May 10, 2010

John 1:29-51
About a year and a half after Laura and I married, we needed to get a different car. I eventually bought a Toyota Corolla from a pastor (from a church of a different denomination than ours). The car seemed okay. It ran decent. The interior was alright. The price range was perfect (at that time I operated on a cash only basis). The pastor also assured me that he had just rebuilt the engine and in his opinion the engine should be good for another 80,000 miles. He said he was selling it for financial reasons and no longer needed the car. I do not have the ability to look into the interior of an engine and determine how sound it is. But I trusted the word of the pastor. It sounded like a great deal. After all, if he had just rebuilt the engine, we should be good to go. So we bought it.
Not many months later we began having problems. I had to rebuild the carburetor. A mechanic informed me that I needed a valve job. And there were a host of other things that happened. At one point I was pulling the back seat out of the car and found an old receipt. It was for having the cylinder heads machined (a process one usually does when you have a valve job done-usually in the process of rebuilding the engine). The receipt recorded mileage and date of when the procedure was done. It was about 60,000 miles earlier than what the pastor had told me. I guess his definition of having "just rebuilt" the engine was a lot looser than my definition. I wished I had the ability to look into an engine to see what it was really like before I bought the car. I would have walked away from it.
Part of the glory of Jesus is that He sees right into our hearts and pursues us anyway. He came along side us in the auction market of sin. We were up for sale. He looked down into our hearts, our engine so to speak and He saw what was defiled and broken. He purchased us to take away our sin and rebuild the broken engine inside. He is just in removing our sin because He shed His own blood in our place. Once our sin is removed and our engine repaired, He fills us with the oil of His Holy Spirit who is able to lubricate all our parts to keep us working. He also fills us with the gasoline of His Holy Spirit who provides the fire to run our engine in a way that delights Him. He is the master mechanic who sees right to the depths of our being. He repairs us and empowers us to please Him. Indeed we serve a glorious King! Speak His glory to someone today!
--Pastor John