December 5, 2022
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Antiques and young children - not a good combination. It is, in fact, an invitation to disaster. Like that lovely antique teapot my wife had out years ago when the kids were little. You know what happened, right? One moment a teapot, the next moment pieces of a teapot. But my wife quickly rallied to remedy the situation. No, she did not disown one of our children. She sent me out for a tube of some sort of super glue. And amazingly, she put those pieces together and recreated that old teapot. And that glue? It's held it together to this very day!
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "When Things Are Going to Pieces."
There are times when you and I could use a little "super glue" because it's us that's going to pieces. And that spiritual glue is available to you right now, if you know where to get it and you know how to use it.
In fact, our word for today from the Word of God is all about this powerful agent that can hold you together, no matter what. Hebrews 4:16 puts it this way: "Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." I studied that "grace to help us" phrase in the original Greek words of the New Testament and I discovered that the word translated "help us" is used only one other time in the Bible - in Acts 27:17. Paul is on a ship that's literally being blown apart by a violent storm. The Bible says "they passed ropes under the ship itself to hold it together." There's that "help" word from Hebrews 4:16, except here it's about literally keeping the ship from coming apart in the storm.
God says that's what His grace is able to do for you, to help hold you together when the storm is intense and things seem to be breaking apart. He invites us to "approach the throne of grace with confidence." That word "confidence" means boldness and frankness. So when you start to pray, you go to your Lord boldly, talking, not in some fancy "prayer-ese" language, but with straight talk. You tell Him how it really is, how you really feel, and how much you need Him.
The Bible says that when you do that, you can "find grace." I like the deeper meaning of the Greek word that we translate as "find" here. It means to "come upon" or to "discover." There's almost an element of surprise in it, "Wow! Look what I just found! All this grace - lots of grace to hold me together in this situation right now!" When the verse says "grace to help us in our time of need," the original language is saying help that comes at just the right time, not before you really need it, not after you really need it, but right on time.
So this is one power-packed invitation from the One who rules the galaxies from His "throne of grace" - to come into His throne room boldly and honestly, reaching out to put in our hands the exact resources we need for this moment, this challenge, this situation, this need. He will respond with a flood of grace, just the kind of grace you need right now: suffering grace, waiting grace, deciding grace, grieving grace, parenting grace, single grace, physical grace, emotional grace, financial grace.
But the grace doesn't just come to you automatically. You have to go for the grace that this moment requires! And so often we don't. We struggle and we worry and we scheme, never going to the Grace Throne for the answers or for the resources we need. We could be rich, but we live in unnecessary poverty. We need to accept this incredible invitation many times a day and pray aggressively, not passively; boldly, not timidly; specifically, not generally. And it's all available to us because of Jesus. We come there because He died to make it possible for us to get this close to the God of the universe.
So there is never any reason you need to go to pieces. The grace glue of your God can hold you together, no matter what hits you!