Broken

What good is something that is broken?  Today, that question would probably be followed up with a response near this: "the only good a broken thing can do is fill the trash can."   To some people though, they can make beautiful masterpieces out of broken things.  Turn on HGTV and you'll see a great conglomeration of people who make beautiful out of broken.  Open magazines and see all the makeovers of houses, streets, and people.  All around us, people take broken things and make them beautiful.

I guess you could say, we are just imitating our Creator.  God is working to take this broken world and make it beautiful, that is the theme of the Bible.   Like these people remodel these houses and make something new, He does the exact same thing.

"Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." 2 Corinthians 5:17

"See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."  Isaiah 43:19

The things that God does with the lives of His people are simply amazing.

I think we see the trend that we are seeing in the world today, because that is our purpose.  We are already a broken people, we should seek to be restored.  Now, we seek it out in all the wrong.  We go searching for restoration at the bottom of a bottle.  We talk bad about others, so we can feel better about ourselves. We seek it out in the love or lust of another person.  We light up a cigarette or a joint to just feel complete.  We eat and we eat and we eat, because that makes us feel whole.  We cheat in class or on our taxes. We cut and scratch ourselves.  We do all this and yet we have to do it again and again.  Why?  It is not real fulfillment.  It is nowhere near the actual fulfillment of our lives.  The fulfillment of Jesus Christ.

Our restoration can only come from Jesus.  That's why you see so many people go to great lengths in those other realms because one just isn't enough.  Folks, I can tell you now that Jesus is enough.  When you allow Him to take hold of your life, He will be all you'll need.

Here's the thing though.  I don't mean some campy, emotionally-charged experience.  I am talking about true life change.  Letting Jesus take the reins in EVERY portion of your life.  There was a speaker when I was younger, who talked about how letting Jesus in our lives like letting someone in our homes.  Usually, when someone comes over, we clean the high traffic places.  The living room and the bathroom.  We make those rooms the places that are spotless and clean.  A lot of times, we may neglect the kitchen or the bedrooms, maybe.  Well, he always talked about how we needed to let Jesus into the kitchen of our lives.  The kitchen is sometimes the messiest place in the house.  We need to let Jesus in the kitchen, and let him help us do something about it.  The problem is, we like it that way.  We like our messy sometimes.  We are comfortable with our issues and with our shortcomings, our sin.  We like to just be able to pop in to church and ask God's forgiveness, then go back to what we were doing.

That's not what this life in Christ is about.  If you read the verses I previously shared, He makes us a new creation.  The old has passed away.  When things pass away they don't come back.  The prime examples could be Jesus' disciples.  When he called Matthew out of the tax booth, it's not like Matthew followed him for a couple of years, then went back to tax collecting.  Matthew experienced a life change.  When Chip and Joanna Gaines remodel a house and present it to someone, that person doesn't go in and tear everything down and go back to how it used to be.

For new things to come, change has to happen. Does that mean every change will be drastic?  No.  Some changes will be minuscule and some will be wholesale.  When we allow God to truly take hold of our lives, He will be in charge of what stays and what goes.  Sometimes that requires the whole to be broken.  Sometimes it calls our brokenness to be made whole.

I want to leave you with some poignant lyrics from Propaganda.  The song is called Lofty and in the final verse he says...

"But worth, value, and beauty is not determined by some innate quality
But by the length for which the owner would go to possess them
And broken and ugly things just like us are stamped "Excellent"
With ink tapped in wells of divine veins
A system of redemption that could only be described as perfect
A seal of approval, fatal debt removal..."