The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
Psalm 34:18
If we’re in search of a spiritual breakthrough, we have two options. First, we can choose to be broken. We can say, “Lord, I want a blessing and a breakthrough. Please break me—strip me of my sinfulness and destructive independence. I’m scared, but I trust that You love me enough to know what I can handle.”
The second option is for God to break us without our permission. This option takes a lot longer, it usually hurts a lot more, and it delays the blessing and the breakthrough. God didn’t redeem us to leave us alone and let us miss all of His blessings. He loves us too much for that. He placed a new, wonderful life inside us, and He wants to sanctify us and make us more like His Son so that we may experience it to the fullest.
Many of us want to simply audit the Christian life as if it were a college course that we sit in on without doing the homework, taking the tests, and being graded. We don’t want to do all the hard work that it requires. But if Christ is truly Lord of our lives, there will be work to show that we are serving Him. There will be evidence that we’re taking the course He’s teaching and that it’s making an impact on our lives. Brokennness is one of the lessons we must go through in order to gain greater spiritual maturity and in order for Christ to be made known in our lives.
It’s important to remember that the God who breaks us is also our Father. He is our Lord. He loves us. There are a million ways He can teach us what we need to know. There are different ways that He will break us down and strip us of our pride in order to teach us that we can trust Him. God is God, and He has the right to strip us of everything in us that’s not like Him so that He can transform us into His image. He wants to give us blessings, but He wants to change us in the process.
