Your #1 Job: Soak in God's Love

Last night my wife cooked a big pot of rice as part of our dinner. We ate all the rice, and the empty pot sat sticky and unclean—clingy, crusty, thick particles of rice clung to the the interior of the pot.

Our boys, who do the dishes, asked if putting the dirty pot in the dishwasher or scrubbing the pot would clean it. We taught them to do neither, that a pot in this condition needs something more than a quick rinse or scrub, it needs to soak. We told them to put the pot in the sink, fill it with warm water and dish soap, and then leave it alone to soak.

You and I are like the crusty rice pot. Our interior is full of sticky, clingy, hard to remove residue—brokenness, sin, idolatry, hurt— that frustrates and that we can’t fix through scrubbing hard or a quick religious rinse. The counterintuitive remedy for our broken interiors is to simply soak in the warm water of God’s unconditional love. That’s it. We don’t have to do anything other than sit there, soak, float, and let the warmth of undeserved love exercise it’s profound power on our self and story, working its way into every hard to reach place. This is called grace. This is called faith. This is a called a relationship of total dependence upon the love of your Heavenly Father.

You can’t rush this. You can’t manufacture this. You just soak and, somewhere along the way, you notice (or, more likely, your friends notice and tell you) that you’re different—freed up, lighter, less heavy. This is what true love does, it moves toward the true condition of our messy interior and greets us with care. A care that frees.

This morning my boys discovered the power of soaking. After simply sitting there, the pot was different. The sweet, warm pressure of the water changed the pot. The inside was now soft and malleable, open to the cleansing and direction of an outside hand.

The great work of our lives is to rest in the great work of God. The great work of our lives is to learn to soak in the love of God, which was finished for you on a cross in Rome 2,000 years ago and which pours out with new supply every morning.