Breaking Me In

Surrender

Dear heavenly father I come to you crying out that you are sovereign, you are King and I desire for you to reign over all of me, to invade all parts of my life. From experience and your word I have come to know that invading my wants and replacing them with your will, will require pain and breaking off of my sinful nature. This breaking will involve physical and emotional discomfort for a while. It is called suffering because my sinful self will literally suffer. But my spirit man is being strengthened within my suffering. My spirit man is opening me up to the savior, the only one that can offer me comfort and joy and hope and peace.

As this breaking occurs, and I mean this breaking is a real feeling both inward and outward, I feel fragile.  I recognize that I’m broken and am in need of repair. As I watch my tower of Babylon fall to its destruction. (This is a metaphor for all that I had put my hopes in.) My dreams and my wants were sinful and indulgent and were displeasing to God. I thought that they would please my soul and my spirit from the inside out. Everything that I hoped for and wanted, my comforts are revealed as empty pursuits.

The Revealing

As God breaks me He unveils how ugly my condition is. How vain my ambitions are and how much repetitive failure and heartbreak I would swallow up in hopes of chasing contentment. This breaking is the beginning of the break through, it is the stripping and humiliation that must occur to be able to be a vessel used by God. It is the personal testimony that we obtain that is our own evidence why we need God more than anything else. Our resume only contains testimonies of how God showed himself to be more evident in our lives. Our resumes contain none of our own achievements, but what Christ has achieved for us and within us and despite us. It is our particular thing and things that we tried that didn’t worked.

This breaking is what makes us immovable in our faith, knowing that Christ came and rescued me from my agony, from my despair, from my lustful indulgence. It is the part where God is God (Good, the Judge, Perfect, the source of all things, All that I need,) and as humans we recognize our human condition (inadequate, born in sin, shaped in iniquity, lost, recklessly running around trying to stuff ourselves with everything but God so that we will no longer feel empty, subconsciously longing for the love of the Father)

He sees you, you finally see Him

It is in this breaking that it is revealed to us who God is in relation to us. In this breaking we are not only aware of our need but we begin to see the muck and grime and blood that we have been drowning in since our birth. We become immersed in all our sins that were once our goals for which we fought, the love of our lives. We begin to see those things as not enough and despise those things. We despise ourselves for clinging to their emptiness when the Father had been reaching out for us since the fall (when the serpent tempted eve and Adam and eve disobeyed God.)

            In this breaking, we realize that obedience is better than sacrifice. So long we had been making our own way, rules and painting our own future. When the creator is the only one in the position of power to make those decisions. He is God in control. But thankfully God is Gracious. He created the concept of forgiveness, because before He sent his son to repay our debt we were expected to bring our own sacrifice. He is the only one who has accomplished supreme Grace “while we were still sinners Christ died for us”.  But God is just and sin doesn’t go ignored, that which you have committed cannot be undone, the damage is done and sin is an indication of our disobedience to the Father. The whole reason we must be broken first, the reason that our breaking entails actual suffering is because we are naturally not receptive to the fathers will. In our nature, the things from which God is breaking us are our desires, our longings and our wants.  They are the things that have attempted to separate us from the love of the father. So it is naturally painful to endure the stripping of our desires that is engrained in our identity.  God is breaking us from ourselves.

He pursues you

            The scripture tells us that nothing can separate us from the love of the father. This breaking may be painful, it is literally the breaking of your world and your dreams in exchange for the will of the father and the most unconditional, inconceivable, devoted Love that you will ever be welcomed to not only encounter but be drenched in. So this breaking means something so humbling and so beautiful. It means that THE FATHER IS IN PURSUIT OF YOU. He sees you and He calls you daughter or son. He is longing for you and He wants to replace all those empty dreams you were chasing that were only intensifying your emptiness. He wants to replace them 100 fold with the love of the Father.

Whenever the Apostle Paul spoke, He spoke with the upmost love and devoutness to the father. When Paul wrote he wrote from a place of true conviction and passion because God had broken Paul. In fact, Paul’s name was Saul before He came to Christ. Saul was persecuting Christians in the name of the Lord! And God stopped Saul in the midst of His own ambitions and Revealed Himself to Paul. After Paul had had this real encounter with The Most High God He was blind for three days, He was not able to eat or drink for these three days. Acts 9:15 But the Lord said to Ananias, “Go! This man (referring to Paul) is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. 16 I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.” As God had revealed himself to Paul he made clear that Paul would endure suffering for The Lord. This would be no ordinary suffering with no end and no hope or comfort, but suffering for the father is the dying of the flesh (your own agenda) and glorification (lifting up, proclamation, acknowledgement of the highest status) of Christ

The Rescue

 In God’s breaking of Paul, he found an eternal love that remains unmatched.  He found his purpose and he was finally complete from the inside exuding out. The suffering that we experience from Christ is His beckoning us into his family, him calling us out of the darkness into his marvelous light. In this suffering, for Christ sake, we are laboring and being formed, burnt, molded into his image. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for God is with me.” “If he is for me who can be against me”. We are graced to suffer for God’s sake instead of at the mercy of this world. Hold on to his unchanging hand. Your journey is in route and with purpose. Be encouraged people of God for He is after you and it is good.