The Toolbox and the Wheelbarrow
This weekend you might be planning to do some work around your house to get it ready for that Memorial Day picnic you are hosting. On the list are both putting down some new deck boards as well as mulching and planting flowers. You’ve checked the forecast; it looks like gorgeous weather. Sunny but not too hot.
Before you begin, you stop and your local lawn and garden store. It is jam packed with people buying flowers and plants, topsoil, mulch, decking materials, new weed whackers, anything and everything needed to do some work around the yard to get it ready for summer.
While you are hammering away on the deck, your spouse is busy in the flower beds. Regardless of the work you plan to do, you need tools, and not just any tools, but the proper tools, to complete the project. Your toolbox is filled with hand tools and power tools while the wheelbarrow has a trowel, shovel, soil cultivator, hoe, dibber, and the flowers to plant. If you are a gardener, you know what a dibber is. (If not, then Google it.)
All around the neighborhood people are hard at work. You see several neighbors planting flowers and filling wheelbarrows with mulch. The sounds of lawn mowers and pressure washers fill the air. Somewhere nearby, someone is cooking burgers on their charcoal grill and boy does that make you hungry.
Having and using the proper tools and implements helps make the job easier. You make them work for you. We often view the Bible in that same way; we see it as some sort of spiritual toolbox. We want to take things out of Scripture and make them work for us, just like those carpentry or gardening tools. However, we do not use Scripture, but, instead, God uses Scripture to change us and carry out His will and His plan in and through us.
The process of becoming more like Jesus means that we come before God, who becomes present to us in and through the Bible. And, it is through His Word that we begin to be transformed. Hebrews 4:12-13 tells us that the Bible is what we are to use to calibrate, measure, and judge our thoughts and attitudes. We read, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all of creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account (NIV).” (When I was in Vineyard’s ministry school, this was the first verse we had to memorize. It emphasizes the transformative nature of God’s Word, and in my opinion is pivotal to how we approach and understand scripture.)
In The Message, the contemporary rending of the Bible written by Eugene Peterson, Jesus’ words found in John 5:39-40 reads like this – “You have your heads in your Bibles, constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me! And I here I am, standing right before you, and you aren’t willing to receive from me the life you say you want.”
So, are you allowing God to use His Word to continually retool and remanufacture you?
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