The Principle of Brokenness: Embracing God’s Path

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Welcome to the InTouch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, October 20th. Today, you’ll hear scriptural truth that helps us come to terms with pain, suffering, and hardship. Our series begins as we explore the principle of brokenness.

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Most people do not understand what the Bible teaches about brokenness. And the last thing they want is a good case of it. And so what they do is they try to avoid it at any expense, at all costs, run the other direction. And in a day when there is so much talk about prosperity, and God healing all of our sicknesses, and God wanting us to be happy and everything just perfect, I want to tell you the message of brokenness does not appeal to those who do not want God’s best, but who want some kind of personal satisfaction. But here’s what I want to say to you. In this series, you’re going to understand what God has been doing in some areas of your life that you’ve wondered, God, why do you keep on letting this happen? Likewise, you’re going to be able to look back and see some times and experiences and some hurtful times, times of pain and suffering that you’ve complained, questioned God, doubted God, complained to your friends, argued with God about it. You’re going to be able to look back and thank Him for continuing the process even though you didn’t like it. So I want to encourage you, my friend, that you’ll not miss a single one of these messages because here is the heart of what God is trying to do in all of our life. And I believe if you’ll stay with us, you’ll understand something about your life, about suffering, pain, about sickness, hardships, trials, and hurts that maybe you’ve not quite understood. And I want to begin by turning to John chapter 12. And if you’ll turn there with me, Jesus is beginning to talk to his apostles about his death. And in two verses of this passage, he sort of lays the groundwork of this whole series. The title of this series is Brokenness, the Weight of Blessing. And the title of this message is Brokenness, the Principle. But look, if you will, in verse 24 and 25 of John chapter 12. Now, let’s ask for just a moment and think about what do we mean by brokenness in the light of these two verses? Because God, I want you to listen carefully. Because God has purpose to bring every area of our life into submission to His will, He continually removes from us every hindrance that would keep us from being fully surrendered to His will and and fully trusting Him. You see, God wants us to learn to live in full trust. As long as I depend upon anything else in my life, it isn’t trust in Him, it is trust within myself. Brokenness is God’s method of dealing with a self-life. What is the self-life? The self-life is that desire within me that desires to live independent of God. It is that inner desire of independence. Now, All of us have those areas of our life at times we don’t want to surrender. And my friend, God has drawn a bullseye in that area of your life. He has targeted that for brokenness because He’s not going to let you alone. One of the reasons that some people go through great trial and hardship in their life is that God is breaking them in a given area. Now already, many of you, most of you, you already know what it is because the Spirit of God has already surfaced it in your mind. You know what it is. Maybe when it first popped up in your mind, you said, oh, not that. And there it is. There it is. You can’t get rid of it. God has drawn a circle around it. And He says, I’ve targeted that in your life because God knows that that area already which you have not submitted is hindering God’s purpose and design, great, beautiful design for your life. But we’re afraid to give it up. We’re afraid to lose control. We’re afraid our needs will not be met. Our desires will not be fulfilled. We won’t be contented. And we’ll have to go through life lacking and missing and not experiencing the things in life that we want to experience. My friend, God has targeted all kinds of self-reliance and self-confidence. He wants us living in, walking, depending, resting in, relying upon Him for every aspect of our life. In that way and that way alone can God live out to the fullest all that He is within us. It is not adding to and subtracting from. It is Christ within you living through you the life. but sometime we have difficulty with that and so I want to explain the necessity and how this takes place if you will look for a moment back in John chapter 12 and notice this verse he said he who loses his life will save it but he who loves it’s going to lose it that is if I’m going to attach myself and refuse to surrender I’m going to lose the best But if I’m willing to hate it, to die to it, to let it go, I’m going to win. I’m going to gain. Now, God has said this in different ways in several passages. Look, if you will, in Matthew chapter 10 for a moment. Verse 37 of Matthew 10. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. He who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. He who has found his life shall lose it, and he who has lost his life for my sake… She’ll find it. Now, all of that sounds like contradictions, but the truth of what he’s saying is this. I must be willing to die to the self that is within me. That does not mean that we have no personality and no life, but I mean that part of me that is independent of God, that principle of sin that is still within me. He says we must be willing to die to that. Now, I want you to turn to 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. And I want us to see what God is referring to and how this takes place in a person’s life. So we know that he’s talking about dying to something, giving up, surrendering, yielding, coming to submission to, holding on, I lose, letting go, I win. In 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, verse 23, here’s his prayer, Paul’s prayer. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete without blame at the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, we are made up, truly, as he says in this passage, of body, soul, and spirit. With our body… We relate to our environment. We have five senses. We smell, we see. We taste, we hear, we touch. That’s the way we relate to our environment. He says, your body, your soul, that is our mind, our will, our emotions, our conscience, our consciousness. And with our soul, we relate to ourselves. We have a self-consciousness, awareness of ourselves, and we also relate to one another. We can laugh with each other, love one another, receive each other’s love, or we can become jealous and angry. But our emotions are there, our thought patterns, our consciousness, our conscience, that which warns us of danger. That’s a part of man. But then there is man’s spirit. He says, your spirit, soul, and body. The spirit of man is that inner man. That is, that part of us with which we relate to Almighty God. When you receive the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, the Bible says the Holy Spirit came to indwell you. What did He do? The Spirit of God, your having been forgiven through the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God came into your life to unite with your spirit, to bring to life within you a spirit that now can relate to God so that you can relate to Him. Now that you’re a believer and dwelt with the Holy Spirit, you are sensitive to God. You are aware of Him. You can talk with Him. He speaks with you. You open the words. You understand the Word of God. The Spirit of God gives you guidance and direction, convicts you of sin. There’s a whole new life. You’ve been born again. Your spirit has been born again. There’s new life, a new spirit. Now, by your spirit, you relate to God. By your soul, you relate to yourself and to others. And with your body, you relate to the world. The essence of brokenness is this, that the Holy Spirit who lives within me, now… is able to exercise the will of the father through my soul through my body into life that is no longer responding to life based on the senses no longer responding to life based on self-will, but now responding to life based on and in submission to the Holy Spirit who lives within us. Brokenness is not an instantaneous act on the part of God, though it can be. And it may be once in a while, but most of the time it is a process that begins over conviction over some area of my life that God has zeroed in on. And then he begins to do some breaking. Now what do we mean by breaking? Well, you think about what is a part of our life. All of us have those areas of our life that we depend upon unless God has broken us. We depend upon our past experiences. We depend upon our abilities and our gifts and our talents. Some people depend upon their status, their position, their power, their authority, their relationships. Some people put their trust in their looks. or where they live, or their position in society. My friend, whatever you put your reliance on, God has targeted to shatter and to break and to remove in order that your dependence and your reliance would be upon him and him alone. God wants no other gods in your life, no competition in your life for your obedience and allegiance and devotion and love and worship of him and whatever’s there, he’s going to break one way or the other. My friend, how does a person become productive in their Christian life? Only when we are willing for God to break everything in which we have placed any reliance, any dependence, and any of self. Remember what I said in the beginning? Brokenness is God’s method of dealing with the self-life, which is that part of me that wants to act independently of God. Turn, if you will, to 2 Corinthians chapter 4 for a moment. Listen to what Paul says in this passage. In the 16th verse of 2 Corinthians chapter 4, he says, But though our outer man, this physical body, is decaying, it’s getting older, yet our inner man is being renewed, what? Day by day. How? By momentary light afflictions. Now, they may last for years, but against the background of eternity, it’s only light. For momentary light affliction is producing for us… Something that is weighty in value. Far beyond all comparison. While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. You see, the pain and the suffering and the heartache and the difficulties and the tears and the weeping that we go through, we thank God. Why all of this? Where’s the joy and where’s the peace? God, my friend, zeroes in on that area of our life that needs to be broken. You know the people that God has the most difficult time with breaking? Those who are the most gifted. Those who are the most talented, those who have a characteristic of being determined, those who have the most self-confidence, those who have the most things going for them as far as the world is concerned, those are the kind of people God has the most trouble with because they have so much to rely upon that appears, listen, that appears to be getting them through life. What they don’t see is what they’re missing. And so they hold on to the reins of their life. Lest God, if they give up all reins of their life and become a slave to Jesus, who wants to be a slave? Any wise person desires to be a slave of the living Christ? Remember who you were made for. He who is living within us deserves and demands the right and the authority to have everything else about us under such control that He at any given moment is able to express His life through us, through our lips and through our eyes and through our hands and through our feet, through our body, through our thinking, through our emotions, so that you and I are not merely reflections, But we are living, walking expressions of the life of Christ. Now think about this. He says that in the eternity future, that you and I will be trophies. Think about that. You and I will be trophies of the grace of God. And because we’re trophies of the grace of God in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, His power to save, we will forever be Be a heavenly reminder of all the angels of the grace and love of God. In this life, we are preparing for the life to come. In this life, we’re going to school. In this life, God has us on the potter’s wheel. Now, you know, when the potter throws a lump of clay, and so often I’ve seen this, throws a lump of clay on the wheel, and with a gentle touch of his fingers and his hands, and maybe a little paddle here and there, he forms a beautiful vase. If he forms it and it doesn’t come out exactly right, you know what he does? He crushes it, throws it back on the wheel, and goes through the same process again. What does God do in your life and my life? Whenever and wherever and however He sees any area of independence which He knows will hinder His great purpose in your life and mine, He throws us back on the wheel, back into the crucible of brokenness, and He keeps on breaking and fragmenting and shattering and pruning and chiseling away at our life, breaking again and again and again until He has formed us in the likeness of His Son. That’s what the Christian life’s all about. It is becoming. The doing is an overflow of the becoming. If Christ Jesus has brought every area of our life into submission to His will, we don’t have to worry about whether we’re going to do. When my will has been saddle-busted, I belong heart, soul, mind, body, spirit. Everything belongs to Him. Then it’s up to Him. You know why you argue with God? Because you have an independent streaking that hasn’t been broken. My friend, when I look at the Bible and read what God says about the Christian life, I’m awed by what He says versus how we act. And God says, I’ve zeroed in on every unbroken, unsurrendered, ungiven area. Brokenness is God’s method of dealing with the spirit of independence within our life. Have you wondered why you’re going through such difficulty and hardship and heartache and trial? Oh, you’d like to blame it on somebody else because it’s much easier to do it that way. But my friend, could it be that God… has zeroed in on an area of your life, and he has the pressure on, and he just sort of keeps tightening the vice in love by his grace, never too much and never too quickly, but he keeps tightening the vice, putting the pressure on in order to break you from self-dependency, self-will, self-sufficiency, that independent streak that God knows is the greatest deterrence to your becoming what God wants you to be. Now, this gets real simple. Either I’m going to surrender and let God have His way and live my life discovering what God wants to do and what He wants to provide, or I’m going to very ignorantly, selfishly, blindly, mistakenly hold on to my little bit for fear of loss and miss God’s great blessing. So I want to ask you one last question. What are you holding on to that you’re willing to keep on holding on to and live your life missing God’s best over something that is temporal and passing and insignificant? compared to what God has offered you.

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Thank you for listening to Brokenness, The Principle. For more inspirational messages like this one, visit our online 24-7 station. And if you’d like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by intouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.