Daily Butter 7/30: Mr FixItALL

My little addition to Our Daily Bread (7/30/11):

    For God was pleased [to have] all His fullness dwell in Him,

    and through Him to reconcile everything to Himself

    by making peace through the blood of His cross —

    whether things on earth or things in heaven.

    (Colossians 1:19-20 HCSB)

Since God first set the clock in motion, or at least since mankind bought into the lie that God’s rules were intended to hold us back, all creation has been in a decline. The “natural” order is that things become less organized, less functional and less orderly with the passage of time. While I have known in my heart that I needed Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and triumph through His resurrection to re-order my life and soul to fellowship with Him, this passage tells me that EVERYTHING is in this same state of reliance on Christ for reconciliation.

Thinking about the reconciliation and restoring the perfect fellowship of Eden got me thinking of something. One of those big theological terms that is thrown around is “justification.” When I was young they used to give it the Sunday School explanation that to “justify” makes it “just as if I didn’t sin.” While not wrong in a young understanding, I tend to think of it a bit differently now. I may be off base with the difference in the way the term is used in theology, but the word “justification” is used in every word processing and desktop publishing program. As I type this text, the editor I am using offers me four options for the “justification” of the text: align left, center, align right, or justify – all of which refer to how the text aligns with the rest of the text. Of course “left” or “right” would align the beginning or end of each line a straight edge along the left or right side and “center” would place the middle of each line lined up right down the middle of the page. “Justified” text would be fixed so that each line aligns to both the left and right edges. This has become my understanding of the process of justification in my life: As the lines of my life story are being written, I yield control to Him to make sure whatever needs done to make my life line up to the image of Him – whether removing text that ought not be there or adding and expanding so that I may align to the “fullness” of Him.

That reminds me of a pin my father would wear on his lapel with just the letters “P B P G I N F W M Y.” (I believe he got it at what he called a "Gothard Seminar" - what is now Institute in Basic Life Principles.) When asked, he would simply explain it meant “Please be patient. God is not finished with me yet.”  I, too, have a lot of growing to do (and certainly some pruning to do also) before matching that standard. Praise the Lord that He’s STILL working on me.

Andy Jentes