February 3, 2013 … Meaning from the Mess!

Daily Berry Patch Devotions in 2013 - Day 34

 Passage of the Day: Proverbs 14: 4 [NLT] …  
4 An empty stable stays clean, but no income comes from an empty stable.

My Journal for Today: Os Hillman in today’s devotional study has selected and explained a very interesting paradox from God’s truth. Proverbs 14: 4 highlights a most interesting pattern in the way God often does His business in life. Have you ever noticed how God so often get His greatest glory by doing His ministry or mission work in the presence of messiness? Hence my journal title for today, “Meaning from the Mess!”

And Hillman, in his devotional this morning, used a very modern word picture to illustrate this truth. … Oh, how we hate all the mess on our highways, especially around busy cities, when the highway engineers decide to construct some wider thruways or to reroute interstate highways around our crowded cities. For a period of time – usually much longer than we’d like – things are a mess. There is slowing and backups and a whole lot of messy traffic. But then, when the project is complete we see why the engineers did what they did. The roads are widened and the routing is SO MUCH better than it was before; and we end up saying, “Wow, this was really worth all the messiness!”

And think about it. Wasn’t that how God got His greatest glory, … when He brought His Son into the messiness of the manger? And look what resulted – from the meaning out of our keynote passage today – where the greatest glory of all came right out of that stinky, messy manger. And so often in our lives, we fight against messiness; don’t we? We want order and things to be clean; but it’s been my experience that God always brings about His most powerful and effective ministry in the midst of our messiest times and events.

Can you think back to some time in your life when God did His ministry in the midst of your mess? I sure can. God took the messiest of all times in my life, when I was broken to the core in the mess of my own self-created addictive sin; and He recreated me and cleaned me up to become the man whom He has used to shine His light and help scores of men walk from the darkness and messiness of their own sexual sin into the light of Spirit-led purity. And that, my friends, is the meaning of today’s proverbial truth.

It is God making a miracle of meaning out of our messiness. And please join me this morning in a resounding “HALLELUJAH!” 

My Prayer for Today … Yes, Lord, HALLELUJAH for making meaning out of the messiness of my life. … Amen