Painting Old Tires
by Jerry Ousley

As a youngster I enjoyed visiting with my grandparents for a few weeks during the summer. It was a thrill to be there. However after a couple of days a child by himself with two older folks tends to run out of things to do.

Grandma would always come to the rescue. Most of us have a few old cans of paint around that's left over after a job. Why we do that I really don't know because you can probably never quite match that color again. An inch or so of paint in the bottom of a bucket will usually harden up and we have to throw it out anyway.

But Grandma had different reasons for keeping that old paint. When I would get bored she would put a T-shirt of Grandpa's on me, give me a brush and turn me loose to "redecorate" her yard. Off I'd go painting anything in the yard my mind had a fancy to give a new coat of paint. Trees, tires turned flower beds, just about anything!

One particular year she had some old silver paint left over from, well I'm not really sure . . . painting tin roofs maybe? Anyway she had some silver. There was a tower in the front yard and I don't recall what it was used for but it was there. I started painting it with that silver paint but it didn't take long for me to reach as high as I could go.

What next? Over in the yard was an old tractor tire that they had turned into a flower bed. It already had a coat of white on it from the previous year but I thought it sure would look good painted silver. When I was finished I stepped back and admired my work. It looked like a different tire and man did that silver paint make it sparkle!

But underneath that silver paint . . . underneath that year-old coat of white paint . . . remained an old tire that had been put to good use as a flower bed, but was still an old tire that had worn out its usefulness as an important part of a tractor.

We are like that old tire. The Bible tells us that man was made to worship his Creator. We allowed sin to enter our lives and so we were no longer fulfilling our original purpose and design.

We may make good use of our lives in other things. We may decide that we are going to change and be something else and make something of ourselves. But whatever we do with our lives if we aren't worshipping our Maker, God, then we are not doing what we were made to do.

That's why Jesus Christ came . . . to give us a way to fulfill God's original plan for us. We can never change ourselves no matter how much "paint" we may put on the outside. We may appear to be very successful. But we aren't unless we are fulfilling our originally planned design. When Christ comes into our lives He actually restores us and "rebuilds" us making us once again what we were meant to be. Accept Him today. Let Him make you a new creature in Christ. Then you won't be an old tire with a new coat of paint but a useful creation of God.

Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.?  Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge.

Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com







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