. Only he can change us from the inside out. He takes, with our permission, our bent and broken heart and replaces it with himself. He redeems us and makes us useful and whole once again.
What does it take to find God? We must seek him with all of our heart. We must recognize that we are bent and broken and incapable of changing ourselves. We must accept God’s great mercy and grace that reached down to us in love, on the cross, where he took our sin and brokenness. We cannot earn this redeeming love—we can only accept it as his great gift to us. He is truly good.
We can try to live without God’s redeeming power and love, but we will never hit a straight shot and we will live a life without the purpose and joy we were designed to have. We are bent but we can be redeemed if we choose to accept God’s plan for us.
—
Linda Ballard
October 15, 2015
Copyright 2015 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.