Not Repaired but Replaced

Picture with me a family heirloom ceramic bowl.  Your child, the kid you babysit, or your grandchild knocks it off the coffee table and it breaks into five pieces.   (OK, so you shouldn’t have a family heirloom on the coffee table with kids around, but work with me here).  You take it to a person who specializes in pottery and they repair it.   When you’re done you exclaim, “It looks ALMOST brand new.”

But you know it isn’t.  It’s not new…. it’s still got cracks that have been repaired and if you know where they are and you look closely you can find them.

But the line of the song ‘That’s what Faith Can Do” says — broken hearts become brand new.   Not almost brand new, but brand new.

2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

In Ezekiel 36:26 God tells us, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

It’s not a repair job, folks, it’s a replacement. Broken hearts are replaced with new hearts….. hard harts are removed and replaced with soft ones. Faith means more than just fixing something until it’s “almost new”— it means taking out the old and putting in something that IS brand new —not just something that looks like it.

And that, my friends, is GOOD news.