Please Lord, break me so You can make me

Photo by John Hult on Unsplash

We never know this truth until we’re stricken with it, and the very thing that smashes us apart is the putting of us back together. But oh, how rare it is that we’ll be broken to that point of submission to God. What sounds sadistic is actually the polar opposite.

Only when life leaves us with no alternative
but to go to God — when He is our only refuge —
do we truly begin relying on Him and knowing Him.

Only when life breaks us
does God begin to make us.

When life breaks us
we only have to be honest,
and God will pour His mercy
into us, and then we will know Him.

Below is a poem that puts it a different way:

When life leaves us
feeling short-changed,
when life as it was
has been rearranged,
we’re left with a situation
only we can own,
all be it that God means
it so we can be grown.

Of course, there’s the reality
we hate this cup!
to drink from it now
leaves us feeling all mixed up,
but that cup’s ours
unlike the one Jesus drank,
Because He drank that cup
we have Him to thank.

Nothing did He gain
as a reward,
apart from being risen
to a life Father restored,
so that’s our hint
to enjoy the Spirit anew,
from our heart comes a glint
when our resurrection’s true.

Rearrangement is for growth, when we can go only one of two ways: bitterness or betterness.

All we have to do is be honest about the situation we’ve been dealt. Healing is the sure transaction of God as we courageously do what any third party would commend, and that’s because they don’t have to enter the cauldron. Get on with the work of reconciliation, which is always a personal transformation through God well before it’s a transaction of reconciliation with fellow human beings.

We never pray, please Lord break me so you can make me, beforehand. Only afterwards are we given the wisdom we could assuredly not have otherwise.

We hate the cup of rearrangement that has been placed into our hand. But as we grip it we’re faced with the glaring disparity that Jesus too held a cup, and that cup was our sin, and He died that we might be saved. And now He offers us that death to have, so His resurrection life might too be ours.

We don’t seem to gain much in being broken by life, but afterwards we’re resurrected through the chastening of discipline — a blessing we would never have sought out.

We can never quite believe how God makes us through the process of breaking us, but having experienced it, we know unequivocally He ordains anything we suffer to be for our benefit.

And having experienced this miracle of resurrection once breeds belief in us that we’re no longer afraid to be broken again and again, because through brokenness is incomparable gold of connection and intimacy with God.

Only what is derelict commands restoration.