With Christ, You are a Masterpiece

Reality-TV shows thrive on showing us people who aren’t good enough, people voted off the island, the ones told “you’re fired!” and the ones with the least votes from home viewers. One of my favorites (to make fun of) is The Bachelor. Whenever I land on that show while channel surfing, there’s inevitably a close-up of a young woman in a limousine, sobbing because she didn’t get a rose — the Bachelor rejected her. She cries, “There must be something wrong with me! What’s wrong with me?” Every time, I can’t help thinking, “Um, let’s see . . . You just spent thirty minutes with a guy you’ve never met before and you’ve decided he’s the one true love of your life. And you’re asking, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Seriously?”

I poke fun, but maybe you’ve experienced a similar kind of rejection. You felt abandoned by someone, or you didn’t achieve what you wanted to. You thought you were going to do more, to be more, but it didn’t happen. Your disappointment slowly bloomed into insecurity, an ongoing sense that you aren’t enough. More and more, you may find yourself thinking, “There must be something wrong with me.”

You know what? You’re absolutely right; there is something wrong with you. With all of us. By ourselves, we’ll never be enough. But once we surrender our lives to God, everything about us — including our mistakes and weaknesses — becomes the raw material for his masterpiece.

And the best news for us is that God, the Potter, doesn’t just throw away the clay, starting over from scratch with new clay. No, he uses the same clay, reshaping it into what he wanted it to be. If the choices you’ve been making have left you just a blob of dried out clay, God wants to remake you into his masterpiece, made new in Christ Jesus, equipped for the good works that God prepared in advance for you to do.

Without Christ as the center of your life, there’s something terribly wrong with you. But with Christ, you are God’s masterpiece.