God makes magnificence from your messiness

An answer for when you feel too messy and too broken

In the Christian journey, there can be those times when we feel like we’ve messed up again, that we’ve made another mistake, or we’re just too broken to do anything good. 

Perhaps you tried and fell short. Perhaps you were hesitant even to try. 

The feelings can be overwhelming. But there’s something we need to remember each time:

If God does not hold our messiness against us, why do we?

The messiness, the shame and the embarrassment of our lives were not—and still aren’t—a deterrent for the Lamb of God to come close, to giving His pure life and glorious inheritance for you.

When the shame and the past creep in and try to point to who you were, that’s the Adversary playing his deceitful and deadly games. Because he knows who you are and to whom you belong. 

The devil tried to question Jesus’ identity in the wilderness—right after God opened the heavens and said “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” (See Matthew 3 & 4 for the full account). The enemy knows quite well that you are Heaven’s delight; he just doesn’t want you to remember, realise or live that God-created and God-affirmed identity here on earth.

“Your past and present messiness is not a disqualification to have the fullness of the Father’s love, His daily forgiveness and grace (and) the promises He has already given for you…”

Friend, your past and present messiness—and the same for mine—is not a disqualification to have the fullness of the Father’s love, His daily forgiveness and grace, the promises He has already given for you to enjoy upon the earth, and for the eternal hope and inheritance that you have full access to, through the sacrifice and acceptance of Jesus Christ. 

The Lord makes things new again. 

He brings beauty from the ashes (Isaiah 61:3) and magnificence from the messiness when we surrender and commit all of ourselves to Him—even that very messy history.

We can see from Jesus’ lineage (Matthew 1) that God does use messy lives and histories for His good plans and purposes. 

He brings beauty from the ashes and magnificence from the messiness when we surrender and commit all of ourselves to Him.

Take heart with these Scriptures—and God’s very own Word—about your identity in Christ:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

2 CORINTHIANS 5:17-21 NIV

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

ISAIAH 43:18-19  NIV

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

GALATIANS 2:20 NLT

“And I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their stony, stubborn heart and give them a tender, responsive heart, so they will obey my decrees and regulations. Then they will truly be my people, and I will be their God.”

EZEKIEL 11:19-20 NLT

Through His honour and glory, he has given us his precious and wonderful promises, that you may share the divine nature and escape from the world’s immorality that sinful craving produces.

2 PETER 1:4 CEB

So all of us, with faces unveiled, see as in a mirror the glory of the Lord; and we are being changed into his very image, from one degree of glory to the next, by ADONAI the Spirit.

2 CORINTHIANS 3:18 CJB

For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.

ROMANS 6:4 NLT

…and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

EPHESIANS 4:24 NIV