Becoming “Playdough”

Psalms 51:10 – “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”

What was one of your most favorite toys growing up? Maybe you had a special model car or action figure that was one of your toys that you played with the most. Maybe it was a bicycle, or a set of building blocks.

One of my most favorite things to play with when I was young was playdough, a soft, bread dough-like dough with which you could mold and shape to create all sorts of things. I had a large box full of plastic tools and molds which I could use to make my creations, one of which was a car building mold. I could press my playdough into those molds to create a few different car , and I had another mold that I could make different types of tires to put on them as well. 

Besides my car building molds, I had other ones that I could use to make different types of houses and animals as well. Whichever mold I decided to use, they completely changed the look of that pile of dough. From the round cylinder shape of the container into a car, or into a house, that dough went through a change.

We all are like that dough as it first comes out of the playdough container. Just as the dough had been formed into the shape of a cylinder, we all are in the form of the world. Molded into sin, we all take on the same form, as sinners.

What we need to do is go through a transformation. We need to change from the form that we were created in, which is sin, and be transformed into a new creature in Christ. We need to be changed.

The word change means to become something different, or to make into something else; to exchange or transform.

And it takes a change in the mind to achieve this transformation. All of the years that we have spent living in sin, learning the ways of the world, we need to completely erase that from our minds, and start again.

Romans 12:1-2  “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

How many of you have started a project of some sort, but along the way you made some mistakes? At that time you may have thought that you might be able to hide or deal with those flaws, but when you stopped to look at it you realized how much they ruined what you were doing, and you were left with no other option but to completely restart all over again.

This same example is like who we all are before our conversation to Christ; our minds are full of information, as we learned the ways of the world. But when we learn the ways of the Lord we realize all the things that were learned wrong, and we throw all that information away to relearn the things of Christ. To do this we need to undergo a change, and it starts when we accept the fact that we are sinners, and need a Savior. We need to begin that transformation and turn away from our sins.

Colossians 3:5-10  “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:

For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience:

In the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in them.

But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth.

Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds;

And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him:”

We need to give God the control over our lives, and let ourselves be changed into a vessel for Him. We need to let ourselves be molded into something different, just like that playdough. I never made everything exactly the way I wanted with my dough each time, and if I didn’t, do you know what I did? I took that dough, smushed it all back into a lump, and transformed it once again.

Have you begun this great transformation? Have you let yourself become that playdough?

In Christ,

Andrew