Chaos to Order

“Get your life together.”

I remember saying this to myself while I sat handcuffed in a small jail cell. It was 7 months after my 21st birthday, and I had just been arrested for a DWI. As I sat there wondering how I had gotten to this place in my life, I made the decision to walk out of that jail and change my life. And that’s exactly what I did. I changed my life. I went from a run-in with law enforcement from publicly drinking to a life-dominating hidden addiction to privately drinking. I sought to change my life with the strength of my own hands, and it only made things worse. Much worse.

I continued in my downward spiral of alcoholism and pot smoking until I finally reached the bottom. My wife had threatened to leave me and the people closest to me had now seen me for what I really was: a loser. I was a self-centered, pleasure-seeking, irresponsible jerk. I had, in no way, gotten my life together. I had gotten my life torn apart. Then something truly life-changing happened. I met Jesus.

In this low point of failure and shame, the Lord Jesus met me and saved me. It wasn’t 99% Him and 1% me; no, it was all Him. As the old hymn says, “He sought me and He bought me with His redeeming blood.” It was then, and only then, that the pieces of my broken life began to be out back together. The efforts of my hands in the beginning were simply to change my externals and therefore change my life. What I didn’t know was that I needed to be transformed from the inside out so that a new external life could be borne out of a new cleansed internal life.

Something I noticed shortly after this change of direction was how dishonorable my life had been. When I looked at my wife, children, coworkers, and friends I wondered how any of them had ever given me the time of day or listened to anything I ever had to say. The truth was that my life wasn’t respectable by any stretch of the imagination. Living in an upright and holy way, loving God and loving your neighbor, leads to respect. You can only get there by being changed from the inside by God Himself.

Our witness to the world around us is based, in part, upon the way the world views his life. Before Jesus saved me, I lived a hedonistic and selfish life, one that couldn’t be seen as rightly ordered or properly managed. But when the light of the Gospel shined into my life, like the light of creation dawning upon the formless and void waters in Genesis 1, the chaos and disorder of my life began to become orderly and beautiful. That’s what it means to be respectable: a life that is well ordered in light of the redemptive nature of the Gospel.

Our sin causes chaos and Jesus causes order. It is that simple. And unless you want to be a hypocrite, you should be seeking the Lord and aligning your life with His will so that when your family, church, and neighbors see you, they see someone worth respecting.