Hi, and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the word prayers in our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

Second Chances Redemption Week is here on the Five Word Prayers Daily, and it's one of the things I love the most about God, that he can truly take every mess and make something of it.

I'm in awe of his ability to do this.

Yesterday we talked about redeeming the messes from others,

and today we're talking about making something out of our self-inflicted messes.

Anyone else have plenty of those they could talk about?

Yeah, me too.

So I think about many of my favorite Bible heroes, and they are at the same time mess-ups.

The funny thing is we love the label of hero and often forget the other side of the coin.

But maybe in a way that's why we love them so

much. We are endeared to that part of their story and character. Their ability to be so much

like us, such mess-ups, so very human, and yet also so very used by God. If David can be a man

after God's own heart and also have done such terrible

things as adultery and have a man killed, then there is hope for us in our terrible things, too.

God knew we would need that humanity, I believe, in these stories, and the people of the Bible.

If they were perfect, we wouldn't relate to them at all. God as a redeemer and the giver of second

chances is an overwhelmingly beautiful thought. And I think it trips us up sometimes because, first of all,

we're busy dwelling on the fact we don't deserve it. We don't. We don't deserve it. That's true,

and it will never stop being true.

Second, I think it also trips us up because our memory is long for things it needs to forget and short for things it needs to remember.

We forget about God and we remember about our past and sin.

...