Difficulties
Broken for God's Service
So much of brokenness goes against what we are taught in our culture. We are taught to be self-confident, to make our plans and set our goals, to refuse to move or budge from our purposes.
Everything in our culture speaks to us in the same way that Moses' upbringing in Pharaoh's court spoke to him. God's "school" of growth for Moses is much different. In the desert Moses had to learn to be God-reliant, to let God set the agenda for his life, and to do whatever God asked him to do.
Jesus, of course, is the epitome of reliance upon God. He said to his disciples, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. . . . The words that I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 14:9-11).
Jesus was living out God's divine plan. And that is what God desired for Moses. It's also what God desires for you and me. Someone once said, "A soul is converted in a moment of time, but to become a saint takes a lifetime." Conversion happens instantly. Maturity takes many years.
So often I see Christians struggling to get to what they perceive to be the top—not only of their professions or of the social ladder, but of what they perceive to be the Christian life.
They gather and gain and accumulate and assimilate and arrange and amass—all the while building their spiritual resumes and their long list of accomplishments, perhaps with the hope that they will one day be able to hand their resume to God and say, "See what I've done for you."
God's work through brokenness calls us not to accumulate, but to discard. He calls us to get rid of this, get rid of that, rid ourselves of this trait and that habit, give up that desire and that goal, and finally strip ourselves of all self until we say, "All that I am and all that I have is God's." He is in me and I am in Him and that's all that matters."
God may not deal with you in the same way that he dealt with Moses, but he will deal with you in similar ways. What is it that God is stripping away from your life? What is it that comes to your mind when you think of being broken? What is it that you have put between you and total surrender to God? What is it that you trust more than you trust God? What is it that you love more than you love God?
Every person I know has an intuitive understanding of what it is that God is desiring to remove from their lives. They may not be able to express it in that terminology, but they usually can identify what it is that they are afraid to do without, or what it is that they most fear they will lose.
We are to love one another. We are to value one another. But never more than we love God or value our relationship with him. We are to work diligently and to do good work. But we are never to value our work—not even the work that we would define as "work for God" - more than we value our relationship with God.
We are to serve others and share Christ with others. But we are never to value our ministry more than we value our relationship with God. God will break us . . . change us . . . and cause us to grow until we reach spiritual maturity. No matter how long it takes or how difficult the process may be for us. . . .
God's purpose for breaking you and bringing you to a place of wholeness and spiritual maturity is so that he might use you as his tool in bringing still others to wholeness and spiritual maturity. He teaches us so that we might teach others. He imparts his insights to us so that we might share them with others . . .
Those who are broken come to a place of total self-sacrifice. This position of sacrifice is critical to our ability to minister . . . [And] ministry is not half-hearted or superficial. It requires great depth of giving, a total commitment, an overflowing abundance of unending love . . . .
God's desire is for us to serve, not for us to be served . . . It's a matter of being a vase or a bucket. You can have a beautiful vase that's worth thousands of dollars and set it in a prominent place in your home so that you and others can walk by and say, "Isn't that pretty?"
Or you can have an old five-gallon bucket and use it to carry water to refresh a lot of people who are thirsty. The same is true for us in ministry. Some folks desire solely to be pretty, looked at, and admired for their "worth." Others are willing to be old buckets, full of God and emptied of self, in order to be of service to others . . .
We can't get to spiritual maturity without suffering and pain, and we can't engage in . . . ministry without being willing to endure even more suffering and pain. The joy set before us, however, is the joy of knowing that God is with us, that God is working in us and through us, and that God is pleased with us. And friend, there's no greater joy than that.
Excerpted from The Blessings Of Brokenness, by Dr. Charles Stanley; with permission of Zondervan Publishing House, © 1997.
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