Brokenness: The Promise

SPEAKER 02 : 0:01

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, October 27th. At times, God works in our lives to break through our willful, selfish attitudes. Though the process may bring pain, His ultimate purpose is always for our good. Please join us for an uplifting message in today’s podcast titled, Brokenness, the Promise.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:25

Brokenness is God’s method of dealing with the self-life, which is that part of us that desires to act independently of God. He targets those areas that are hindering His purpose and will for our life. Then, having targeted them, He arranges the circumstances for our brokenness. He chooses the tools by which we are to be broken. And then He controls the pressure as we are broken. And each facet of our life is brought into submission to His will. One of the reasons that brokenness is a painful experience, oftentimes causing suffering, is simply that… God begins to deal with us in brokenness on a level that is very deep. He deals with us on a deep emotional level. He deals with us on a deep spiritual level. And as a result, He is after what most of us do not want to give up. God is ultimately after the control of our life. And the last thing we want to surrender is control of ourselves to anybody, God included. So this is part of our series on Brokenness, the Way to Blessing, and the title of this message is Brokenness, the Promise. And as each message we have taken a biblical character to illustrate the principle, so today we choose the Apostle Paul. As I look at the life of the Apostle Paul, I see two areas in his life that I believe God had to break. It is the same two areas he has had to break in my life and that he intends to break in every person’s life. One of those you will find in Romans chapter 7. Look there for a moment if you will. Verse 14. Verse 14. The Apostle Paul had to come to the conclusion in his life that he couldn’t live the Christian life. Otherwise, he would have depended upon his own strength, upon his own flesh, upon his own background, upon his own heritage, upon his own education, upon his own determination, upon his own aggressive spirit, upon his own determined will, his own depth of commitment. He would have done the same thing everybody else does until God drives us through brokenness to the helpless end of ourselves in despair to say to him, God, I cannot. I am a failure when it comes to living the Christian life. The second area in which he had to be broken is found in 2 Corinthians chapter 12. That God says that he had given them this tremendous revelation. But with it came a thorn in the flesh. Something that Paul suffered tremendously for. For he says in three periods of time. This does not mean three nights before he went to bed. But three seasons more than likely of fasting and praying. Pleading, begging, beseeching God to deliver him from this. He says God sent it to him. Verse 7. In order to protect him. To keep him from exalting himself, there was given to him a thorn in the flesh. To keep me from exalting myself. And treated him three times. He says, God says, my grace is sufficient. Therefore, his conclusion was, after pleading before God to deliver him from what appeared to be a hindrance in his life and a hindrance in his ministry, he said, verse 9, insults, distresses, persecutions, difficulties for Christ’s sake. But when I am weak, I have learned this awesome, important lesson that when I’m at my weakest, that’s when the power of God is released through me with its greatest intensity. God gives us Some wonderful assurance when we go through valleys of pain and suffering, when God is stripping us of anything and everything upon which we would depend so that pride and arrogance may be removed from our life. So if you’ll jot these down, because the first thing I want you to notice here is this. And that is that God only breaks us in love. God never breaks us in anger. God never breaks us in wrath. It is always out of love. Somebody may look at the life of the Apostle Paul and say, well, the reason God broke him was look at all the sin he committed and all the people, all of God’s people that he had harmed and punished. No. The day Jesus Christ met the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road, He saved him. And at that moment, and from that moment all the way back to the beginning, God forgave his sin once and once and for all, and he never suffered as a result of that sin. God breaks us out of love. That is, He sends into our life thorns. He sends into our life those experiences that break down our resistance and our rebellion and our self-will in order to bring every area of our body, soul, and spirit in submission to Him so that our walk will be holy and our work will be effective. Now, let me distinguish between three words that are very significant. I want you to be sure to understand this. Brokenness is God’s discipline in the life of the believer in which he is dealing usually with attitudes in our life that he must change. But what he has primarily in mind is future service. So brokenness is God’s discipline in our life. in which to bring about a change so that future usefulness is God’s priority. In chastisement, God again disciplines the believer. But what he has primarily in mind at that point is the immediate change in order to correct something wrong in that person’s life, to walk holy before God now. Though, of course, always the future’s in mind, but primarily now. God chastens us now in order we might walk holy before Him. He breaks us. What He has in mind primarily is future usefulness. Now, the word punishment that oftentimes we confuse with brokenness, chastisement, and punishment. Discipline, that is chastisement and brokenness for believers. Punishment for unbelievers only. Punishment is an expression of God’s wrath upon unbelievers because the unbeliever has rejected the only sin bearer who can take his wrath. Therefore, when the unbeliever sins against God, the unbeliever must realize he’s going to be the object of God’s wrath because the blood of Jesus Christ has been rejected. The cross has been rejected. No one else to bear his sins. So the unbeliever must bear his own sins. So therefore, the unbeliever is punished. The believer is chastised, and the believer is broken for future usefulness before God. Very important you look at chapter 4 of 2 Corinthians, and look, if you will, in the 16th, 17th, 18th verses, verse 16. Therefore, he’s spoken about difficulties they’ve had. Therefore, we do not lose heart. We don’t get discouraged and give up. in the conflict but though our outer man is decaying this physical body it suffers disease and sickness and it’s getting older yet our inner man that is our spirit is being renewed day by day and strengthened resurrection for momentary light affliction things that we’re going through is producing for us something what is it producing it’s producing something that cannot be seen he says it’s producing for us An eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. Building character. Forming Christ-likeness in our spirit. Shaping us into the mold that God wants us to be in. Preparing us for future service for Him. While we look not at the things which are seen, that’s what the world looks at. The believer is to look at what cannot be seen with the naked eye. But the things which are not seen with the naked eye. For the things which are seen with the eye are temporal, passing away. But the things which are not seen are eternal. So that… When God takes us through a breaking process, we’re not to focus on what we see happening to us, but we’re to ask God, Lord, what do you have in mind? What do you see? What is it that you’re looking at? All I can see and feel is hurt, pain, suffering, rejection, persecution, or harassment, or separation, or whatever it might be. But God, what do you see? God sees through all the fog and the haze of those things, and He sees what His great objective is in that given incident’s In that given period of time, in that valley experience, God sees exactly what He’s up to. And therefore, brokenness is always an expression of God’s love, and that is the key to understanding. Secondly, God sets limitations on our brokenness. That is, when God begins to target something in your life, He doesn’t just turn you over to Satan and let Satan have a heyday in your life. God sets limitations upon our periods of brokenness. Now let me explain, and it’s very important you understand what I’m going to say at this time. Now, here is rule one with God in breaking us. Rule one is this. God’s process of brokenness ceases at the point in which our spirit will be broken. God isn’t in the process of breaking our spirit. He wants to break our will. When our will is broken, stubborn, rebellious, have it my way will is broken, then what happens? Body, soul, and spirit are offered in submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. So rule number one with God is the breaking process of sending into our life whatever is necessary to bring body, soul, and spirit in submission to Him. That breaking process ceases at the moment or before the spirit is broken. Rule number two is this. that the process of brokenness ceases at the point in which it would damage God’s great purpose for your life. That is, if God allowed you to be broken and shattered and the pain and suffering be such that it would absolutely destroy God’s purpose for your life, then he would have wasted the opportunity and that wouldn’t be in God’s nature. And then I want you to notice the third thing, and that is God… will deepen our understanding when we are broken. As God takes us through the breaking process and stripping us of those things that we’ve depended upon before, the first thing that He does, we get a whole different perspective on who God is. Does He not say, my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts? My ways are not your ways, nor my thoughts your thoughts. In the process of being broken and stripped of all those things that we depend upon rather than him, what does he do? But he opens their eyes to see the working, the ways of God. Not just reading scriptures, but we see the ways of God, how he works in our life. we get a deeper understanding of his love what it means to accept us on the basis of nothing within ourselves but just the fact that he’s a loving father we understand how he accepts us on the basis of the cross we understand his patience and love and kindness and forbearance taught us that he puts up with us while he’s in the process of breaking us but there’s a second direction in which we begin to understand that’s ourselves Once the process of brokenness takes place in our life and He begins to strip us of all those things that would hinder His great purpose in our life, we begin to see things about ourselves that we’ve never seen before. We begin to be able to trace the avenues of thought patterns that we’ve had since we were children growing up. Those thought patterns, they were placed there by our parents when they taught us things that they thought were right. but have devastated us. Placed there by our teachers who rejected us and didn’t even realize that they were doing it. Placed there by our friends who shut us out. Placed there by circumstances that caused great pain and upheaval and misunderstanding and frustration and anxiety and fears in our life. But all of that leads to the third area of direction and that’s this. We begin to look at other people differently. You know what happens? Your critical spirit somehow just fades away. This aggressive criticism and negative attitude and nobody else is ever right and everybody’s wrong and life has given you a bad show. All of a sudden you begin looking at other people differently. Then the fourth thing I want you to notice here. God never deserts us in our seasons of brokenness. Now this is very important that you understand what I’m going to say. Now, you and I know he says in Hebrews chapter 13, I’ll never leave you nor forsake you. But I can look back at some times in my life when God was breaking me, when the pain was so intense and the suffering so overwhelming that Though I knew in my mind he was there, in my emotions and in my spirit, I thought, God, you have deserted me. Now, I knew better. That’s what I felt. In my mind, I held on to the truth. But in my emotions, I felt, God, where are you? Knowing at the very moment I asked where he was. Well, let’s move on. He’ll never desert us. Number five, God is always patient with us through our experience of brokenness. You know why? He knows where we came from. He knows what’s been going on in our life. He knows how long you’ve been thinking the things you’re thinking. That’s your train of thought. That’s the way you’ve been thinking for years and years and years. And so God begins to work with And He doesn’t do it suddenly like that. Brokenness is usually a process, and sometimes it is a process that lasts a very, very long time. And then the last thing I want you to jot down, and this is the only promise that has condition. God will lead you to victory through brokenness. It may be months. It may be years. When we rebel against God’s breaking experience, we delay God. in accomplishing all that He’d like to accomplish. It may be that we forfeit many of our opportunities. And we certainly forfeit some of our reward because if you live to be 40, 50, 60, 70 years of age and finally God finally gets you, look what you’ve missed. Look at the potential to be used of God that was there that you did not utilize. And when you stand before God to be rewarded, look what will not be your reward because you refused. You see, the whole breaking process in itself is an expression of love. What is he doing? Bringing us into oneness. Look, if you will, in verse 10 of 2 Corinthians chapter 12. Therefore, I am well content with weaknesses. I’m not fighting against them anymore. Insults. I don’t try to defend myself. Distresses. Don’t try to make God explain them. Persecutions. Accept them from God. Difficulties, know that God’s working out something in my life. For Christ’s sake, for when I’m weak, then I am strong. Let me ask you a question. Do you want your Christian life to be a daily walk of intimate oneness in your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ? Warm, intimate, loving relationship? Do you want God to bring you in such a relationship with Him whereby your service for Him will be effective and glorifying to God? Not glorifying to man, but glorifying to God. If you want intimacy in your walk, effectiveness in your service, brokenness is God’s way to make that a reality. I’ll ask you one last question. Is your desire to walk in intimacy with Him and your desire to be used of Him in your business, in your home, with your children, among your friends, is it great enough for you to pray this prayer? Lord, more than I want anything in life or any other relationship, I want to walk in oneness with You. a deep intimacy. I want to be used of you effectively. And therefore, Lord Jesus, would you target whatever areas in my life that need to be dealt with? And would you break me in those areas that that oneness and that service you might fulfill in my life? Would you be willing to pray that and then remember? Whatever God does, He will only do in love. And when you’re through the valley, you’ll view the brightest sunshine and the most beautiful clouds and the brightest horizon you’ve ever known in your Christian life.

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Thank you for listening to Brokenness, The Promise. 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.