THURSDAY - Devotional

READ: Psalm 51:10

(Answer the question/s below in your app notes)

• What does a pure heart look like to you?

My sister, Claire, is a remarkable artist. She creates the most touching watercolors of meaningful moments in people’s lives. She can draw from memory; her shading is impeccable, and the details she’s able to include are what makes her pieces extraordinary.

I’m nowhere near the artist that Claire is. I can get by with mediocre art, but only if I am looking at a painting that I can copy or have a stencil that I can follow. Starting from scratch, my work would look exactly that: like scratches on a canvas.

The psalmist writes, “Create a clean heart in me, O God.” Sometimes it feels like we’ve messed up so much that God has no choice but to start over completely, to scrap the whole picture and begin again. But the more we pray this prayer daily and recalibrate our lives to God’s design for our character, the more we begin to see the truth: God isn’t throwing away the canvas, but restoring it.

Little by little, stroke by stroke, God, the ever brilliant artist, reshapes us. Not by erasing who we are, but by revealing who we were always meant to be.