Broken
TCF Sermon
September 14, 2003
Fruit vs. Stone = Soft vs. Hard
(Demonstration: use a piece of fruit and a small rock. Use some sort of tool to try to penetrate each.)
To get to the middle of this fruit, the “heart” of it, if you will, to penetrate this fruit, it doesn’t take much effort. However, to get to the middle of this rock, to penetrate it, it takes quite a bit of effort. In fact, it takes some destruction, some breaking, doesn’t it?
This past week, we remembered one of the most terrible and important days in America’s history. All over the news were those memories again. Jets crashing into buildings. Buildings crumbling, and thousands dead.
It has been two years since September 11 set our world, in some ways, on a new course. That day led to war in Afghanistan, and later to war in Iraq. That day has contributed to a new sense of insecurity when we travel. That day has done a lot of things, but I’d like for a moment to consider what that day could have done, and didn’t.
What such a day could have done is break us as a nation. It could have brought us to our collective knees. And I mean that in a good sense – not in the sense that we’re broken and defeated militarily.
But it could have broken us, in a good, biblical sense, which we’ll focus on this morning.
And for a short time, it seemed that’s what might really happen. I can still remember the scene on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, shortly after September 11. There, congressmen and senators, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals alike, stood on those historic steps and sang together, God Bless America. It was a moving moment.
It was a moment that gave me, and many Christians, real hope for America. It gave me hope that perhaps the good that would come from this terrible event, might just be an awakening to God, to His purposes, to His plans, to His will.
It might have been a turning point for our culture. But in hindsight, it’s obvious today, just two years later, that it wasn’t that. We could have been broken, but we were just bent. Yes, this event threw us back on our heels as a nation for a short period of time. Yes, briefly, it humbled us. Certainly it changed a lot of things. But very quickly, within a matter of weeks, our society was headed right back down the same wide road to spiritual destruction we were on before this terrible event. A very brief window of opportunity, a very short window of a sort of national softness of heart, a very brief time of vulnerability, quickly gave way to renewed hardness of heart to the things of God, and then, back to business as usual. This was an event that could have, that should have, broken us as a people.
But it didn’t. Without speculating about God’s purpose and plan in all this, without speculating about whether or not this was a judgment of God on America...we can see quite clearly in scripture, that God can and often does use hard things to break us, and He allows this, because He wants us broken before Him, so that when we are weak, He can be strong for us. So that our strength is completely in Him, and not in ourselves. We’re going to look this morning about why that’s true, why it’s important to live lives of constant brokenness before Him.
And it relates to our opening illustration...it has to do with softness that God’s Holy Spirit can penetrate, versus a hardness that requires breaking.
Psalm 51:16-17 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Last week, Jacob sang a song during the offering that provided much of the background of this psalm. David, who wrote Psalm 51, was crying out in repentance, because he had not only committed adultery with Bathsheba, but his sin had led to murder.
He wrote, “Create in me a clean heart, renew a right spirit in me.”
He even went so far as to ask God not to take His presence from David.... not to take His Holy Spirit away. These verses we just read follow this plea to God. These verses are a recognition by David that there is no adequate sacrificial atonement for his sin. David knew that there was no sacrifice he could bring to appease God’s wrath over his sin.
What’s more, David seemed to recognize that God wasn’t looking for a sacrifice, per se, at least in the way his culture had come to think of sacrifice. What God wanted was David’s whole heart. It was the only thing David had to offer.
Let’s look at what this means.
First, David in verse 17 writes, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.”
Essentially, we could paraphrase this by saying, as the New Living Translation says: “The sacrifice you want is a broken spirit.”
God wants us broken. Not because He’s cruel, not because He enjoys seeing us in pain, which often accompanies brokenness. He wants us broken, because unless we’re broken, He cannot penetrate our hardness to speak to us, He cannot put us back together again.
Now, when I say cannot, I don’t mean He is unable. But I mean that because He has given us a free will, a free will to accept His Lordship in our lives, a free will to submit to His will, of our own free choice, in that sense, unless we’re broken, He can’t build what He wants to make of us.
So, again, to paraphrase this first part of verse 17...the only sacrifice that means anything to God is our brokenness...
It’s important to understand what this brokenness is. Broken here means to to burst (literal or figurative) :- break (down, off, in pieces, up), broken ([-hearted]), destroy, shatter, smash, crush...
That’s reiterated in an even stronger sense by the next part of this verse. “a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
There’s the same word, broken, repeated for emphasis, followed by the word contrite. Now, we typically think of this word contrite as meaning repentant, and it does mean that.
The dictionary definition of contrite:
1. caused by or showing sincere remorse.
2. filled with a sense of guilt and the desire for atonement; penitent: a contrite sinner.
Yet, the biblical meaning is stronger still.
It means: to collapse (physically or mentally) break
The Hebrew root word means crushed. Literally crushed to a powder.... to beat to pieces, or break in pieces... figuratively, it can mean to be humbled. So, combined with the previous verse ...where broken means smashed or crushed, we get a stronger sense of what David means to be broken here.
In our typical understanding of it, we think more in terms of something being cracked or chipped, or even broken in two. But here, it’s a lot stronger. It means crushed, turned into powder. Really, totally destroyed.
So, when the Word says we’re a new creation in Christ, and we relate it to this understanding...of being broken...of being contrite...both of which carry the meaning of being crushed, it gives this idea a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?
When something’s crushed to the point of being turned into powder, it’s often literally unrecognizable. But the word says,
Psalm 34:18
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
And Jesus applied the prophecy in Isaiah 61:1 to Himself:
Isaiah 61:1 The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners,
So, God wants us broken, so He can bind us up, and rebuild us.
You know the saying, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?
Well, to change that around a bit, if we ain’t broken, we cannot be fixed. God wants us broken, so He can put us back together again in His image. And while this clearly applies to unbelievers, I think it also, just as clearly, applies to us as followers of Christ. Being broken in specific areas of our lives, is part of what God uses to mold us and shape us into the image and likeness of Christ.
I think it will help us understand what this brokenness that God wants is all about, if we understand the opposite, too, in other words, what it is not.
The opposite of brokenness is pride, it’s arrogance, it’s self-sufficiency. Now, these are things we can relate to, because we see them all around us, and if we’re honest, we see them to some degree in ourselves.
Consider this quote:
The inward part of a man is said to be broken and crushed when his sinful nature is broken, his ungodly self slain, his impenetrable hardness softened, his haughty vainglorying brought low, in fact, when he is in himself become as nothing, and when God is everything to him.
Unbroken is like King Uzziah in 2 Chronicles. Like some of Israel’s or Judah’s kings, he started out OK. 2 Chronicles 26 begins by telling us how he came to power as King, and that “he did right in the eyes of the Lord....” it tells us that “he sought God,” and it says in 26:5 “as long as He sought the Lord, God gave him success.”
In verse 15, it tells us that Uzziah’s fame spread far and wide, “for he was greatly helped until he became powerful.”
Then, reading from verse 16:
But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the LORD his God
We can see this kind of story again and again in scripture, especially in the Old Testament. What’s more, we can see it in our world today. You may have heard the phrase, “power corrupts... and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It happens in businesses, it happens in governments, it happens in churches. Earthly power corrupts, and earthly power hardens. And that hardness leads to either more hardness, or a breaking, that brings down that power, to real brokenness.
One of my modern-day heroes is Charles Colson, a man I believe God uses powerfully as he writes and comments on the state of our world, and the state of the church.
Colson once said,
“Before God can use a man greatly, He must wound him deeply.”
He spoke those words from his own personal experience. Most of you know his story. He’s a man who rose to a real position of political power in the administration of president Richard Nixon. There was a time when, as an aide to the president of the U.S., Charles Colson was one of the most powerful men in the world, and he would be the first to admit that he was ruthless in the exercise of that power. He would also admit that in those days, he fit our earlier definition of the opposite of brokenness:
- he was arrogant
- he was proud
- he was self-sufficient
As a result, he got caught in the criminal and political mess that came to be known as Watergate in the early 1970s. It brought down the Nixon presidency in shame in 1973, and it ended up with Colson in prison for his part in the scheme. But not long before he went to prison, God broke Chuck Colson. God used the circumstances of his crime, and a prison sentence, and a few well-placed friends, to break him.
Here was a man with an Ivy League education, an attorney, a brilliant man, a potentially wealthy man, humbled by being sent to prison. There in prison, shortly after becoming a Christian, God used that time of brokenness in Chuck Colson, to begin to rebuild this man.
He went on to found Prison Fellowship Ministries, a really fine ministry born of Colson’s own time in prison. More than that, he became a prolific author and commentator on culture, and today, he has a tremendous impact for the Kingdom of God, on Christians and non-Christians alike.
But first, before any of these things could happen, he had to be broken, humbled before the mighty hand of God, before God could re-shape him, to mold him into the kind of servant he could use.
Before God could get through the hardness of his heart, he had to break him. Before God could conform Chuck Colson to God’s will, he had to be broken, willing to submit his will to the will of God.
Now, these things don’t just apply to a well-known believer like Chuck Colson. They don’t just apply to the kind of power he had. They apply clearly to our own self-sufficiency, even in the more mundane things of our lives...our homes, our schools, our marriages.
David is telling us that in this Psalm.
When he writes, as he did in verse 17: The sacrifice God wants is a broken spirit....he’s referring to what God wants from him, he’s referring to what God wants from Chuck Colson, he’s referring to what God wants from us.
That’s because David recognized that God didn’t want the ritual of sacrifice. He didn’t want what for David had become only an outward act of obedience. He didn’t want the ritual of sacrifice, which apart from a real commitment to do God’s will has absolutely no value.
David knew God wanted his crushed heart, his broken spirit, the very center of David’s being. God wanted David’s heart, which isn’t just the emotional component we often think of when we hear “heart.”
To the Hebrews, the heart was the center of not only the affections, but also of the will and of the mind. We sometimes tend to create this false separation between heart and mind... such as when we say something like, “He understood it in his head, but it didn’t penetrate his heart.”
But this false separation doesn’t square with the way the Old Testament views the heart. To have a clean heart, as it says in Psalm 51:10, is not only to have pure desires and emotions, but pure thoughts – which originate in our minds.
For the most part, there’s no significant difference in Old Testament understanding, between mind and heart, between the intellect and emotions.
These things may be different in some subtle ways, but they’re so closely entwined as to be inseparable.
So God wanted David’s heart. He wants our heart. And He knows that to really have our hearts, they must be broken.
A pastor named Bob Roe said, "When we sin we are playing God. When we know something is wrong, and God has said it is wrong, but we do it anyway, we are choosing to sin. We are choosing to play God. We are putting our will in opposition to His will.
But for salvation or restoration, God’s terms are my will returned to him by my own choice.
Those are the terms he has laid down, and they are inflexible. David sees that here, and that is why he offers himself. It’s as if David were saying: "I have nothing to offer you except exactly what you want. You don’t want the blood of goats. You want me. So I offer you me." And David understands that God accepts that."
Bob Roe, Peninsula Bible Church
We also cannot properly understand this passage in Psalm 51 without taking a look at the sacrifice. That’s because of the way David ends this verse: He says of our sacrifice of ourselves, of our broken will to God, that God will not despise this. Now, at first glance, that seems a rather odd way to say this. Why, for example, wouldn’t David say what is said in other passages of scripture,
as in Psalm 34:18:
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
or
Isaiah 57:15 For this is what the high and lofty One says-- he who lives forever, whose name is holy: "I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.
Why didn’t David just say that God loves the broken in spirit? To write that God doesn’t despise the broken seems like kind of a negative way to put it, doesn’t it? Well, I believe there are two ways to look at this passage, and I think both have merit. One is the one I found in some commentaries on this passage,
The gist of those is this:
Men despise that which is broken, but God will not.
In other worlds, the world doesn’t appreciate brokenness, in fact, it’s not too strong to put it this way: the world despises brokenness.
I believe that’s true, but God doesn’t despise it. But here’s another take on the way David, as we believe, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote this verse.
To understand it, we have to read
Amos 5:21-23, where God says,
"I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.
Pretty strong words from God. But His anger was directed at the religious hypocrisy of their sacrifices. He knew their hearts, He also saw the rest of their lives, apart from the time they were bringing these sacrifices to Him. He saw them as hypocrites. He saw their religious worship as inconsistent with the rest of their lives.
If it were today, He might have said, “I hate the worship of these Sunday morning Christians, who go to church on Sunday, and live like hell the rest of the week.”
Life Application Commentary says:
God hates false worship (“religious feasts” and “assemblies”) by people who go through the motions out of pretense or for show. If we are living sinful lives and using religious ritual and traditions to make ourselves look good, God will despise our worship and will not accept what we offer. He wants sincere hearts, not the songs of hypocrites.
I believe that’s why David wrote this Psalm this way. It’s because God despises the worship of those who are unbroken, those who by their thoughts, their words and their deeds, reveal that their will is not submitted to God. They reveal that their hearts are not broken before Him, they reveal that they believe either God doesn’t see their hearts, or that they don’t care that their religion has no impact on the rest of their lives.
So to say that God does not despise a broken and contrite heart, is to compare it to what He does despise...an unbroken, uncrushed, proud, arrogant, self-sufficient heart.
Here’s what God wants, said in another way by Isaiah in chapter 66, the end of verse 2:
This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.
The sacrifices of the arrogant, of the unbroken, are only external compliance, at best. And not even that – perhaps only compliance when they’re with Christians. Who you are when you’re alone, or out of the sight of your wife, or your children, or your Christian friends, or your pastor, is who you really are. And God knows who you really are.
But what God is saying here in this passage through Isaiah is this: If you live a life of brokenness before me, my Word is enough to get through to you. My word is living and active, and sharp...and if you’re broken, it can penetrate.
One pastor put it this way:
For a humble, broken, contrite heart, the Word alone is enough to steer the whole life immediately. There’s a trembling at the Word of God all by itself. I take that to mean that nothing else is needed to make my heart listen to God. Just the voice of God - just His Word causes my heart to tremble. I long for His favor more than I long for anything else. I’m anxious - trembling - to get at His will for my life.
And then this pastor quotes author Norman Grubb from his book Continuous Revival, where he calls brokenness “the key concept to a continuous renewing of life in the presence and power of God.” As with so many things in scripture, at first blush, brokenness appears to be a particularly unappealing thing. But viewed as we have seen it in scripture today, we can really see a genuine joy in brokenness.
There’s joy in our will being instantly submitted to our loving God. Once we find the freedom and joy in this, we’ll never want to live in our own sufficiency again. We’ll never want to be in charge of our lives ourselves. Our hearts will be soft, they’ll be pliable, they’ll be the kinds of hearts that God not only doesn’t despise, but the kind of hearts He can work with.
Isaiah 57:14-15 And it will be said: "Build up, build up, prepare the road! Remove the obstacles out of the way of my people." For this is what the high and lofty One says-- he who lives forever, whose name is holy: "I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.
On the one hand, we have broken and contrite hearts, like this piece of fruit. On the other, we have hard, strong-willed, unbroken hearts, like this rock. God only works with the broken, and despises the other. It’s that simple.
The only sacrifice God accepts is our will, submitted to Him. Which one will you be this morning? Pray
