Lost Years

The threshing floors shall be full of grain;

the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.

I will restore to you the years

that the swarming locust has eaten. Joel 2:24-25, ESV

GOD’S PEOPLE had suffered the loss of their entire harvest as swarms of locusts marched like an insect army through their fields. For four consecutive years, the locusts laid waste to every vine and tree and field. But it wasn’t merely a natural disaster; it was divine judgment. In the midst of the famine, the Lord called out to his people through his prophet Joel, wooing them back to himself with an incredible promise: “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.”

In the midst of the devastation came the promise of an incredible reversal if God’s people would turn to the Lord, who is merciful and compassionate. “He is eager to relent and not punish,” Joel says of the Lord (verse 13).

This same merciful and compassionate Lord restores what the consequences of sin have taken from us —all the years of glad service to Christ lost to apathy and busyness, all the loveless years lost to bitterness and anger, all the indulgent years spent trying to fill up the emptiness with alcohol, and all of the Christless years resisting the Savior’s drawing love. The Lord restores the distracted years when you didn’t give your children the attention they needed. He restores the angry years when you were more likely to yell or hit instead of listen and love. He restores the demanding years when your rigid standards drove your child away.

Take heart. There is hope. God can restore to you the years eaten up by sinful patterns and misguided priorities. He can deepen his fellowship with you so that your love for him can be greater than you’ve known before. He can multiply your fruitfulness so that your impact for Christ can be greater than it’s ever been. He can break down the barriers between you and your child so that your mutual affection can become stronger than you ever imagined.

Lord, I don’t deserve the kind of restoration that you promise. But I know that you are a God of grace, giving your people what we don’t deserve and could never earn. As I turn to you, restore the years that sinful patterns have stolen from me.