Posted by
Virginia Daddy on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 10:09:27 AM
I am reading a book, Brokenness, by my current pastor, Lon Solomon. Actually, it is his only book, and while I have not finished it, it brings up a concept that I find very intriguing. That concept is brokenness and its application to reaching God.
A little bio on Lon, first. As he has been the pastor of McLean Bible Church since 1980, he has seen its rise to its size and influence now, but in 1992, he and his wife bore a daughter. This daughter, Jill, soon starting having innumerable and uncontrollable seizures and it has caused her to be permanently disabled. The journey from the joy of having a daughter after three boys to the pitfalls of constantly caring for an unknown ailment brought Lon to his knees. Since then, he became aware that God broke him from relying on his own skills and to rely on God's for him to reach his goals of reaching DC to reach the world.
His concept is really quite simple: God must break every Christfollower before they can go on to fully serve Him. Every believer must be destroyed, so to speak, before God can lift them up and work fully through them to acheive His goals. In searching the Bible, one is hard pressed to find an example of a person working for the glory of God to not have been through trials and utterly humiliated or battered first. From Moses and Abraham to Peter and Paul, God breaks us of our will so He can instill His own.
But the application of this idea is very difficult. And this is where I am in his book, so I don't wish to go too far in that direction. But I would like to discuss some of the idea of brokenness in our lives. Since I have been reading, I am wondering if I have been truly broken? I don't know. I don't think so, even though I know I have seen some valleys. I don't think I have been truly broken. But I think that God will break me, and that scares the heck out of me. I don't want it. I want to be a voice for God on my own, with where I am and where I will go, but I want to go up, not down. But this is exactly what Lon says we all want and what we must avoid. To him, we must allow God to tear us down, because only then will we know how much we need God. He quotes Charles Stanley when he says that we don't know how much we need God until he's all we have left.
But I wonder how many of us truly allow ourselves to be broken, completely and fully. I bet like me, most of us are scared of it, or confused by it. Lon actually talks about some of the impediments to brokenness, but I think virtually all of us resist being broken. Why? Why do we resist God's will? For me, it has been my own pride and my own desire to contol my life. I hate to feel out of control. I bet whoever reads have there own reasons, too.
Getting battered and bruised. Being sent to the wilderness for forty years (as Moses did), being called out on a weak heart and blatant lie by God (as Peter was), seeing all my work burned to the ground (as was Moody), or fathering a child who doctors said would not live beyond age 10 cannot be fun. But is it necessary? I think there is truth to the idea, and wonder if I am willing to be broken.