Heart Tracks - The Restorer

"But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives...." Job 19:25....."Restore me, and I will return, because You are the Lord my God." Jeremiah 31:18...."Your Father is a restorer. He gives back what you've lost. That's the message of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation....the Savior came to save, the Redeemer to redeem, the Healer to heal - your world, your life, and your heart." Chris Tiegreen.....If I find in myself a desire which no experience in the world can satisfy, I must conclude that I was made for another world." C.S. Lewis

Some time ago I wrote in my prayer journal, "Lord forgive me for having spent so much of my life looking for the better country here in this world." So many of us do the same. We're convinced that if we just find the right situation, relationship, job, ministry, environment, all will be well. We'll have deep satisfaction and fulfillment. Except that we don't. Like the smell of a new car, it all wears out in time. We drift into the day by day sameness we've always known. There's a yearning within that whispers, "There must be something more." So we keep looking, searching, hoping to find the better country here and always ending up with deeper frustration.

There are also those who have given up the search altogether. Encountering disappointment after disappointment, and failure after failure, they've resigned themselves to the shadowlands. They live in the gray of defeat. They still believe in the Redeemer and Restorer, they just don't believe He can be so, will be so for them. Hope has been replaced by cynicism. Faith is a thought in the mind, not a flame in the heart. Passion may be spoken of, but it's rarely felt. They live waiting to die, and have lost the determination to one day die while fully living.

Into all of this He comes, just as He did with Job and Jeremiah, two men who knew much about loss and suffering. Both were led by the Father through a "country" that they came to realize held no permanent life and fulfillment for them. Both suffered terrible loss in the midst of a world, a "country" that can take everything and give back nothing. Both came to know that there was something more, something greater than all that they had lost. Something, Someone, they could not lose. Someone who filled that emptiness within. Someone who invited them into His better country. Best of all, Someone who would show Himself as the Redeemer and Restorer of their lives.

All of us live with regrets, with sorrow over choices made, words spoken, actions carried out, and opportunities missed, or even ignored. Satan has a field day with so many of us over these. He whispers his accusations against us. The torment can be intense. Yet it's into these very things that the Redeemer comes....and He redeems them. All of them, by the blood of Christ. Our sins, our failures, our messes. Even those wrought by our own hands. He also restores us in the midst of it all. Life in this fallen world takes it toll. We can lose so much of ourselves in the midst of it. By His redeeming grace He restores us....into that which He created us to be. He gives back that which we thought lost forever. And only He knows how deep this redeeming, restoring work goes in us. Yet this one thing is sure, it begins now and carries over into the fullness of eternity....if we'll but receive it. Every longing fulfilled. Everything we believed gone forever restored. And in the midst of it, the discovery of the world for which we were truly made....the real "better country" that is His Life.

Our Redeemer lives and He restores our souls. May this come to be the testimony of we who are His. May this come to be the witness of we who are His Church. May it be that in every place we know this great Truth; our Redeemer LIVES!

Blessings,
Pastor O