Over the past month I have done a lot of soul searching. I have had many conversations with God about where exactly I am heading. A lot of it has led me to one conclusion; I am broken. I am busted up and falling apart and in need of some help. Last week I was reading something and someone made an interesting claim. They claimed to be perfect. They said because they had accepted Jesus they had become perfect. Even more than that, they made the claim many times. It wasn’t just a wording mistake, they really believed it. It reminded me of a brickyard “preacher” that used to yell at people and tell them he had no sin in his life. He would yell at random people walking by about how they were sinners until he drew a crowd. Then when people debated him, he would tell them how they were all sinners and going to Hell. When people asked about the things he did wrong, he would tell them didn’t do anything wrong and had no sin in his life. You could never convince him that his judgmental attitude was a sin, but I think he is in for a rude awakening when he stands before God.
I don’t know how these people come to these conclusions because every time I take a good look at my life I find a list of things I should change. The Bible is pretty clear in Romans 3:23 when it tells us, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” There isn’t really any getting around that. We all fall short. We are all failures. We are all in need of some help. I am reading a devotional by Joseph Prince and he put it this way, “We, who were sinners, knew no righteousness, did no righteousness and in us was no righteousness.” Not only is righteousness something that is not in us, we don’t even know it.
That’s where Jesus comes in. He died on the cross so that we could know righteousness. He traded us our sin for His righteousness. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus didn’t know sin but he was made sin so that we who didn’t know righteousness could be made righteous. In Christ we go from being a failure to being royalty (see 1 Peter 2:9). But does that mean we are perfect? Not at all.
Even mighty kings make mistakes, just look at David (2 Samuel 11). To think that when we accept Jesus we become perfect is a terrible mistake. It takes all the glory away from God and gives it to ourselves. Romans 8:11 tells us, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesusfrom the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” God’s perfect spirit dwells on the inside of us, and it gives life to us, but it never becomes us. The only thing that is perfect in us is the spirit of God. Even Paul, who wrote a majority of the New Testament and most people view as an outstanding Christian, said this in Romans 7:18-19, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”
We are all broken, and we will always be broken. Jesus is the only one who can hold our lives together. When we learn to lean on Him, to trust in Him, to put our faith in Him, our lives are strong. When we begin to walk away from that our lives will fall apart. It is something that is so simple to write, yet so hard to put into practice. I want to feel like I am capable of handling my life, but the reality is that I’m not. I want to feel like I can take care of myself, but I can’t. I want to be able to keep my life from falling to pieces, but only Jesus can. Its a constant process of learning how to give Him control. My life may not seem incredibly good looking at my current situation, but knowing Jesus is holding it together makes it beautiful to me.
until next time…
Comment Question: How does knowing you are broken make you feel?