Picture Puzzles and Insights
Ruth Ann Stites, Staff Writer
Putting together a jigsaw puzzle is one of those quiet pleasures many of us enjoy. Things can go awry, especially if an unwatched cat pilfers a piece, but a finished picture puzzle, especially a 1000 piece one, is a satisfying sight. Doing a big jigsaw puzzle requires getting familiar with the picture being assembled, establishing the borders, and seeing new patterns. It’s exciting to find just the right pieces to fill in a portion of the whole.
Sometimes studying our Bible requires the same skills to develop new insights from familiar Scriptures. We see the “Big Picture” of the text we are reading and know what it’s about. We grasp the shape (outline or borders) of it and this passage’s place in the whole. And suddenly something in the text snaps into a new and exciting pattern; we see how it all fits together in a new way. We not only have knowledge, but we have insight.
I had one of those “aha” moments a while ago when Pastor Dave spoke on Luke 19:1-10.[1] In his closing comments, he spoke about how Jesus takes our weak faith and saves us by His strength (Luke 19:9-10). I wrote in my journal, “It’s His part to do what we can’t. He seeks the lost (out of place) and restores (saves) them to the place they were created for.” I had seen a relationship clearly from the familiar text I hadn’t seen before in exactly this way.
That’s what God’s love does. It looks for those out of place things in us and puts them right just as they were meant to be “from the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4; Rev. 13:8; Matt. 25:34; 1 Peter 1:20). And, as we develop in our Cross Discipleship, we increase our ability to do the same kinds of loving acts for others. When we consider what is out of place in other people’s lives, by His grace, we can begin to address restoration to what our Lord intended for people to have and help them move toward that goal. The Apostle Paul encourages this kind of love intervention in passages like 1 Thessalonians 5:9-11: “For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.” So, let us love others toward restoration and completion knowing that our Lord does the part we are unable to do. It is, after all, His good pleasure that we join Him in His mission to “seek and save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10, KJV).
(Photo credit: R. A. Stites, River’s Edge Park, Council Bluffs, IA, with Omaha, Nebraska, across the Missouri River, 2020)
[1] Pastor David Montgomery of Trinity Baptist Church, Rogers, Arkansas.
