Jesus runs to the mess
Life is messy, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Our lives don’t often end up neatly packaged and orderly. We have an idea of what a perfect day looks like and strive toward it, but we never reach it because a perfect day is not reality.
Even if, theoretically, we could have a day go perfectly in our perception, that wouldn’t satisfy us because we would wake up the next day and begin the struggle for a clean, neat, orderly, perfect day again.
Part of living in contentment is understanding that our lives are messy, busy, and sometimes chaotic. The reason our lives are messy is that we are messy and sometimes hurting or broken. Our hearts and desires are often messy and at times pull us away from the peace that Jesus desires for us and the freedom in which He wants us to walk.
Jesus Offers Freedom
Jesus wants us to live in freedom. He wants us to trust Him with the mess of our broken past, the mess we have made by our own sin, the mess that we deal with from how we have been sinned against, and the mess that comes from living in a broken world.
Over and over in the Bible, we see Jesus moving toward people's mess and miraculously coming through for them. Whether it was a blind man beside the road, a woman caught in adultery, or a lame man lying beside a pool, Jesus stepped into their situation and showed them that His love was more powerful than their mess.
God didn’t love us from a distance. God stepped into our messy world to save us and set us free.
Jesus is not afraid of our mess. He wants to be in it with us and help us in the midst of whatever we are facing. The truth of the Gospel is that God stepped into our messy world to save us and set us free. God didn’t try to just love us from a distance. He didn’t encourage us to clean ourselves up or command us to try harder and live a better life. By sending Jesus, God ran into the mess for us. Jesus did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves.
How We Can Love Like Jesus
Love is messy. As believers, Jesus wants us to follow His example and run toward others' mess. We live in a world where people naturally run away from other people's junk. People are dealing with pain, hurt, and difficulty all around us. Life gets overwhelming and struggles can weigh us down.
As the church, we are not called to love from a distance. We are called, like Jesus, to be willing to step into the mess with others who are hurting and help those who are tired and wounded. We are called to be in it with them and point them to God.
What is the mess in your life that feels overwhelming to you? What is it in your life that is weighing you down? Who around you is hurting and needs you to step into the mess with them?
We have a God who wants to show us that He is who the Bible says He is. God didn’t just step into the mess 2,000 years ago. He is ready and able to step into what we are dealing with right now. And as we love others the way God loves us, we get to see God come through and do what only He can do.