Brokenhearted

What compels you? What drives you?

I think that most of us, if we are brutally honest with ourselves, given the time and quiet to consider, can probably find the event(s) and/or person(s) that have shaped the core of who we are. Often enough, it is probably heartache, pain, loss, or failure that pierced us through our heart that is the keystone to who we have become.

We are, all of us, brokenhearted. It's a product of the Fall. Sin has placed such a burden on this world that, as Paul says:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

Romans 8:22-23 [NIV]

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.

Isaiah 61:1(b) [NIV]

When Isaiah talks about the brokenhearted, God is not using metaphor. The Hebrew is leb shabar (leb for "heart," shabar for "broken"). Isaiah uses the word shabar to describe a bush whose "twigs are dry, they are broken off" (27:11); to describe the idols of Babylon lying "shattered on the ground" (21:9), as a statue shatters into a thousand pieces when you knock it off the table; or to describe a broken bone(38:13). God is speaking literally here, He says, "Your heart is now in many pieces. I want to heal it." (Eldredge, Waking the Dead,132)

The wonderful promise from God is that we do not have to be driven by those turning points, or by that event or person that has colored our perception of who we are, who God is, and what I should be doing with my life.

My prayer is that God would reveal to me those event(s) and people that have shaped me and enable me to refocus my understanding of them with His Truth. In so doing, perhaps, I can learn to be driven by my love for Christ instead of my fears, my failures, and my faults.

He's already set us free from the prison of our old heart, our sin nature. It seems that my problem, and maybe yours as well, is that I keep walking back into that old cell and sitting down. I've imprisoned myself by choice. Instead of enjoying the freedom that He paid for so extravagantly, I'm stumbling around in a prison cell with an unlocked door.

What about you?