Just recently, I took a 40 Day Journey with my Accountability Bible Study Group through a book entitled, “He Restores my Soul” by Jennifer Kennedy Dean. (You can find the link to the book in the Resources tab on my website. I highly recommend it!) The first week of the study, God completely changed my heart about the idea of a broken heart and opened my eyes to his perspective on the matter.
Now, I am going to be brutally honest that the idea of allowing my heart to be broken in my mind has never been an option. The picture that I’ve always conjured up regarding brokenness was Humpty Dumpty who fell off a wall and broke into a million pieces. Remember the little rhyme where it says, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty back together again.” I could just never allow myself to break like that for fear that I would never recover from the sadness I have about some of the things that have happened in my life.
My eyes were opened to the fact that I have never fully understood why God loves a broken and contrite heart. A broken heart doesn’t mean sadness, humiliation, or utter discouragement. A person can experience all of these things and still not be broken. What it does mean is that my self-life has been exposed and its hold broken by the Spirit’s power. Brokenness is an ongoing process where daily the Spirit is revealing the areas of my life where my old nature is still alive and well. God has to show us where our fleshy ways of thinking and acting still have a hold on us, so that He can help us break free of them and experience a victorious life. True brokenness is loosing all faith in our own abilities, abandoning all dependence on the resources this life can offer, and letting go of the outward appearances that we are have it all figured out to cling to the Spirit of God, as if to a life line.
I am wondering if maybe, just maybe you’ve had the same picture in your mind about a broken heart. Your heart ripped to shreds, in a million pieces with no hope that you would ever recover and put the pieces back together. But that’s not God’s idea of a broken heart. He wants us to be fully free of the muck that holds us back from experiencing all that He desires for us! When I fully understood what true brokenness is, I was ready to start embracing it for the very first time in my life! My prayer is that you can, too!
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