Every so often a car comes into The Garage that the insurance company has already written off as a total loss. If you’ve ever gotten that phone call, you know how it feels. Someone looked at the damage, ran the numbers, and decided your car wasn’t worth fixing.
A lot of people feel that way about themselves. If you’re feeling too far gone for God, like the damage in your life is too much and the numbers just don’t work, I want to tell you something I’ve come to believe with everything in me.
God doesn’t use the insurance company’s math.
How a total loss gets decided
So how does that work? When the cost to repair a car is more than the car is worth, it gets declared a total loss. The math is clean, with repair cost on one side and market value on the other. If the first number is bigger, you write it off and get another one.
That calculation doesn’t care about anything else. It doesn’t care what the car means to you or who taught you to drive in it, or whether somebody might be willing to fix it for reasons that have nothing to do with market value.
We’ve seen cars at The Garage that looked like total losses, rusted or wrecked or neglected past the point where any reasonable person would put money into them. And sometimes, not always but sometimes, we’ve been able to bring them back. By any outside measure they weren’t worth it. Someone decided they were worth it anyway.
The math we run on ourselves
Most of us run that same calculation on our own lives, usually late at night.
On one side goes the damage. There’s the marriage that fell apart, and the years lost to drinking or pills, and the kids you weren’t there for. There’s the thing you did that nobody knows about, and the promises you broke so many times you stopped making them.
On the other side goes what you think you’re worth, and for a lot of people that number feels small.
Maybe someone told you you’d never amount to anything. Maybe you told yourself. Either way, the conclusion feels obvious. It would cost too much to fix me, I’m not worth the trouble, and God has better projects.
I understand that feeling. But to be honest with you, that’s the insurance company talking. It isn’t God.
What grace actually means
The Bible has a word for the way God does his math, and the word is grace. It means God giving good things to people who haven’t earned them and can’t.
Listen to how the apostle Paul describes it: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4–5).
Look at the order. God didn’t wait for us to clean ourselves up. He loved us “even when we were dead.” Not damaged, dead, and you can’t get more total than that. That’s exactly where his love showed up.
This is the part that trips people up. In Under the Hood I wrote, “Grace isn’t grace if you earned it.” If you could earn it, it’d be a paycheck. Grace comes to people with a long list of problems, people who’ve driven past every warning light for years, and it says, in the words of the book, “I see all of that. I know the whole history. And I’m going to fix this anyway.”
Tim Keller had a way of putting this that has helped a lot of people. The gospel, he said, tells us we are more sinful and flawed than we ever dared believe, and at the very same time more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. Both halves are true at the same time, which is what makes it good news and not a pep talk.
Why this is hard to believe
When people first hear about Christianity, you’d think the hard parts would be the miracles or the resurrection. For a lot of people those aren’t the sticking point at all. The hardest thing to believe is that God actually, personally, specifically loves them, and that they’re not a lost cause and the door isn’t closed.
Is that you? Then here are a few honest things to think about:
- Your sense of guilt isn’t proof you’re beyond repair. It’s proof your conscience still works, which is a good sign.
- Nobody comes in clean. In all the years we’ve been doing this, we’ve never had a perfect car come through our doors. God has never had a perfect person come to him either. Paul, who wrote the verse above, called himself the foremost of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15).
- The cost has already been covered. The reason God can fix what looks unfixable is that Jesus already paid the bill on the cross. You aren’t asking him to take on a cost he hasn’t counted. He counted it, and he paid it.
Something to do with this
If you’ve written yourself off, try this. Get a piece of paper and write down the thing that makes you feel too far gone, and be specific. Then read Ephesians 2:1–10 slowly, with that paper sitting next to it, and ask yourself one question: is there anything on my list that “rich in mercy” can’t cover?
And if there’s someone else you’ve written off, a parent, an ex, a son or daughter, consider this question from the back of the book: “What would it look like to extend grace to them the way this chapter describes God extending grace to us?” You don’t have to answer it today. Let it sit a while.
The door is open
Everything needed to bring you back to God has already been done. The bill was paid and the work was finished. What’s left is for you to walk through the door, and the next step, which I call handing over the keys, is simpler than most people expect.
I wrote Under the Hood for people who feel like they’re on the wrong side of that math. It’s short and honest, and it’s written for people with no church background at all. If a friend handed you this post, they probably think you’re worth fixing. So do I. So does God.
Enjoyed this article?