Living "Fixed" instead of Being Broken


Why do we want to live the façade of a life “fixed” instead of admitting our brokenness?Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way… We’re all broken.
All of us.
Each and every one of us.
Every single one of us.
The Bible clearly teaches us that ALL have sinned. That means me, you, the sweet little grandma figure you idolize, and every one in between.
We’re in shambles. We’re just not right. We’re broken.
Growing up, I used to think I had the perfect life, the perfect family, the perfect everything…. I must have been God’s favorite or something because it was really ridiculous how perfect my life was.
Or seemed. How perfect my life seemed.
There’s a world of difference between what “was” and what “seemed” to be so.
Now, I’m not negating the fact that God extra-blessed my with a huge family full of wonderful people that do love Him, but let me set the record straight. We’re not perfect, and it took me a lot of grown-up years to figure that out.
But the problem is this: it’s not just my family. If yours is made up of people, yours isn’t perfect either. None of ours is.
And you wanna know another secret? We’re horrible about hiding it.
We grow up in church, Sunday after Sunday, and pretend we’re all okay. Pretend we’re all “fixed.” We all got saved when we were six-and-a-half or rededicated our lives at a throw-your-stick-in-the-camp-fire service, and no one seems to need Jesus anymore. We’ve got it all together on our very own little lonesome.
No one wants to be broken, or even appear to be broken. But several years of Sunday smiles and plenty of potlucks later, we’re still desperately broken people. In case you didn’t know it already, God didn’t send his Son Jesus to come and die for the church person who didn’t need anything more than a second helping of potato salad.
He died for the sinners amongst us, which is, ALL of us. We’re broken. We’re frail. We need Him. Every day and every minute within each day He gifts us with.
The church oftentimes teaches us how not to mess up because that’s intolerable, but God’s message is quite the anti-thesis. He’s whisper-shouting to us all that WHEN we mess up (not IF we mess up), when we go against His will and perfect plan for our lives, and when we sin against His Holy Name, that His love is greater still.
This does not give us a license to sin more and more, but an opportunity to see how very ridiculously broken we are before Him.
How very much we need Him.
How very much we should not be able to do anything else but love Him with all the moments of our dear-little-lives in return.
How we all need to stop living and acting like we’re already “fixed” and perfect, when really we need to come to the realization that we’re all broken.
And we do have a God Who specializes in redeeming brokenness.
I wonder what would happen if we all embraced the true reality that our “perfection” is an arch-enemy to God’s redemption.
I wonder what would happen if we all acknowledged that (collectively and individually) we’re broken, we still need Jesus (desperately so).
I wonder what would happen if we stopped playing games in church services and began helping one another truly learn how to love Him more in light of His love for our brokenness…

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