Brokenness. A substitute passage, Psalm 31, prompted the following reflections…

I am confident that it is God’s will on earth (as it is in heaven) that we each receive the priceless gifts of His fatherhood and friendship, yet I am aware many of us feel left out and don’t know why. We are in good company: so did David, the man after God’s own heart. Listen:

You have set my feet in a large place.

However…

 My eye is wasted away from grief,

My soul and my body also. 

For my life is spent with sorrow 

And my years with sighing. 

My strength has failed because of my iniquity, 

And my body has wasted away…

I am forgotten as a dead man, out of mind; 

I am like a broken vessel.

In the previous four decades, I have known some seasons like that. I trace the root cause to two heart-conditions. The first was my prodigal life style. Sin feeds the heart with momentary pleasure while it binds it to guilt and shame. A prodigal’s sense of God grows dim. The second is an elder brother life style, where good works feed the heart with self-righteousness and binds it to religion with judgment and bitterness. Elder brother’s sense of God is not just dim—it’s grossly distorted. I pray that my words, as an ex-offender, will be filled with grace, enabling us to move off of religious-high center, where we may be hung-up, spinning our wheels.

We know of Jacob’s all-night wrestling match with God—no doubt, a picture of our own lives. How ESPN would it be to have a move-by-move account by Jacob of his struggle? How beneficial would that be to our relationships to God? In Psalm 31, David is doing this very thing, offering color-commentary on his wrestlings with God. If you take some time in Psalm 31, you will have a front row seat at the Bethel Gardens Arena. If you observe closely, you may see yourself in the ring. And if you will stay till the last round, you will discover how this arena got its name.

When David says, “In Thee O Lord, I have taken refuge…be Thou to me my fortress,” I hear him saying, “Lord, it is You and me together in this life. I have no other plan, no other recourse. My strength is gone. I am in distress yet my times are in Your hand.”

If we will lean into our lives (again, wrestle, if you will) with the understanding that it is God with whom we have to do (Heb 4:13) and that in Him, we live and move and exist (Acts 17:28), we will eventually discover that all the give and take, all the pressures, from wherever they come, are a part of our prolonged struggle as well as our unprecedented opportunity. For those who persevere in working out their lives face-to-face with Him, God will restore their identities, enabling them to fulfill their destinies. However, we must stay in the ring. Perseverance is required to discover the all-things-work-together hold of Romans 8:28 and the count-it-all-joy hold of James 1:2.

As a (mostly) ex-offender, may I share a move I tried to put on God? For the record, all my favorites have been escape-moves. As I recall, I was perfecting my avoid-brokenness move when God showed me his broken-hip hold. This last round with God highlighted something for me—I am hard-wired to go around brokenness as opposed to going through it.

At some level, we feel our heart dysfunction. We know the pain of human impotence and incompetence, but we learn how to keep those thoughts at bay—we figure out a way to cope and make life work. The paths around our issues include busy schedules, drugs, humor, and hobbies. Anything will do really, as long as it keeps our minds away from the gnawing unresolved issues of our hearts. We elder-brother types try a host of moves. Dreaming we are pressing on to know the Lord, we read the Bible, we read other books, we attend the conferences, get the training, fast and pray, attend the church and serve it. Perhaps you hear the wheels spinning?

We elder brothers do not easily abandon our chores to attend the banquet. While we boycott the party, our disappointments can metastasize into debilitating, deeply buried and well-managed anger. We pride our selves in putting one foot in front of the other—slogging on through our slough of disappointment and despair. This is a tragedy. If we don’t go through our pain, we will just go through the motions. And, if we just go through the motions, our hearts will remain bound up in religion, alienated from God’s love. For newer readers, my working definition of religion is any system of thought or practice whereby the doing of it causes me to think I have gained the favor of God.

It is easy, very easy, to escape God in the church. In any religious subculture, we can go to work serving the Lord with the unresolved issues of our hearts acting as the driving, unseen motivations of all we do. The opportunities for elder brothers in organized religion are almost unlimited: attendance stickers, awards Bibles, social acceptance, titles, offices, tasks to keep us busy, with each substitute for God Himself, aiding and abetting our escape from the real issues of our wounded and insecure hearts.

Jesus has come to set captives free. His targeted captives are not only lost persons, who do not know Jesus as their savior; they are also found-persons, who do not yet know God as their father and friend.  Jesus aspires to liberate His offspring from every lie the enemy has sown into their lives. If we are busy going through the motions (doing right things for the wrong reasons), we are captives. But, even if we are, there is tremendously good news here! In his mercy, Jesus will come into the temple of our heart and kick over the moneychangers’ tables where we are engaged in the unholy and enslaving commerce of religion.

There is irony in this. Our pain and sense of failure may feel mushy to us, but to God, they are the firm subgrade He can build upon. If we will entrust our brokenness to Him, face to face, knowing He is the one we are actually dealing with, we will eventually see something beautiful emerge. Over time, God will construct rest and confidence, the very things we have always wanted and were created for. There is more encouraging news; God wants this even more than we do, and in Christ, He has made provision. Facing-off with God, wrestling with the unholy things that drive us, is where our lasting dreams start taking shape.

I am not saying all honors afforded men within Christendom are evil. I am saying they can be if we haven’t been working through our painful core issues face-to-face with God. This is how it worked for Jacob and David and all the saints who have come to know God intimately. Pain is not evidence of His absence, as the enemy would have us believe. We have pain because we are not yet home. Pain is but a reminder. Pain is not only a frequent component to growing intimacy with God, it is also an indication of what lies we have ingested.

While it is reflexive to flee things that bring us pain, we must do something counterintuitive when we face it. We must hold onto God by letting go. (Please forgive the overused cliché.) We must intentionally entrust all that we are, however bad we think that may be, to God. Saints who follow through can look backward and see the good and strong hand of God taking the worst events of their lives and building things that will last for eternity.

Over time, just living out our lives, wrestling when necessary, our hearts will gradually prove that God is patient, powerful, loving, kind and altogether trustworthy. More irony: the heart would have never known this without the trials. Whether the trial is a test or an attack, it doesn’t really matter. If we process life, face-to-face with Jesus, we will discover Him as our life. We will have an overcomer’s account of the hope within us, which will prove out our portion of His kingdom’s coming, His will being done.

Overcomer’s are triumphant because their vision has been restored. Truth has set the captive free. There is a grand prize for those who will stay in the ring long enough to hear the bell ring and the announcer say, “God, has prevailed.” While the things of God grow dim for estranged sons, the face of God will become progressively clear to children at rest. They will discover that Jesus feeds the heart with abundant life binding it to love, liberty, rest, and joy.

FYI: Bethel means the house of God. After the bell wrung in Jacob’s match, he announced, “Surely God was in this place.” We too, if we will persevere in our losing, will see that God was intimately involved in every aspect of the contest. What a wonderfully odd kingdom, where one must loose the match to be an overcomer!

Father, thank you that today is the day of salvation! Help us to receive your love now, not at some future date when we think we will be better qualified. In the give and take of our lives help us to lay hold of that for which you laid hold of us. Even now, help us to embrace you in the midst of our circumstances. Grant us Your eternal perspective on our brokenness that we may press on to know You and to make You known. Amen.

 

 

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