Grace: God's Wrecking Ball

If you're like me and went to the DiscipleMakers Fall Conference this past weekend, then you may have come back deeply challenged by God's Word. Thankfully, the Lord knows me well enough to know that He should reinforce the things He's teaching me with song lyrics in order to help it all sink in. So I might even go as far as to say that the weekend wrecked me. But the wrecking had really started weeks before...

Let me back up a little bit. A few weeks ago, a friend asked me what I thought of Miley's hit single, Wrecking Ball. At the time, I hadn't thought about it enough to have a real answer. So I started to listen to it, filtering it through a gospel lens as is my habit of doing with pop culture artifacts. 

I wasn't really making much progress until one fateful evening when my roommate decided it would be a good idea to learn to trim hair by practicing on me. I tend to be pretty particular about my hair, so I was somewhat hesitant at first, but she was just so excited about it that it was hard for me to refuse. Besides, it was only a trim. So I put on Wrecking Ball for some background tunes, and handed over the scissors.  

But it quickly ended up being much more than a trim. It accidentally morphed into a major haircut. And as I stood gaping at my considerably shortened hair, the refrain that stuck in my head was, "You wreck me." My first instinct was to blame my roommate as the one who wrecked me. Upon a second consideration, however, it occurred to me that perhaps the Lord was actually using this as part of His bridge burning project. He had wrecked me. And it was good for Him to do so. He was helping me to focus on the imperishable.

As I reflected on the whole thing later that night, here's the passage that came to mind: 


"1 What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? ² You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. ³ You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. ⁴ You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. ⁵ Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? ⁶ But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” ⁷ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. ⁹ Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you" (James 4:1-10).

Here, James reminds us that at the center of every conflict (or potential conflict) we are sure to find: the warring desires of our hearts (v. 1-3) and the God who is battling to be our first love (v. 4-10). He even calls us spiritual adulterers (v. 4) because we give the love that God deserves to other things. And the way that the Lord fights for our hearts is with a jealous grace (v. 5-6). So my hair crisis was more than an accident. It was an opportunity, sovereignly and graciously planned by God Himself, for me to examine what my heart was really worshipping and then to choose to worship Jesus instead. And to my surprise, I actually did that. I repented of worshipping my appearance and turned to Jesus, thanking Him for loving me so much that He would go to such drastic measures to even mess with my hair in order to help me love Him more. It was an amazing evidence that God's bridge burning had been making a difference in my life. The power of the gospel was truly changing my heart! What a victory!

But the coming days were harder. That little victory was a shining moment in the midst of the constant battle. All the things were sad. First, I was pretty horrified to look in the mirror, because on top of my hair struggles, my allergy induced puffy-red eyes came back with a vengeance. I literally looked like a zombie. And nothing seemed to help. I seriously didn't even want to go out in public. Plus the song that I was writing was not coming together the way I hoped and was causing all sorts of internal emotional turmoil. And to top it all off, I was having conflict with people on every side. So when you add those things together, I was struggling, but thankful for how God was at work through it. 

That's when I went to the conference last weekend. And there was a very real war going on inside me. I desperately didn't want to feel ugly at an event where I would have to be in front of 400 people. But I also desperately wanted to choose to put my hope in Jesus and the perfection of His beauty instead of in mine. And I longed for the song that I had been working on to go well.  But I also longed to be freed from closing my fist over that desire so that God could be worshipped in the way that would be most pleasing to Him. The war was raging between my kingdom and God's kingdom. 

As you can imagine, God's kingdom prevailed. I wanted Him to win, but it's just such a painful process. The wrecking ball of God's grace kept crashing into my life and my heart to tear my kingdom down. He used the devastating combination of disappointments from my idols as well as His powerful Word to make me all the more desperate to be changed by Him. So as I heard the Scriptures preached over the weekend and felt myself being exposed as a sinner, again, the words rang in my head. "You wreck me." And that's what I needed. That's what I always need.


Because our idols wreck us in a bad way. They leave us ruined and hopelessly disappointed. But God's the one behind it all, and He has redemptive purposes for His wrecking. He wrecks for our good. Our merciful God loves us enough to oppose our pride and selfishness so that we can become the person He intended us to be - someone who reflects Him. He destroys the kingdoms we're intent on building for ourselves so that we can refocus on the only kingdom worth building - His. God's plan crashes into ours, not because He's malicious, but because He's full of grace. And His jealous grace is the wrecking ball that shatters our hearts, not so that we can remain broken, but so that He can truly heal us as He makes us like His Son. 

When it comes down to it, Jesus was the one God truly wrecked. Unlike us, Jesus never tried to build a kingdom apart from His Father. He never committed spiritual adultery as we do. Yet, on the cross, the Father crushed Him for our sins. So when God's wrecking ball comes at us, it's only to train us in holiness. Jesus already took the fatal blow of God's wrath, and all there's left for us is His boundless grace! 

So whether we find ourselves wrecked as a result of our idolatry, just by the fact that we live in a fallen world, or because His Word has convicted our hearts, our gracious God is surely there at the center of the wrecking. He is sovereign and has orchestrated all things to point us to our need for Him. Through it all, our loving Savior is asking us to let Him win the war for our hearts, asking us to put Him first. Thankfully, for Christians, Jesus' victory is guaranteed. He has won the war over sin. And He won't stop with His grace til His kingdom finally reigns in our hearts!

As His jealous grace wrecks us, Loving Him is Red.

How have you found yourself wrecked by God's grace?