Brokenness

A while back my pastor gave a very stirring sermon in which he ended it by asking if anyone was ready to be broken. The congregation responded whole-heartedly. I started puzzling over the whole concept of brokenness and what it all means.

So what is brokenness? It is being hurt, not whole. When you break a plate it is no longer usable. It is in pieces. It's purpose is now gone. When a relationship has a break up it is no more. There is pain. When a car breaks down it can no longer move. It is useless until it is fixed.

When we ask for brokenness what are we asking for? It seems like we are asking to be hurt, to be torn apart so that we are no longer useful. We are asking to be without purpose.
But isn't purpose the very thing that we all seek. We want to know what the point of our life is and we sure don't want to be hurt. We don't want to be useless.

When we seek brokenness we are not pursuing that as an end in itself. If that were the case, we would have a church full of people in terrible pain wasting their lives away and doing nothing about it. Brokenness is the beginning! It is the concept of something being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt. But why fix what isn't broken.

Aha!
It is broken. See, a long time ago a certain couple hanging out in the garden disobeyed God. This error forever changed man's relationship with God. Romans talks about how sin entered the world through one man. When that sin came upon mankind a distance was put between us and our Creator. Adam and Eve lost a piece of themselves and everyone since then has been born without that piece.

When we look at the Genesis account the first thing that Adam and Eve notice was their nakedness. This was because in that moment the source of their value and meaning was stripped from them. Before, their appearance didn't matter because God poured His love into them and they knew that everything they were was God's. I think that when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God they became separate individuals and therefore, they felt that their meaning came from them personally. You can read more about this theory in Donald Miller's book Searching for God Knows What.

So we were broken. Because of that sin we are not whole. Unfortunately, we continue to sin which makes the break worse. It's kind of like we got a bad cut on our arm and instead of cleaning it we throw filth into the wound. This festers so much that disease spreads through the arm and can eventually kill a person. The only way to stop this disease is to cut off the arm. We must break the broken to be free.

When we pray to God for brokenness we are asking Him to get rid of all the filth that has built up over time. Before we ask for God's cleansing we often don't even realize just how screwed up we are. We have lived in disease for so long that everything has to be stripped down and started over. That is why Scripture says that they old is gone and the new has come. Ephesians 4:23 speaks of being "made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self."

I think like with any break, asking God for brokenness will hurt. Parts of you will be exposed that you never knew about. But I think that ultimately the reward is worth it. If we allow ourselves to be broken, to have who we think we are completely stripped away, then we will emerge a new and better person. It is the same way with a broken arm. Sometimes it has to be re-broken for it to heal properly.

Are you ready to be broken? Am I ready to be broken?