Have your self-restoration attempts left you feeling dissatisfied and unrestored? Have you tried a hair transplant, a facelift, or Botox, binging, purging, restricting, over-exercising, or cutting? Have you attempted to fulfill your desire for restoration through a smoke, a toke, a drink, a line, or a pop of a pill? Have you purchased a new car, a new house, a new Rolex, a new diamond necklace, a new vacation, a new academic degree, a new wardrobe, or switched to a new spouse solely to make you feel new on the inside? Have you even sampled religion and its treadmill of good works to discover rejuvenation of your heart?

It’s likely that your dissatisfaction has hardened your heart resulting in foolish choices that continually ding your relationships as well as your time, talent, and treasure.

Unfortunately, most of us turn to ourselves for restoration, attempting to fix up our shortcomings on the outside under the guise that it will change us on the inside. We think that if we go somewhere and do something, then we will be somebody. These futile efforts to make ourselves new from the outside in represent two kinds of pride: loose sand-hearted or legalistic stonehearted arrogance that we can restore ourselves. The former requires a storm to be shaped, the latter a severe tool.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus admonished the Pharisees, noting that their attempts at self-restoration from the outside in left them full of pretense and dead inside their hearts (Matthew 23:25-28). In the collector car world, we call this a cosmetic restoration. The surface is touched up just enough to fool everyone that the undercarriage is also new, when in reality it is ready to fall apart. Get the picture? But, there’s hope in the Restorer.

Ask God to reveal any self-restoration attempts in your life and confess them today. He will start you on a new journey from the inside out.

Episode 13: Restoring Living Hope…Restoring New Life from mitchkrusetv on Vimeo.

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