Photo by SCREEN POST on Unsplash 

Dear Children of God,

When I get a new gadget, I usually read the owner’s manual. Because, as a former engineer, I appreciate that somebody who built it did me the favor of writing a user’s guide to tell me how it’s supposed to work and what to do to care for it so it keeps working as it should. After all, they created it so they should also know best how it works and what it needs to work properly.

God’s Word tells us an astounding fact – God created each one of us (Psalm 139:13-14, James 1:17-18). You could say, in a way, that God is our manufacturer. As such He knows everything about us. Like any good manufacturer, He goes out of His way to make sure we know how we should live, how to maintain ourselves, and how to get repaired when we break. He does all this in our “user’s guide”, the Holy Bible. 

Unfortunately, too many people, us included, don’t fully recognize God as our Creator. We think we know better than Him how we should act and maintain ourselves. We’re like the clay God mentions through His prophet Isaiah, “Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, ‘He did not make me,’ or the thing formed say of him who formed it, ‘He has no understanding’?” (Isaiah 29:16). It seems ridiculous for a pot to disregard the potter who made it and his intent for making it, but that’s the way many react to God as He tells them how He created them to live in His creation.

Disregarding God’s “user’s guide” leads us into sin which inevitably leads to a total breakdown in us and His creation. But God reminds us how to get repaired too. Knowing we can’t repair ourselves, He sent Jesus, His Son, to put us back together after sin causes us to fall apart. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we’re restored to new by our Father’s grace, love, and mercy found in His forgiveness.

                                                                                    In our Creator’s Love,

                                                                                    Pastor Jim