Are you Broken?

20.02.18

We had a guest speaker at our home league meeting this afternoon and her theme was, broken. Sarah spoke firstly about things being broken, and how we all experience breaking something and if it is something special to us we may try to fix it, but it never looks again as it did before. And we oft times just throw it away, because we are encouraged to throw things away and buy new. There is too much time and effort involved in mending something, it's easier to put it in the bin and replace it.

Even hearts can be broken, it has been known for men and women to die of a broken heart, hours or days after their spouse had died. 

We can break things in our bodies, our teeth, or our bones. Breaking bones can have a life changing effect on some people, especially the elderly, people find their bones don't heal as well as they did when they were young.

Sometimes we can feel broken by circumstances, and we feel shattered, and in tatters, and we find ourselves not dealing with things, not going through a healing process but rather trying to throw away the brokenness and acting tough so that no one will know what’s going on. We are made to feel that broken equals uselessness, that we must be worthless, and we feel forgotten, much like the broken plate just tossed into the dustbin and sent to the dump.

Sarah showed us a photograph of a bowl that had been repaired by Kintsugi which means, golden joinery, which is the art of mending broken things with gold, showing that it can still be useful, and it also then increases it's value. Something which was quite ordinary before it was broken becomes a thing of great beauty and value after it has been mended, put back together with gold.

There is brokenness in the world and in our individual lives because of sin, when sin entered the world, God didn't then cast it aside, He didn't discard it, but put a remedy in place that would heal people's brokenness, that would forgive our sins. God sent His Son, Jesus to die in our place, He took our sin and gave us His righteousness. Jesus took our broken lives and gave us freedom in Him.

Sarah reminded us of some of the fractures in the lives of the men and women God used throughout the Bible, just when you are thinking about your brokenness bare this in mind.

Moses had a speech problem

Jonah was self-absorbed

David was an adulterer and a murderer

Samson was a womaniser

Rahab was a prostitute

the Samaritan woman had a string of divorces

Zacchaeus was engaged in extortion

Peter was hot headed, impulsive and temperamental

Naomi was a bitter widow

Leah wasn't attractive enough

Joseph was abused and abandoned

Jacob was a liar and a schemer

Martha worried about anything

None of these things define these people, what defined them was their relationship with God. That is what is good about the Bible, it doesn’t omit their weaknesses, it doesn’t gloss over their imperfections, their impurities, or their sins. It tells us how it is, it tells us about their victories as well as their imperfections. There is beauty waiting to be discovered when we realise that God uses everything in our lives including our pain, our failures, our weaknesses, everything about us to bring about a beautiful redemptive story.

Romans 8:28

And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.