The True Fairy Tale
There is a famous fairy tale told by Hans Christian Andersen that describes the a magic mirror that was devised by a wicked hobgoblin and anyone who looked in the mirror saw the beautiful things of the world distorted so that they seemed mean, ugly and small and the bitter things of life were highlighted and made big and grand and proud. In the story, the mirror shatters into millions of pieces as tiny as grains of sand. These tiny shards were carried by the wind across the world and pierced the eyes and hearts of many. In the story there is a boy and a girl who were friends and loved each other as brother and sister. One day when the boy was playing outside, a shard of the wicked mirror entered his eye distorting his vision and another entered his heart turning it cold and hard and he is drawn away from his home and becomes a prisoner of a harsh Snow Queen in the cold northern lands.
The rest of the story describes the pursuing love of his friend who perseveres through trials and difficulty to find her friend and rescue him through the tears of her love and brings him back home.
This fairy tale is a true one. For it describes both the situation that we find ourselves in this world and it pictures true love that is willing to taste bitterness to its full on our behalf and rescue us from the prison of a cold heart and blind eyes and lead us back to our true home.
We may think we are immune to such bitter shards as described in Andersen’s fairy tale once we have come to know the Lover of our souls - Jesus the Christ. When we received His life and love, we are told in the scriptures that we became new creations in Him and indeed we are! At the cross, Jesus obedience and willing death on the cross not only paid for our sins, but birthed us into a new kind of human life. As 2 Corinthians 5:17 declares, “The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
The difficulty is that this declaration is not just for new believers, it is a word that we must keep returning to over and over again if we are to recover all the riches embedded in it. We cannot fathom how good the “Good News” really is on the first day of our birth into the family of God. Like any child we must grow into it - we must every day be gaining a greater and deeper comprehension of what it means for our lives to now be His.
From the first day we surrender to Him and yield our broken lives into His hands like a new wet lump of clay, we expect that He will use every means He has to transform us and redeem our story. For that is exactly what He has promised to do. But what we often don’t expect is that a part of the molding and shaping process is death. Death to cherished dreams, death to familiar ways of being, death to those parts of us that deeply resist change and healing because they seem to us like our strengths and our best features. But all of it has to go. All of our life must be exchanged at the cross.
And this is the part that we often do not understand as we go through the Christian journey. We think that God will leave alone the good parts of us and just reform the bad parts. As C.S. Lewis once described it, “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house…” ~Mere Christianity
This is what continues to surprise us as we continue on in our journey with the Lord, especially if we are in ministry outreach or ministry leadership, that we must in a sense continue the journey anew every day at the same point we started at the very beginning of our journey - at the foot of the cross. We must bring ourselves - our story, our sorrows, our regrets and our bitter disappointments, our good deeds, our opinions of others and self-righteous acts, and even our understanding of ourselves and our desires. All of who we think we are must eventually find its way to the foot of the cross to die and be exchanged for the sweetness of knowing Him.
For each time we return, we find new treasures in the Divine Exchange awaiting us. Each time we surrender ourselves to the Potter’s tender, crushing hands, we will find that He is not finished making us new.
Peter writes it this way, “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.” (2 Peter 3:18)
This is the introduction post to a series of posts that will be exploring different aspects of The Divine Exchange and how these reflections can strengthen our resilience when we encounter the bitter tasting times and how to discover sweetness in unexpected places.
The Featured Resource for this week’s post is a blog post about “The Divine Exchange” by Derek Prince
Download the Booklet: The Divine Exchange by Derek Prince