Joel 2:18 and 25, NIV
“Then the Lord will be jealous for his land and take pity on his people. The Lord will reply . . . I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten”
I will never forget the day in 1970 when I acquired the wreck of a 1934 Alvis Speed 20 car. It was already 36 years old and in an unbelievably impossible condition. The problem certainly wasn’t locusts – but the car had been stolen, crashed, vandalised, set on fire and finally pushed into the River Mersey! Most sensible people would have consigned it to the scrap heap without any hesitation! But as I looked at that broken car God spoke to me about His vision for restored lives. I was thinking of a restored car, but in God’s vision He was showing me that He wanted to see beautifully restored lives.
Just as I didn’t see the sad remains of the car as being a hopeless case, God doesn’t look at the history of any of our lives and write us off. He sees what the “locusts of life” have eaten and dreams of what He could do in restoring His people to once again fulfil their destiny in Him.
In a few precious moments of vision I caught a glimpse of timeless eternity. I saw things that I’m still unpacking today. I saw into the heart of God and with His eyes I looked at the wrecks of broken lives – hundreds of them, thousands and millions of them. And there on the sidelines was Satan grinning over the lives he had wrecked and which he was wanting to send to the scrap-heap, without hope.
But as I looked, I sensed the joy there had been in God, when each life had been created in all its pristine beauty. Then I saw His tears at the wrecks that so many of these people had become. Finally, however, I became aware of the joy that would be His once more, if those broken lives could be restored as their maker had intended them to be, and for which His Son had died.
I realised that God’s emotions over broken lives were not dissimilar in nature to the ones I had experienced when I looked at the wreck of a broken car – only broken lives are much more important than broken cars. God never shrinks from the magnitude of the task. In Him there are no hopeless cases – none are beyond the healing love of a God who is passionate about His creation.
It has taken me 42 years to restore the car and this year I will be driving it to all our UK Centres and across the Channel to our Dutch Centre as well. The car has been restored to run! At each Centre I will be conducting a new training course, simply called Restored to Run – because that’s what God wants to do with each one of our lives, restore them so we are able to run the race of life.
To see a short video about the vision, the car, Restored to Run and the Alvis Tour, http://www.thealvistour.com/video {please click here.}
Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that You rejoice to see Your people restored and once again fulfil their destiny. Help me to own the mistakes I’ve made and to forgive those who have hurt me, so that You can have Your way in restoring my life and dealing with the damage caused by the “locusts” which have damaged me. In Jesus’s Name, Amen.
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To see a short video about Restored to Run and the Alvis Tour, please click here.
