Remember the “Humpty Dumpty” nursery rhyme?
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Life is like that, isn’t it?
1. We all fall off the wall
Like Humpty Dumpty our lives become cracked and damaged. We all understand disappointment, desertion, and deceit. Every parent understands disappointment. Every divorce person can relate with feelings of desertion and failure. And each of us knows the deceit of temptation and sin. One ski lodge understood this well. They supply customers with the kind of skis that can be made into splints. We all take tumbles in life.
Sometimes we even willfully jump off the wall. We do inappropriate things knowing they are inappropriate. We choose our selfish will over what we know to be God’s will. And we pay the price. Someone has said, “You can’t break the 10 commandments, they break you.” And so with each disobedience in our life, another crack develops.
Our lives show the marks of our failure. So what are we to do when we fall off the wall?
2. We can look for help in all the wrong places
Instead of trusting our failures to God we often try to lose ourselves in work, family, and a host of other things. We think we’ll just fill the voids created by our falls, so we pretend everything is OK. Yet while we are doing that on the outside, we are fighting to hold ourselves together inwardly. Harry Neale was a professional hockey coach who knew the frustrations of a losing season. He once said, “Last season we couldn’t win at home and we were losing on the road. My problem was that I couldn’t think of any place else to play.”
In the rhyme, Humpty Dumpty takes a fall and all the king’s men couldn’t put him together again. You and I are not going to find adequate help either unless we turn to the King of kings. He can help. Here’s how the rhyme has been changed in the Christian Mother Goose: Rock-a-Bye Bible.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
Humpty Dumpty shouted, ?Amen!
God can put me together again.’
3. We can find only One who can put the pieces back together
Since God is your Creator, only He knows each piece of your life. He’s the only One who knows how they all fit together. After a pastor preached his last sermon before retiring, a lady approached him. “Do you know what is the most important thing you said in all these years?” she asked. “What was that?” the minister inquired. “You told us we cannot do anything to get God to stop loving us” was the quiet reply.
Most of us see ourselves as a composite of all our failures – a divorced person – someone who lost a job – overweight – BUT this is not the way God sees us. Can you imagine a loving father introducing his kids this way: This is my daughter Malerie who stained the carpet with grape juice when she was two. This is my son Miles who broke a valuable vase last week. Loving fathers don’t memorize their kid’s failures. God doesn’t either. He doesn’t make a monument of your shattered pieces at the foot of the wall. With your desire and request He wants to bring those pieces together, set you back up on that wall, so the world can admire what a great transforming God He is.
We all fall. I fall way too often. We can pretend we’re not cracked and all in pieces. We can linger in our own pity party about how much it hurts. BUT we’ll still be at the bottom of the wall. How about letting the Potter remake your jar of clay (Jeremiah 18) so that He, the treasure, may be displayed (2 Corinthians 4:7)? We need to be back up on the top shelf of God’s trophy case.
In the Kiln – Being Remade for His Glory
Pastor Steve