Wednesday, December 15, 2004
We were trying to teach some young leaders the importance of teamwork and how each of us has a piece that the other needs. Here was my bright idea: Tear up a page of a magazine into pieces, dump it into the middle of each small group, and see who could put their picture together first! It didn't work too well. I had forgotten one little thing. I forgot to give them a copy of the complete picture so they could see what it should look like when it was all together! I've tried to work on one of those big puzzles myself and I had the same frustration because I didn't know where the puzzle box top was. It was very hard to put the pieces together when the complete picture wasn't there.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Top of Life's Puzzle Box."
I'm not the first to describe life as being like a puzzle. There's so many pieces - family pieces, friendship pieces, romance pieces, financial pieces - the pressures of school, and work, success, failure. The nagging questions like, "Who am I?" "Where am I going?" "What do all these pieces mean?" "What are they supposed to make?" Well, I've found the top of the box! It's in God's book, the Bible. It's found in Colossians 1:16 - these words: "All things were created by Him and for Him." That's speaking of Jesus Christ, and there are six powerful words there. Six words that can finally pull the pieces together: "...created by Him and for Him."
You can begin to put the pieces together when you put your name in that verse. Let me leave a blank: "______ was created by Jesus and for Jesus." Your life isn't going to make sense until you belong to Jesus! There's going to be this incurable hole in your heart until you have Jesus because He's the one the spot is for. No earth person is big enough to fill it, no earth thing, no earth achievement.
You may have some great pieces in your life, or maybe some pretty scarred and fading pieces, but life's still a pile of disconnected, often meaningless pieces in front of you awaiting a look at the whole picture that they're supposed to fit into. And our Creator has told us what that is - who that is - His one and only Son, Jesus.
The reason life seems disconnected and confusing? We're created to live for Him, and we've all chosen to live for "me." You and I have run our lives when our Creator was supposed to. And according to the Bible, "Your sins have separated you from your God." The only one who knows why you're here, the only one who's got the love you've looked for your whole life, is on the other side of a wall, and the wall is called sin. No wonder it's not adding up. We're stuck with the pieces, we're cut off from the whole picture, but this same passage that tells us, "by and for" tells us where the hope is for finally having it come together. "He forgave us all our sins," it says. "He nailed it to the cross." It was our sin and its death penalty that kept us from our Creator. And it was all our sin that God sent His Son to die for on that cross. The pieces of your life finally start to fit together when you come to that cross and you say two words, "For me." In simple faith you say, "Lord, it's for me. I want you and your forgiveness, for me."
If you've never done that, if you're ready to finally meet the one you were made by and made for, then I'd love to send you my booklet about this called Yours For Life. I'll send it to you if you'll just let me know you want it.
The top of life's puzzle box is within your reach today and the pieces can finally come together. You are very, very close to finding the reason you were born, and the person you were born for.