What does God do to make our broken hearts whole again? Well, let’s think about our deepest needs. We all need at least three things to experience health and wholeness. We need a sturdy story, promising possibilities, and renewed relationships. The first great need is for a sturdy story. The story you believe about yourself shapes your identity, your idea of who you are. Let me just ask: Who are you? You may think of yourself as the person who is married to so—and—so, or the person with such—and—such a career, or the parent of this and that child. But who are you, really? Who are you if your mate dies or leaves you? Who are you if your career falls apart? Who are you when your children move out of the house or turn against you? Or maybe you’re a victim of abuse. You may have moods that make you totally different from one day to the next. Some people even develop multiple personalities to cope with abuse. Who are you? Are you just a bundle of moods bouncing from day to day and from one event to the next? Or is there a story that can help you understand your world and establish your own identity? Whether you’ve been through a major change in your life, or you’re dealing with the aftereffects of abuse, or you’re just trying to figure out who you are and where you fit in this world, you need a sturdy story——and God gives you one. In the Bible God faith gives you a story that shows the big picture, and faith in God gives you a place in that story. God gives us the true story of where everything comes from: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth“ (Genesis 1:1). God gives us the true story of who we are as human beings: we’re not accidents or junk; God made us in his image and designed us for eternity. God gives us the true story of why so many things go wrong: human sin has brought dreadful evil and devastating damage and death into God’s creation and into our own lives. But that’s not the end of the story. God also gives us the true story of how he set out to rescue us from our ruin. He gives us the true story of his love and his mighty acts among his people throughout history. He gives us the true story of his mightiest acts of all in the death and resurrection of Jesus. He gives us the true story of the church, the family of God. He gives us a happy ending to the story: a heavenly home for all who belong to his family. And by faith that story becomes your story. This is the only story big enough and strong enough and sure enough to build your life on. If you don’t have a story that makes sense of the world and of your own life, you will feel confused, unsure, and fragmented. You need the gospel story. You can’t write your own story; you need access to the story God has written. You can’t define your own character; you need the character God has chosen for you. God gives you all that when he gives you the gift of faith in the true story revealed in the Bible. Through faith God gives you the confidence that your own story is part of his grand story and plan to work all things for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28). Your parents, your career, your spouse, your children——all have a place in your story, but they’re not your whole story. Your sins and failures and heartbreaks have a place in the unfolding of your story, but they don’t get the last word. God does. Believe the story God gives you in the Bible. Trust in the Lord Jesus as the main character in your story. Even when many aspects of your life are changing, even when things happen that you can’t understand, even when your very personality is shaken, faith provides a sturdy story that helps make sense of life and gives you an identity and a purpose. The bigger your troubles have been, the more God’s power shines forth in giving you victory. The worse your sins have been, the more God’s mercy is magnified when he forgives and transforms you. Whatever chapters have already been written, Christ can make your story a good one. Count on it. That brings us to the second thing we all need: promising possibilities. We need a future. We need to expect the best. In other words, we need hope. When you’ve been through a horrible trauma or a tragic loss, you may feel like you’ll never be happy again. Counseling centers are full of people who feel only darkness and depression and despair, who feel they have no future. How does God meet this need? God gives us promising possibilities, possibilities based on his promises and not on our immediate circumstances. This doesn’t mean we won’t have our share of sadness. We still have troubles, and we still cry, because we’re still living in a broken world. Jesus says, “In this world you will have trouble.“ He doesn’t say you might have trouble. He says, “You will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world“ (John 16:33). The Bible says, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all“ (Psalm 34:18—19). God promises to rescue his people and give a brighter future. After a time of grief, loss and devastation, God gives new energy and a fresh sense that life is worth living. And these renewals of hope are just a small taste of the great renewal to come. The Lord promises a grand future for his people, when every tear will be wiped away and all things will be made new. Jesus’ resurrection is the proof that nothing can stop God from keeping his promise. Even death itself can’t destroy the future God has in mind for his people. No matter how dark your situation, no matter how final it all seems, the God of resurrection comes to you with promising possibilities, with the gift of a hope that can’t be quenched. The Bible says, “Our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us“ (Romans 8:18). God’s gift of hope doesn’t always take away our sadness right away, but it does help us to see a brighter future. A third need we all have is renewed relationships. Or, to put it another way, we need love. It’s an awful thing to be alone, to be close to nobody, to have no one who really understands you. One reason so many people in our society go to professional therapists is that they don’t have any real friends they can trust with their hurts and their deepest secrets. Many of these people would never need a paid professional if they had someone they could trust to sit down with them and listen and care about them. A therapist often serves the function of a paid friend, the one person in your life who takes the time to listen and care. Therapy often fills a gap left by a lack of relationships, and a good deal of therapy is devoted to discovering what damaged relationships may lie at the root of a person’s problems. When you’re carrying a load of guilt over something you’ve done in the past or some sin that you keep on doing, it spoils your relationship with God and poisons your relationships with others. When you’re carrying around resentment over the way someone else treated you, it spoils your relationships and eats at your insides and threatens to destroy you. How can you get beyond the bad things you’ve done? How can you get beyond the bad things that have been done to you? How can shattered relationships be restored so that you can live in love? The only answer is the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus died to take away the sins of the world and dispose of the garbage that pollutes our relationships. The cross is where God dumps all the garbage that exists in your relationship to him, and the cross is also where you need to dump all the garbage that exists in your relationship to others. The cross is the place of forgiveness, the place to dump all your guilt and all your resentment. Much of our heartbreak isn’t just due to something bad that’s happened to us. Often it also involves something bad we’ve done ourselves. For example, if you’re a single looking for love and you go to bed with someone who then dumps you, you have been sinned against by that person, but you have also sinned against yourself by not saving yourself for marriage as God commands. You can’t just blame the person who dumped you. You also need to take responsibility for yourself and for your sin. That can be hard. Often we’re too proud or too angry or too afraid to come clean. But Jesus changes all that. He paid the price to restore and renew your relationship with God. You don’t have to bring anything to God except yourself and your guilty, broken heart. The Bible says, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise“ (Psalm 51:17). God’s love sets you free from the sin of self—righteousness and gives you the grace to admit your sins and to ask for forgiveness, knowing that God will accept you in Christ. God’s love also sets you free from the sin of self—protectiveness, of never daring to love too deeply or risk being hurt, and gives you the grace to let go of resentment and fear and dare to love again. What a healing takes place when God sets you free from guilt to enjoy his love again! And what a healing takes place when God sets you free from resentment and empowers you to love others and to experience their love! Restored relationships are God’s greatest gift of all, the gift of love. Once God begins healing your broken heart, he also uses you to bring healing to others. It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself, to think only of your own pain, but once God begins to heal you, you look beyond yourself to the needs of others. They too need a sturdy story, and you can share your faith. They too need promising possibilities, and you can share your hope. They too need renewed relationships, and you can share the love that flows from God. Faith, hope, and love——this is God’s medicine for shattered spirits. This is the healing touch of the God of galaxies and broken hearts, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 07:22:18 +0000
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