Isaiah 61:1,3 The LORD has anointed me…to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes.
One of the Bible’s greatest truths is that our lives can be different.
No matter what our past has been, Christ stands ready to forgive and cleanse us–and then to make us new. “Therefore,” the Bible says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old has gone, the new has come! (2 Corinthians 5:17).
When Isaiah wrote these picturesque words about beauty from ashes, he was probably thinking first of Jerusalem, the once-proud city now shattered and burned at the hand of a brutal enemy. Some 700 years later Jesus applied this passage from Isaiah to the ministry God had given Him.
Only Christ can bring hope to lives that have been turned into ashes by the assaults of our enemy. Satan. And He doesn’t just restore us to what we once were; He gives us “a crown of beauty”–the beauty of forgiveness, and the beauty of hope and joy and peace. Who around you is experiencing the ashes of a shattered life? Pray for them, and ask God to use you to point them to Christ.
Blessed Ones,
Each of us has the opportunity through God to make our lives and everything in them new. God can create beauty out of ashes and replace our hurts and failures with joy and success.
In order for this to happen, we must be in Christ. That means we must live in the way God instructs as we follow our faith down the path God has laid out for us. We do not do this by following the self, but by denying the self and following God..
When we abandon the self and practice our faith, then God flows through us and into our world. That is when we become a new person, and is when we receive our crown of beauty. Until then, we are stuck with the ashes of our self-centered, self-imposed and self-anointed crowns.
Let us today claim our crowns of hope, joy and peace as we live in the beauty with which a loving God has surrounded us.
Less self,
Dad
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