Frosted Trash

There are two types of sin. Or rather, two ways to handle sin.

• Carnal Sin - that people use for their own pleasure, and others use for gossip purposes.
• Humbling Sin - that God uses to humble you, break you, and mold you.

Most people don't realize that the second type of sin exists.

The first type of sin is often all that we can see. Someone does something stupid, it gets leaked, and they'll never live it down. Oh my gosh, people will say. What was she thinking, people will say. Why are you even talking to her? people will say. Don't you know what she did?

And unfortunately, sin often never becomes anything more than that. A bad move, a source of rumors, a life of shame to follow. That's it. That's sin when we don't allow God to take it. And in a way, that's far more comfortable than allowing God to take it. Anyone can deal with rumors about them. It stings, but you can deal with it. Yet surrendering your sin to God, allowing Him to wrest it from your hands, and allowing Him to use it in unknown ways - yikes. 

As a child of grace, we are given just that: grace. Grace blots out sin. But the process is painful. You might feel like shards of pottery on the ground. Getting trampled. By people who hate pottery. One word: David.

But it will become worth it.

When you surrender yourself to the process of grace, it isn't easy. It isn't even always beautiful. It hurts, because you are so broken over your sin, and yet people still trample even the brokenness. And yet grace carries on. It doesn't pause, even for a second, rinsing away the shame. Sin is sin, and it will never have worth. But God, in his sovereignty, can use it to do extraordinary things in us.

Grace is a funny thing. It meets us where we are, but it does not allow us to stay where we are. It convicts us and acquits us. But we don’t often allow ourselves to experience its full beauty, due to our own selfishness. We like to think that God’s grace is the free-pass to do whatever we please. But it isn’t. The beauty of grace is only fully realized when coupled with repentance. Otherwise, grace is cheap. Grace only matters because it distinguishes the difference between our worth from our sins. But if we use grace to “justify” sketchy character, then it no longer meets its purpose. Then it is no longer grace at all. It is only an excuse at that point.

Grace is beautiful when coupled with repentance. It is at its most beautiful form when we realize how little we deserve it. That's when God uses our sin to humble us, to break us, to shatter our pride and to deepen our perspective. Sin is never beautiful, and often, that's as far as our vision goes when we think about sin. We don't realize that we are called to repent from it; we are called to be saved from it; we are called to be free from it; and we are called to recognize other people's freedom from it too.

In the cover photo of this post, there are shards of pottery. And basically, those shards of pottery will always be broken. But people take those broken pieces of trash and paint them and frost them and make them beautiful. I'm saying that grace takes trash, sin, and twists it to create in us something more beautiful. The trash itself isn't worth it and it isn't beautiful, but because of grace, we are.

_